Veracode transforms processes with Conga's contract lifecycle management solutions

Founded in 2006, Veracode got its start in response to the growing need to improve application security and prevent malicious actors from exploiting vulnerabilities. Veracode evolved into a global software security solution from its beginning as a code-scanning tool. Today, Veracode provides a comprehensive, intelligent software security platform that organizations of all sizes use to prevent, detect, and respond to software and application vulnerabilities while managing risk and compliance.  

Challenge
Veracode engages with multiple customers, partners, and vendors regularly. However, the company had to manage everything through email when sending quotes and executing buy-side and sell-side contracts that required data and signatures.

Veracode’s teams used Adobe Sign and a document repository to create, save, and pull static quotes or contracts and then send them to personal inboxes. They had to depend on individuals to find, download, modify, and return the documents in what was a time-consuming and often unreliable back-and-forth process. Teams were also using spreadsheets to manage document data, which were tedious and precarious to manually track and maintain.

Lacking robust reporting capabilities, Veracode encountered significant challenges in obtaining essential insights into its contract lifecycle. These challenges included gaining visibility into factors like document volume, processing durations, and document progression within the workflow, as well as tracking the number of iterations and versions required for each document.

Urged on by legal, Veracode recognized how critical it was to move beyond email and into a transparent, centralized system that could provide the necessary visibility and tracking for sales, procurement, and legal teams during each phase of the document lifecycle – from document generation through to e-signature. 

Solution
To address these challenges, Veracode began by further researching Conga’s contract lifecycle management (CLM) capabilities. Veracode quickly realized that Conga’s CLM solutions — specifically, Conga Contracts for Salesforce — provided the end-to-end solution they required to optimize their business needs. Conga Contracts for Salesforce includes several of Conga’s best-in-class tools including Conga Composer, Conga Grid, and Conga Sign, allowing Veracode to be fully integrated into Salesforce where the company’s critical data lived.  

Veracode’s sales and legal teams use Conga’s CLM every day to process standard and negotiated contracts while the procurement team built an app within Salesforce that provided them the access and permissions needed — meeting both the sell-side and buy-side needs within the business. Sales was also able to use the extended functionality of Conga Composer’s APIs with their Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution for more efficient quote generation, specifically for renewals and preapprovals.  

With Conga’s CLM, Veracode can now efficiently track, audit, and report on its contract lifecycle for the first time. Veracode mapped out various stages of each document’s lifecycle — such as draft, customer review, Veracode review, and legal negotiation. As a contract or document moves through the lifecycle, each stage is timestamped providing visibility into the status of documents at any given time and how long the document remained in each stage, allowing the business to understand where bottlenecks and delays existed in the process.  

Conga’s clause library was another important feature for Veracode’s teams, enabling sales to automatically insert clause language on their own when generating contracts while giving legal the ability to store, standardize, update, and report on clauses and term language.  

Using Conga Composer’s APIs to integrate with other systems like CPQ has been critical to the sales team in simplifying quote generation with renewals, preapprovals, and triggers around certain criteria. Sales consolidated what used to be a lengthy process into a single click. Specifically, APIs called up the proper template, merged accurate data, and auto-tagged it in one step — all within Salesforce — before seamlessly sending the quote to the customer for signature. The APIs streamline the sell-side flow, taking contracts and agreements produced with Conga Composer and quickly updating the sales order form within Salesforce.  

The simple onboarding process, conducted with the help of Conga partner Coastal Cloud, and native Salesforce functionality helped alleviate any initial concerns for users about switching to a new, automated system after having used email and Adobe Sign for so long. After communicating the switch and working with Coastal Cloud to roll it out on a team-by-team basis, Veracode showed its users that the new system could be trusted — and users fully embraced it. 

Results
Now, with Conga’s CLM, Veracode saves time and reduces manual work, while improving visibility, tracking, and reporting.

Since adopting Conga’s CLM solution, Veracode can report on the number of documents they sent and how many are negotiated, the length of the negotiation cycle, and which terms are added to documents the most — quantifying the company’s contract and document volume and demonstrating how automation improved its overall contract lifecycle management.  

Conga’s CLM uniquely allows the sales team to track contract terms and milestones, providing the opportunity to turn upcoming expirations into autorenewals, and saving time searching for and processing renewals manually. Leveraging Conga Grid, the sales team can also visualize and efficiently manage customer data— eliminating the need for spreadsheets. The team even set up an extension of Conga Grid as their home page view in Salesforce.  

Veracode’s procurement team benefits from Conga’s CLM as well to easily manage its vendor contract signing, tracking, and reporting processes.  

Because of the ease of tracking and negotiations now, Veracode only has to involve legal for one round of review before a contract is sent for a final signature by the sales rep. This has greatly reduced internal friction and legal involvement, saving significant time and frustration.  

The most common document Veracode generates is the sales order form, as either a straight renewal or a preapproval. The sales team was sending around 25 per month. With the Conga Composer API, the company streamlined and simplified the number of screens and clicks down to a single API callout when generating the order form, reducing the time spent on the renewal and preapproval cycle from seven minutes to less than a minute.  

Business outcomes

• Reduced the sales renewal process from 7 minutes to less than a minute with Conga Composer API functionality
• Extended Salesforce functionality with fully embedded, comprehensive document solutions
• Eliminated the use of email, spreadsheets, and manual processes for document and contract lifecycle management
• Reduced employee frustration and friction by centralizing all document data in one place
• Limited the involvement of legal with faster, trackable contract negotiations, templates, and a clause library 

*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.