automated quotes produced
International Business Machines (IBM) wins Inspire Award for Commerce Excellence
The Commerce Excellence Award recognizes a customer that best aligns teams, decisions, and execution so commerce keeps moving when the stakes are high.
Each year, the Conga Inspire Awards recognize organizations and individuals that embrace innovation to lead impactful change within their organizations. Spanning a variety of categories, the Inspire Awards highlight achievement in Buyer Experience, Momentum, Transformation, Commerce Excellence, and more.
The Commerce Excellence Award is designed to honor the customer who best embodies connected commerce—aligning teams, decisions, and execution so commerce keeps moving when stakes are high. This is the highest honor among Inspire Awards recognition and represents overall excellence. Let’s meet this year’s winner.
In today's complex IT environment, organizations depend on proactive infrastructure support to maintain uptime, manage risk, and ensure operability across hybrid cloud and enterprise systems. As a global provider of infrastructure support and services, IBM® Technology Lifecycle Services (TLS) helps clients plan, deploy, support, optimize, and refresh mission-critical IT environments across more than 140 countries.
As a longtime Conga customer leveraging both commerce and contracting capabilities, IBM TLS has been steadily advancing the connected process that supports its broader commerce chain—from quoting to contracting to ongoing support. Renewals play a central role in that ecosystem. For IBM TLS, they are far more than administrative milestones; they are essential to protecting recurring revenue, maintaining client trust, and ensuring uninterrupted support for critical infrastructure.
As renewal volume and data complexity increased, the team saw an opportunity to further modernize and automate this part of the lifecycle—strengthening efficiency, surfacing deeper insights, and creating a more seamless, connected experience across the full commerce chain.
50K
37K
hours saved
1-click quote creation and recommendations
>30% of quotes include automated recommendations
Challenge
Before expanding its use of Conga solutions, IBM TLS was ready to modernize a renewal process that had served the business well but required more efficiency and scalability. Sellers had visibility into upcoming expirations, but assembling the full picture—client context, service history, and potential coverage needs—meant navigating multiple systems and manual steps. Renewal outreach and quote creation were effective but handson, making it harder to support a fastgrowing portfolio with the level of insight and speed the business aimed for.
Recognizing the opportunity to streamline workflows and equip teams with datadriven guidance, IBM TLS sought a more connected, intelligent approach that would empower sellers to lead proactive, strategic renewal conversations at scale.
Solution
IBM TLS continues to enhance and optimize their Conga solutions across the commerce chain to help automate renewal quoting, embed intelligent insights, and streamline seller engagement.
Solutions implemented include:
- Contracts (Conga CLM)
- Conga CPQ
- Digital Commerce
Additionally, the IBM TLS team is taking innovation to the next level by combining the intelligence of their AI solution, watsonx, with Conga’s connected commerce and contracting solutions, creating an AI-powered renewal engine. The team focused their optimization efforts on three key areas:
- Auto-quote generation: Renewal quotes are now automatically generated beginning 120 days before agreement expiration. By applying clustering to 3.5 million rows of client data, IBM TLS produces tailored upsell recommendations along with a success projection score that explains each recommendation and estimates upsell likelihood. Sellers begin conversations with data-backed quotes in hand, improving both accuracy and strategic positioning.
- Client renewal notifications: Automated email workflows proactively notify clients of upcoming renewals, delivering tailored offers with embedded response options. Sellers manage contacts and notifications through a Renewals Dashboard, while clients can respond directly from the email—streamlining communication and reducing manual follow-up.
- Upsell workspace and CPQ integration: Intelligent reporting and dynamic pricing are integrated directly with Conga CPQ, giving sellers a consolidated view of renewal and expansion opportunities. Sellers can identify coverage gaps, act on recommendations, and synchronize updates back to the renewal quote.
These capabilities are fully integrated within the Conga environment, consolidating Conga data with additional analytics insights to provide a seamless user experience and more informed decision-making.
Results
By modernizing its renewal process, IBM TLS has significantly improved efficiency, seller productivity, and revenue visibility.
The Renewals Dashboard simplified quoting through one-click creation and recommendation options, producing 50,000 quotes year-to-date and saving more than 37,000 hours. Over 30% of quotes include automated recommendations, demonstrating strong adoption of data-driven upsell strategies.
Automated renewal notifications ensure timely engagement with tailored offers and embedded response actions—laying the groundwork for automated activation within Conga upon client acceptance.
Beyond efficiency gains, the transformation repositioned renewals from a reactive process to a strategic growth engine. With predictive insights, optimized pricing, and streamlined workflows, IBM TLS is now able to:
- Accelerate velocity through automation and reduced friction
- Elevate team performance by eliminating repetitive tasks and enabling more strategic selling
- Execute multiple pricing and product scenarios with greater confidence
- Strengthen client relationships through proactive, insight-driven engagement
- Be more future ready by gaining agility for quoting and renewals
By embedding intelligence into its Conga-powered renewal workflows, IBM TLS has created a scalable foundation for protecting recurring revenue while unlocking new expansion opportunities.