Peloton Consulting Group nearly doubles contracting output with Conga Contracts for Salesforce

Conga Contracts for Salesforce offers 360-degree visibility and automation to significantly reduce the time to review and execute contracts

Peleton Consulting Group (Peleton) is a professional services firm with the vision and connected global capabilities to help organizations envision, implement, and realize the benefits of digital transformation. Peloton makes digital transformation a reality through Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Customer Experience (CX), Analytics, and Data Management for the cloud. Through connected capabilities, Peloton brings people, processes, and technology together.

Challenge

Peloton Consulting Group collaborates with businesses of varying sizes, including many Fortune 500 and 100 companies, across diverse industries. Peloton has achieved remarkable success and significant growth in the last decade as it established a presence in India, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. During this period, the company's total number of contracts has grown fivefold.

Elise Hiller, the Chief Legal Officer, is responsible for Peloton’s legal strategy, compliance, risk management, corporate governance as well as contract management. Hiller works with a talented legal team who support requests from a wide variety of internal stakeholders for proposals (RFPs) and provides backup support for contract review. When the company began expanding rapidly, the team wrestled with the growing pains that came with managing many different types, formats, and statuses of contracts. As a professional services firm, Peloton understands contracts form the backbone of its business and the contracts team dedicated extensive hours to maintaining their pace amid a growing contract workload.

At the time, Peloton tracked all contracts and RFPs in Excel spreadsheets, along with pertinent information like contract renewal dates, key terms, and pricing. Spreadsheets offered only limited views into the contract lifecycle — it was difficult to see where a contract was in the process, its signature status, and the parties responsible for moving it to the next step.

Without a centralized communication platform, Stakeholders messaged Hiller and her team, through email, Slack, and text messages to inquire about the status of contracts and RFPs. The legal team tracked contract status with a pen, paper, and color-coded email messages.

As the company expanded, it hired additional salespeople and created more contracts, making document management even more challenging. Salespeople had access to limited contract templates that needed frequent updates, posing a risk in ensuring consistent use of the most up-to-date contract versions.

In addition, Hiller and the team found it difficult to access comprehensive contract data. The reliance on spreadsheets hindered streamlining the contract process, necessitating the adoption of new software. Initially, the company explored an automated electronic signature process, but the tool fell short in addressing the company's complete requirements. Moreover, the solution was expensive, and the support did not align with Peloton's partner expectations. With the organization's rapid growth, Hiller recognized that these manual workflows were increasingly untenable.

Solution

As Peloton Consulting Group reviewed contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions, the company sought several high value features to allow their business to continue its growth. The first was to gain visibility and real-time tracking into all their contract data. Next, the company wanted more control over their contract templates and approved legal language. Peloton also required a solution with a robust audit trail to monitor contract versions throughout the negotiation process. Additionally, they sought the ability to establish straightforward, automated reminders for managed services contract renewals, aiming to develop a more proactive business model as they expanded.

After considering various options, Peloton concluded that Conga Contracts for Salesforce stood out as the best choice. One pivotal factor in this decision was Peloton's prior investment in Salesforce to support its customer relationship management and sales operations. Given that Conga Contracts for Salesforce was built on the same platform, integrating it with the CRM was straightforward and expedited the solution's implementation.

Now, instead of sifting through spreadsheets, Hiller can use the CLM to create reports that give her far more visibility into the organization's contracts. These reports enable her to keep the CEO, COO, and Head of Sales updated on the progress of different projects efficiently and swiftly. Conga also gives users the following abilities:

Analyze and examine data for better insights.
See at a glance how many contracts are executed each quarter and compare results year-over-year.
Report on contracts over a certain dollar threshold.
Run a report that shows when Master Service Agreements (MSAs) are up for renewal, which ones automatically renew, and which ones have automatic price escalation.
Report on details such as client logos and permissions, so marketing can use the information in their promotional efforts.

Conga offered us a 360-degree view of our sales and provided a streamlined, user-friendly, and customizable solution to meet the growing and diverse project needs of Peloton Consulting Group.

Elise Hiller

Chief Legal Officer

Peloton Consulting Group

The CLM significantly improved Peloton’s ability to control and maintain its contract templates. Templates are easily stored and updated in a central location within Salesforce, eliminating the burden of juggling outdated versions outside the system. Additionally, the clause library lets the legal team customize contracts and clauses, speeding negotiations and increasing compliance around approved legal language.

With the automation and organization that the solution brought, Hiller estimates up to 50% of her time has been better allocated away from internal check-ins and manual process updates. Information pulled from Salesforce is inserted into contracts that can be sent to a client in just minutes, rather than hours or even days, providing increased contract productivity. In the first seven months of the year, the company reviewed 331 contracts and fully executed 256, roughly the same number as in the previous 12 months.

Before implementing the CLM, Hiller and her team reviewed Master Service Agreements (MSAs) using client-drafted agreements 65% of the time, leading to more time spent negotiating terms and conditions. With the new Peloton MSA template Hiller estimates that they have successfully reversed this trend, with clients now accepting Peloton’s MSA 65% of the time instead. This change has resulted in substantial time savings, improved contract terms, and decreased business risk.

Conga Composer, an included document generation tool in the Contracts for Salesforce package, can create contracts in up to 15 languages, including Portuguese, which is a big win for Peloton’s Brazilian managed services contracts. This language capability will also be a future necessity as Peloton expands farther into Latin America in the years to come.

The CLM improves workflow management by making it easy to forecast how much work is slated, based on the contracts. This insight also helps the company plan its hiring needs, staff projects, and streamline the entire cross-departmental workflow, resulting in a positive impact on revenue. Peloton routes contracts for internal review with the touch of a button and offers users a Kanban view providing sales and delivery teams with much needed visibility.

With the built-in version control, all activity on any contract is documented and visible to all teammates regardless of whether edits are made using track changes. Collecting signatures is faster now with automated reminders through Conga Sign. The solution sends reminders to clients at a cadence selected by Peloton. Hiller and other teams have insight into contracts in flight and know instantly when a client does sign. The reminders have streamlined contract execution and eliminated many emails, texts, and Slack messages because everyone involved can see the status through the signature audit trail.

The legal team's satisfaction with Conga Contracts for Salesforce is not unique within Peloton; other teams are equally enthusiastic about the solution. The Sales team appreciates the system's transparency and its ability to provide real-time contract status updates. The Senior Vice President of Sales is especially fond of Conga Grid for generating reports and its capacity to delve into detailed data analysis. Hiller sums up the unique offer of Conga CLM.

What we truly value about Conga Contracts for Salesforce is its multifaceted utility. It enhances contract management and offers advantages to other teams across Peloton. As we grow and expand our business, this solution proves to be a versatile, rather than one-dimensional, tool.

Elise Hiller

Chief Legal Officer

Peloton Consulting Group

Business outcomes

331 contracts reviewed and 256 executed in the first 7 months of 2023, roughly the same number as the previous 12 months.
50% of Peloton’s legal time can be reallocated from answering messages to focusing on legal strategy and efficiency.
65% of the time, clients now accept Peloton’s MSA, resulting in shorter negotiations and better terms.
It takes minutes to send contracts, rather than hours or days.
Increased speed of contract signatures has had a positive impact on revenue.
Transparent contract status tracking throughout the entire process.
Reports can be customized and useful to multiple departments including sales, staffing, and marketing.

Conga offers many tools, like Conga Composer, Conga Sign, Conga Orchestrate, Conga Approvals and Conga Grid, that are dynamic and can be used to automate and optimize processes across different teams and use cases to support the entire revenue lifecycle. These tools are packaged with the purchase of our purpose-built solutions, like Conga Contracts for Salesforce for contract lifecycle management, allowing our customers to not only advance their legal and sale teams and enhance their contracting process, but also use the tools to advance and enhance other functions of their business as well.