 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. The Mark Benioff has finished this portion of the keynote so we can get back to business here. Special event outside of Salesforce, 171,000 people over watching Mark on the keynote. We're here at a special Conga event. It's called Conga Connect West. It's about 3,000 people they said that last year. Three days of taking over the thirsty bear. They've got free food, free drink, free entertainment. A lot of demos come on over. The invitation is open just to make sure you come early because the line is really long. But we're excited to get into it with a practitioner. We love to talk to customers. So we're really excited to have our next guest, Susan O'Leary. She's a continuous improvement leader and program manager for Abbey O'Bedd. Susan, great to see you. Hey Jeff, thank you so much for that introduction. I'm so excited to be here. Excellent, and with her is Will Spinla, the VP of Marketing from Conga. Will, good to see you. Good to be here, Jeff. Warming up before your panel tomorrow. Exactly. Very excited to be here. All right, so first off, impressions of this show. It never fails to amaze me when we come to Dreamforce. What happens in downtown San Francisco? It's insane, isn't it? It is crazy. Never disappoints. There is so much going on at every moment and especially right here at Connect West. Right. What is Abbey O'Bedd for folks that aren't familiar with the company? So Abbey O'Bedd, we are a class three medical device company. We make the world's smallest heart pump and our corporate mission is to recover hearts and save lives. And more recently, we have some commercials for our flagship product, the Impala product on TV. So I feel like we've really arrived at some point in the company's maturity that we have television commercials. Right, well what does class three mean? So it's a certain level of classification within the FDA and class three means essentially in the simplest way that it goes inside the body. Okay. So the rigor at which it's controlled and how products are introduced into market have a very rigorous path for patient quality and compliance and safety. You know, it's a pretty exciting space to be, but it's not easy to bring a product to market. Right, and you've got hardware, I imagine you've got all kind of crazy software, you probably have all types of continuous monitoring, not a simple device. No. And a very important one. A very important one. All right. That's right. So we're here at Conga Connect West. What do you guys do with Conga? Where does Conga play in your world? So Conga has enabled Abbey Med to do amazing things. So, you know, we're here at Dreamforce, obviously a Salesforce customer and we began our journey with Salesforce back in 2009 and we discovered that we had some business processes that still resided outside of Salesforce, that people were struggling with these kind of PowerPoint presentations and putting together their sales forecast and all the data that would really drive that lives in the Salesforce org. So, you know, a tour on the app exchange back probably 2010 I would say, well, and Jeff, I found the Composer product and it was a pretty easy sell to our VP of sales, a quick group of concept, taking, you know, certain data that people were manually manipulating and with a click of a button, here is your forecast blown up in, you know, all kinds of colors and charts and graphs, it was a game changer. All right. So that's a really interesting right? Cause one of the biggest knocks on Salesforce always is getting sales people to use it, right? And changing behavior is much harder than writing software or developing software. So, did you find that that app was the killer app to get the sales team to actually use the tool? Well, I mean, everybody's got the same story, right? Everyone's got PowerPoint and a lot of times people use Salesforce for reporting, not actually working and not double data entry and I can't stand it, but it sounds like this Composer was really a game changer for you. Well, it brought the best of both worlds together because our field organization was using Salesforce. They're doing their work in that application and yet the model that leadership wanted for delivering their weekly forecast in their update was very, very, very specific and you couldn't do that in any Salesforce report. You can do it in Excel. So the forecast model was outside of Salesforce driven by the executive leadership even though the day-to-day work was happening outside of Salesforce. Because of the, you're right, you're right. Well, it was the- And this is like, oh, it happens over and over and over again. It was the visualization that was impossible and standard Salesforce reports, but you could build it in Excel and then merge the data with the Composer product. Right. And so that was our first use case and we have invented so many more but that got us in the door, so to speak. So Will, have you ever heard that story before? What I was going to say, you know, I think it's interesting because so I worked at Salesforce for about six years before I came to Conga and one of the things that we often saw was that salespeople will sometimes put their data in Salesforce unless they're, you know, coaxed very greatly but what they actually don't do a lot of times is leverage the data that's inside there once it's there. And so the nice part about having a tool like Conga is that you can make it so the salespeople don't have to do anything with the data. Right? You can automate creation of, you know, reports and charts and PowerPoint presentations so that the sales reps, they don't have to do anything. Good job. They just click a button. Click a button. They have the relationships with their customers. They know how to win the deals. They know how to, you know, take all those conversations to the next level and why do we want them crunching numbers and doing that? We don't want them doing that. There's no value in that. So you find great tools that take the data and put it in a button and gain changed. Right. And then you can ensure that whatever process or policy your company like Abbey Omad has every single sales rep is within, you know, that guideline, right? So they're not making their own decisions. They're kind of doing what the organization wants them to. That's right. They're following a tested and validated model that delivers what leadership wants. And they, I don't know, I'm probably not joking if I would say half a day on Friday, if you were a cardiology account manager, you would be trying to cobble this together in a PowerPoint and then turn it into the office. Half a day. The office was asking for a PowerPoint presentation on the updated status of your pipeline basically. This very, very specific visualization model. Right. And with Composer, you know, how people are with data, they think that this is all they really need. But once they saw what we could put in that output document from Composer, it has grown to be an enormous analytic tool set for the field team that drives their forecast. I'm just curious in terms of this scale, the size of the team. Don't tell me anything out of school, but are we talking tens of reps, hundreds of reps? Hundreds of reps. Hundreds of reps. Globally, we have over 100 sales territories. And so we have, you know, easily 450 feet on the street. And certain people have different roles, right? So the cardiology account manager role is that forecasting leader in the company. That person is really clicking that button to generate that document. And there's well over 100 in our organization. So Will, you hear these stories all the time, I'm sure. You know, is Composer the killer app to get people to start to embrace this tool? Do you see that time and time again? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the nice parts about Composer is that you can, in some respects, direct your entire sales or organization on the way that the company wants to showcase themselves, whether it's in reporting, whether it's in highly branded and kind of pixel perfect documents. Yes. Yeah, I mean, what we've seen a lot of people do is, you know, you may have a monthly or a quarterly business review. Oh, we do that, we use Composer for that. We have this beautifully crafted merge template that delivers a business review to our customers. Yeah, that was the second thing we did with Composer. That's right. We first did the forecast and we did the business review. Business review. Yeah, and you can do that in Excel or in PowerPoint or in Word or even in HTML. It just gives you the ability to take data that sits inside Salesforce and push it out in any format you want. So in the nice part too is you can pull data from other systems, right? So it can be in your ERP or your accounting system and it brings it all into one spot. Yeah. I just can't help but think of the poor guy on the receiving end of the 450 PowerPoint decks on Friday afternoon. That's right. I mean, how did that get, how did that get rolled up? So, yeah, we had another process for that. There's the territory level. I don't want to hear that one. That one's getting scary. There's a regional, there's a country-based, there's a company-based, and it's all Composer. It's all Composer, it's great. Last question for you, Susan. So have you been able to leverage a success with Composer to basically expand into more applications in the Salesforce suite with Conger or other to actually get your adoption up and now start to add more and more applications? Yeah, that's a great question, Jeff, you know? And certainly Composer was that early adoption product that was such an easy sell. I mean, it had win-win written over in capital letters. Everybody really got it right away. We're buying this, we're doing this. And then over the years, you know, Conger in its, you know, kind of development life cycle put out a couple other game-changing products that we also have. We have their Action Grid product and their contract solution when we were- Is that as easy as a sell? Yes, yes, yes. That's definitive. Well, you know, the business, it wasn't, you know, IT organization selling solution on business. Business is saying we want a quoting platform and we need something better than standard Salesforce. So, you know, we started looking at what is now CPQ, but it was called Steelwork at the time. And then we needed to solve for the contract life cycle management part of that. And it was very, a contract product didn't even exist at the time. And we were looking at other kind of solutions and we were, you know, trying to make something work and we learned about the contract product through a connect event and a colleague of mine attended and came back from that event and just said, Sue, you got to stop everything you're doing. You got to go talk to Pete Castro at Conga and you have to see this contract tool because I know we're almost at the end of this project but literally you're going to rip out everything that we did before and you're going to want to do this. And so, guess what we did? We did it. Well, you can't let this one off your hip. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. He's awesome. It was a tough timeline and that was part of the promise that we needed to hear back when we went to the table was we can't miss our launch. Yeah, yeah. To do this pivot and switch and can we do it? But that's easy compared to getting salespeople to change behavior. I mean, timelines are one thing but if you got people to actually, you know, use the tool the way the tool is supposed to be used, you know, then the ancillary benefits are tremendous. So, thank you for sharing that story with us too. Well, you're very welcome, Jeff. All right. You know, and we do have the action grid product but I don't, I'm not the expert in that space but I've seen some amazing things. You've got the sales people using Salesforce on a weekly basis. Plant the flag and call it a W. Come on now. All right, so thanks again. He's Will, she's Sue. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.