Commercial Real Estate Analyst achieves 80% sales win rate with Conga Contracts for Salesforce 

Challenge

Delivering best-in-class customer service is a high bar—and the firm’s sales and account management teams take pride in meeting it. But behind the scenes, the contracting process told a different story. Every stage was manual, and existing contracts were scattered across a shared drive, creating inefficiencies that slowed the business down.

The team took a step forward by using Salesforce to track contract requests and store newer agreements. Yet critical functionality—like document generation, redlining, and centralized storage—was still missing. The result? A process that remained fragmented and time-consuming.

Meanwhile, other departments were modernizing rapidly. Sales implemented Salesforce CPQ, and accounting integrated billing under the same Salesforce umbrella, streamlining workflows and connecting related functions. The contracts team needed to keep pace. To truly support the business, they required more than incremental improvements—they needed automated, flexible document generation and a single source of truth for contract management. 

Solution

The business was familiar with Conga products, as it already used Conga Composer to generate invoices in its accounting and billing system. The company was very pleased with the software’s powerful capabilities and ease of use. So when the Conga team suggested the company attend Conga Connect and explore the features and potential benefits of the contract lifecycle management solutions in Conga’s portfolio, the decision was easy to make.

This led to participation in the Conga Customer Community, where the team was impressed by the welcoming, supportive culture in the user groups. A seed was planted, and the company deployed Conga Contracts for Salesforce, finally digitalizing the contracts function and fully integrating it with their Salesforce CPQ, accounting, and billing systems.

Experienced voices in the user groups encouraged the team to bring in an expert partner to help with this implementation. The company engaged Conga partner Northbound Consulting, enabling them to hit the ground running on day one. 

Results

The shift from a manual, fragmented process to a fully integrated system marks a major transformation for the company. Greater collaboration among contracts, sales, and accounting enables the company to resolve challenges quickly and maintain forward progress across all teams.

The enhanced contracting capabilities have empowered the sales team to become more self-sufficient and take control of the contracting process in many situations. If standard terms and conditions are acceptable to a customer, they can generate documents and get them signed without involving the contracts team. This gives them the flexibility to get things such as nondisclosure agreements in place in a timely manner without being at the mercy of disparate time zones and working hours.

This increased autonomy on the part of the sales team has put the business one step closer to meeting its mandate to lower operating costs. The contracts team is now able to manage its obligations with just one part-time and two full-time employees without sacrificing turnaround time or negatively affecting other metrics, and they can focus on fine-tuning language for complex negotiations instead of manually putting together contracts for standard offerings. In the future, the company hopes to lean into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and continue optimizing the contracting process, especially around third-party paper.

One metric in particular is especially compelling. The business tracks contract cycle times, which provides a window into how many initiated requests turn into closed-won opportunities (won business). The company’s rate is approximately 80% post-transformation. In the struggling commercial real estate industry, that’s a strong indicator of success.