Conga Cloud Platform Drives $74M Revenue Uplift for Office Supply Distributor

Challenge

Before partnering with Conga, the company didn’t have the tools to drive profitable pricing and streamlined selling. To start, they didn’t have an optimized quoting solution. Instead, they relied on spreadsheets and emails to create quotes and get them approved. However, they did have a price optimization solution in place—but they had reached the limits of its capabilities and found they needed something more. The key failings of their previous solution were:

1. Poor pricing visibility 

   The organization lacked the ability to stay up to date with all the markets they were operating in and to take all market factors into account when pricing their products. This made it difficult to optimize prices for profitability or manage their pricing at the customer level. 
    

2. Inefficient quoting processes 

   During negotiation, sales teams sometimes took weeks to manually generate quotes. It involved aligning all the SKUs from their Request for Pricing (RFP), which sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands. Then, approvals had to cycle through multiple teams, including purchasing and finance, and sometimes as far up as the CFO, before finally being approved. 
    

3. Inflexible solutions 

   The company was using an on-premises pricing solution that couldn’t handle the huge volume of SKUs involved in the quoting process. The system’s lack of flexibility meant they couldn’t price at the customer level or ensure consistency between contracts. Furthermore, their pricing solution couldn’t conform with the Most Favored Nation law, which states that if the company informs the government that they’re getting the lowest price on a product, the distributor couldn’t sell that same product at a lower price to someone else.

Solution

The company wanted an end-to-end, cloud-based solution that could unify all their pricing and selling processes onto a single platform. Their new solution also needed to help them adhere to government laws and regulations across all markets, handle customer-specific price agreements, and help teams generate RFPs quickly and accurately. The company also needed their new solution implemented quickly.

The company decided to implement the full suite of Conga B2B products: Conga Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ) and Conga Price Optimization and Management (POM).

Conga's Price Optimization and Management (POM)

To start, Conga implemented Smart POM to bring together the distributor’s complex pricing structure for every individual customer, allowing sales reps to access all the data they needed to sort prices rapidly. Another key highlight in the implementation process included introducing AI-powered price optimization for negotiated prices. With this new capability, sales reps could access pricing “envelopes” for each line item so they could see the floor, target, and maximum prices at once.

To help the company manage customer-specific pricing, Conga also set up a customer profitability model. Using this, sales reps could perform accurate price calculations based on historical agreements and data, essentially establishing a unique profitability model for each individual customer. They also added complex pricing tools that could adjust to different strategies depending on multiple factors, including product type or time of year.

Conga Smart Configure Price Quote (CPQ)

Implementing Conga Smart CPQ provided the company with several much-needed capabilities. First, the new solution was able to manage up to 22,000 line items, which helped them handle the large volume of incoming quotes. They also gained the ability to capture original or alternate prices, enabling in-the-moment upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Lastly, the document generator helped them attach agreements to quotes and proposals, capturing all changes from one contract to the next to ensure greater consistency.

Also Read: Accelerate deal cycles and maximize revenue with Advantage CPQ

Business Outcomes

After going live with the Conga Platform in 2020, the company experienced significant improvements to their business operations and profitability.

To start, the company experienced revenue uplift of $74M, reversing the 6-year downward trend.. They improved profitability and time-to-quote on over $1B in contract sales from over 8,000 fixed price customer agreements.

The intuitive and logical interface of the Conga Platform made it easier to manage pricing activities, transfer data from pricing to quoting, and quickly generate RFPs. Because their administration time has been greatly reduced, sales reps became more empowered to add value to their customer journey. For example, they can suggest alternate products based on margin information. Plus, they had the information at their fingertips to see past price recommendations and customer sales histories to make sure they weren’t setting prices too low and leaving money on the table.

Ultimately, Conga's POM and Smart CPQ offered the office supply distributor a single, easy-to-use platform that would help them work efficiently, set competitive prices, and grow profit and margins even during inflationary cycles. Lastly, the dynamic, harmonized pricing across the organization allowed them to perform faster and more efficiently than their competitors.