How to Streamline Your Revenue Operations with Conga Digital Transformation Officer Ash Finnegan

Finigan, Digital Transformation Officer at Conga. Thanks for being with us, Ash. Yeah, thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. So it's really great to be speaking to you all around our revenue operations transformation piece. My journey with Conga actually started off as a customer. I was managing an entire revenue operations transformation program where we changed everything. We implemented CPQ, CLM, a billing, and a back-office finance system. And we did it all at the same time. We were changing everything and taking an entire global business to a whole new version of Salesforce. This project had so many learnings that I now spend the majority of my time working with our customers on their transformation journeys, but also working with them on how to use the maturity model to help them understand where they are now, what they should do next, and how they prepare their business for the future state whatever it may bring. So in this session, I'm going to cover the role and the importance of revenue operations, why it has superseded sales operations and legal operations, and it's all about breaking down these silos and making everybody accountable for revenue. We're going to look at how to digitally transform your revenue operations, and also we're going to look at to help you see where you are on your revenue operations maturity, to know what, where you are and what you should do next. So Revenue Operations, and where does Conga sit? Conga is all about helping our customers with transformational capabilities to help them maximize revenue yield through connected customer experiences. However, when I first start with any customer around digital transformation, I will always ask them, why are you doing digital transformation? What does it mean to you and your business? They say that digital transformation is the topmost strategic priority for every organization. Every major company knows that the future is in data. If this is true, where is the data? And what would you do if you had access to it? Connecting the customer experience is a top priority. This is something that we're hearing more and more from all of our customers. Organizations know they need a more connected and personalized experience for their customers, partners, and employees. It's now about working with an ecosystem and making sure that connected customer experience is as seamless as possible. So if we look a little bit closer at the whole customer and connecting the customer experience, there's much involved in that. So you may have your customer at the center, and we know there are many preferred channels you may speak to your customers, whether that's via your sales team using your CRM system, online using a commerce channel or your website. Do you communicate to customers via partner, a distributor, an agent, Wholesale. There are many ways and sometimes multiple ways you could speak to one customer. We also look at the various different products and services that you offer your customers. And the product, the price, the promotions, how you recommend and cross-sell to those customers. And what's the experience like on the various different channels? Do they have to repeat the same thing if they're on a different channel? How frictionless is that process? And getting that information across different channels. Then we come to the piece all around the contracts. Customers wanting to know, where am I in my contracting process? Where's my signed agreements? Am I in the middle of negotiation? Am I gonna amend? What are my obligations versus your obligations? It's all about having complete visibility on where they are around those vital contracts. Then it goes through to order management. Right through to invoicing, and right through to your customer success team. 'Cause we all know it's one thing to attract a customer, but the key thing is how do you retain the customer and keep them buying from you by giving them that flawless experience. When we look at this whole connected customer experience, we see a lot of different processes. You probably have a lot of teams. So Revenue Operations is all about making that system and process so much more connected. So why revenue operations and why now? They say that most digital transformations are failures are due to no, not transformation, transforming at the core. And this is because people build in silos, they think in silos, and they don't look at it at the end-to-end. And they don't have this core center of excellence. Revenue operations has materialized as one of the most powerful shifts a business can make to drive transformation change to improve growth and performance. It's not just about changing your process or your systems. It's about changing culture and your people, making them work closer and better together. This genre of capabilities is proven to deliver more ROI than the core CRM. So Revenue Operations is a vital play in digital transformation. Revenue Operations is all about driving growth through operational efficiency. It's about aligning everybody, getting everybody on the same page and creating efficiencies. It's about creating focus across everybody. There's two type of people in your business: those that are directly making money and those that are helping. And it's all about keeping everybody focused on driving profitability. It's about simplifying everything— the process, the people, and the technology— getting everybody onto the same page. So Revenue Operations is about bringing your marketing, sales, legal, finance, and customer success operations all into one place and making sure that they're all communicating. Revenue Operations has many advantages. For your internal teams, it's about improving the employee experiences, keeping them engaged. We know that it improves team productivity by allowing better cross-functional collaboration. It's about having full funnel accountability around revenue generation. Everybody knows their role and what they have to do, and they ensure they don't just build for their department, they build for the business. It's about creating that optimized and frictionless business process, not just a sales process or a legal process, it's now about a business process. It's about having end-to-end transparency on all data and agreements on metrics. Everybody knows the data, where it is, and how that we're measuring. And everybody's looking at data, not deciding what, which is the right data, is what do we do with this information to improve our customer experience. In order to do that, it's all about the alignment and the adoption of the tech stack across all teams. The more seamless you get and the more integrated you get, the better the performance will be for your business. It's all about putting your business in a position of having predictable business growth. Obviously, there's huge benefits, not just for your internal teams, but also for your customers. They will get that seamless and personalized customer experience regardless of the channel or the stage in the sales cycle that they're at. It's about tailored engagement based on what you know about them, how they've interacted, what they bought before, how you recommend new and the right products for your customers. It's about having visibility and transparency around all the contracting terms and conditions. So you do not disappoint your customers when it comes to obligation management and ensuring you stick to what you've agreed to. It's also helping to accelerate those negotiations, the signature contract lifecycle, predictable billing. It's all about making sure that your customers feel very successful with you and they're focusing on doing more with you, not replacing you. It's all about getting all your teams and all your customers focused on ensuring that they are all happy working with you. So how do you digitally transform your revenue operations? Well, if we take a closer look at the end-to-end revenue operations process, there are many stages in it. And like we said, it's about building for the business, not just for a department. So whether your issue is around proposal management and getting those proposals out by having the right offering products, services with the right price, make it accessible across multiple channels, especially your sales teams. They can access the information, get the right price, inflict the right discounts, generate the documents, and get it to the customer, and work through all of the approval processes that need to happen. And that seamlessly then falls into the agreement management or your contract lifecycle management, right through to your billing, to the ability to analyze the revenue, right through to your customer success. It's about being able to seamlessly manage all of the documents end-to-end, get the proposals out, get the contracts out, get the invoices out. It's all about making sure you stay connected with your customers, and regardless of what happens, they get the right information at the right time. Revenue Operations is all about end-to-end process automation improving the workflows, and paying attention to integration. It's vitally important that you don't create something here around the proposal side, but later on will cause a problem for your finance team. So it's all about making sure that you build for end-to-end and not just a particular area you're working on, or just the users at that process. And this is where the maturity model comes into play to help customers understand how to make this a reality for their business. It's all about how we review your business and understand where you are and what are the business outcomes you need for today. It's about building a plan that's focused on what's now, what's next, and preparing for beyond, whatever that may be. It's about making you simplify that process, but not just the process, look at the people involved in that process, understand their real pain points, right down to the technology they use today and what, where you need to take them to, to make them more engaged and more involved. It's about taking the simplified process and then applying technology. Lots of technology has so many features and functionality. It's about using the features that will drive your business outcomes for today and then move to more advanced features when your business is ready. It's about driving business outcome. That is measured by your business. So where are you on the maturity model? So when we look and we reviewed your business, we simplified, and we select the technology that we think will solve, how do you know where to start? So when we look at the maturity model, it breaks across stages. And what we're trying to do is understand where your business is today. Where's the pain point? Is it in your proposals? Is it around contracts? Is it in your finance? Is in your customer success. Wherever it is, these stages of maturity will work for each stage of the process. So for example, at the initial stage would mean that you're, you're at a stage where you're very reactive. So your processes are very manual and time-consuming. There's a lot of pain points. So normally what we do is we want to get you on the, on the steps to a more sophisticated process. And that starts by building a strong foundation of business logic. It needs to be controlled by the right teams. So whether that's your product and pricing, your central repository for your contracts and your clause library, so your legal teams have a central place to keep all the terms and conditions up to date, or how you build your architecture around your invoicing schedules and the GL. It's all about building a foundation that the teams can access to build that single source of truth. But it's vitally important that they make that accessible to all the teams. And this now takes you to the second stage of maturity. This is all about now getting your users on the system to take that repeatable process, getting the proposal out, getting the contract out, getting the invoice out. So it's all about making your teams efficient. They can get on, have a document management system to generate the right documents based on the products that were selected, based on the language that's of the opportunity, to make sure that that document is as personalized and customized to the, customer, and it's what they expect. And marketing have the ability to add in extra information. It's all about making sure you can get the information to your customers fast. The next stage that we do is to ensure that we use automation. Automation is vital to digital transformation. It's one of the biggest talk tracks right now. How do you improve the workflow? How do you take data from one system to the next system? How do you do those advanced approval processes? How do you do checks on customers before you give them the right product with the right price? What are the things that need to happen and how can you make the system do it so that your users can spend more time speaking to customers, not manually trying to find information? So it's all about being very success— succinct around process automation and building those true workflows. The next stage is once you've got a particular area working and the system, the foundation's there, users are on the system, you've automated the process around proposals, you know, need to build it for the business. So even before we build anything, we will always ask you about integration. Where am I getting data from? And where am I sending it to? 'Cause remember, Revenue Operations is all about breaking silos and connecting the customer experience. So we have always, integration is a key thing. Even if we're only building in phase 1, your foundation and getting users on the system, we will always be planning for integration. 'Cause we do not want to make a problem for another department. It's about getting your business to that truly intelligent state where your teams are aligned, your data is visible, and you are future-proofing your business based on data, not based on opinion. So if I take the maturity model, for example, this is how it applies to proposal management. You have the stages of maturity, which you'd be assessed on. In there, we would look at your product and pricing and how complex you are when it comes to product and pricing. Can you do it off a Salesforce price book? Or do you need a CPQ tool to help you manage those complex bundles and pricing and discounts? So it ensures a seamless experience. How do you get proposals out? It's all about making sure you get the documents right to online proposals. How do we automate the workflows? And then again, where am I integrating and sending data to? Like I said, these stages of maturity will work along offering. It will also work with contract management. And it will also work with revenue. So regardless of where you're first starting, you will always build the foundation, getting users on the system, automating the workflows, using advanced technology, to then integrating from getting data from and sending data to. And either if I'm just looking at CLM, I will still engage my finance team and my sales team to ensure I build a process that works for a business, not just for a department. One thing we do is always work with customers. Every time you climb the maturity model, you need to be measuring. We need to put dashboards in to ensure you've got the repository in place for your contracts. What's the measurement? What are you learning from having that? Users are on the system. It's about adoption. Cycle time is about automation, speeding up the sales cycle. How are you measuring it? Is it working? When you get to integration, it's about now I'm looking at the customer end-to-end. What am I learning? And it's all about getting to a stage where you're starting to now look at trends and be more proactive about how you liaise with customers. And you don't just cut the customer off. So the key takeaways from this session, and it's a lot of information, but we have 20 minutes, so I want to make sure we have time for Q&A. It's all about designing a transformation program that works for your business, not a department. Revenue operations, about end-to-end connecting that customer experience. Don't start with technology. Review your business, simplify the process, and engage every team, and then apply technology that will drive your business outcomes. Digital transformation is a continuous journey. You need to understand where you are on the maturity model and then climb to more advanced features. Don't build and forget it and then find in 2 years' time you've fallen behind. This is all about creating that connected seamless experience. So your customers feel that you're getting better and you're using data to understand what's the next business outcome. And you're maximizing revenue yield. You're not just generating revenue. It's about revenue yield, which means you've got to reduce revenue leakage. So if you want to continue this conversation, there's lots of different ways you can talk to Conga because there's a lot of information around revenue operations, proposals, contracts, finance, all the documents, all the workflows. We're happy to help you with anything that we can, and we can help you in any area. Everything doesn't need to be done at once. We can focus on one area, help you climb, help you understand, and then integrate it out wider when your business is ready. You can come to Konga, go to our virtual booth and book a meeting. You can come to konga.com, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. A lot of people actually prefer to just come to me on LinkedIn and have conversations. Either way, we're here to help you and your business. So it's vitally important that you know how to speak to us, and we are more than happy to help you with the entire revenue operations process. So with that, I'm going to now pass it back to Ben, my colleague, who's been keeping an eye on questions to see if you guys have any questions before we wrap up.

Thanks, Ash. We did have a couple questions come through. We had one from Bob who wants to know, uh, how does he know where he stands on the maturity model so he knows where to start?

Yeah, exactly. So what you would normally do is if you came to me, again, I'd ask you, where are you? Which part of the revenue operations process? And then what we do is whether it's contracts or proposals, we then go through a series of assessment questions, which is basically on the foundation level. I would need to know where you are with your contracts or where you are, what's your product and pricing? What do you sell? How do you sell it? Then the next stage is how many users, how complex are you there? And then we have a series of questions around your workflows, your process. Where's the real pain? And based on those series of questions, we would then be able to understand where you are, understand the pain points, and then help you go to the next stage. So it's all about making sure you, you know where you, where you want to start, and that could be a series of questions as well. So it is all about going from foundation right through to intelligence and asking the right questions.

Thanks. Melissa asks, "how do you get all teams to work together?" Ah, yes.

This is always an interesting one, and it can cause a lot of conflict. Normally what I always recommend around revenue operations, and if you're managing the project, meet the teams individually first. So all the teams that are involved in the process, meet them one-on-one, because people will always talk more freely when they feel they might not add, generate some conflict in the room. So it's really important to meet with them individually and then find out where the problems are, from their perspective. And then what you need to do is you need to create a super team that will come together. Like I said, you'll have your primary people and your secondary people. The primary people are the one that are involved in that process, and then the secondary teams are the ones that will have to take data or give data to that department. And it's vitally important that you create a super team that's made up with the people that know what's really happening, not people that think what's happening. And then when you bring them together, It's about then looking at the process. What are the business outcomes? Get everyone to agree the business outcomes and draw the process out, simplify it with them. I always recommend to bring in an expert because sometimes it needs somebody from outside of the comp business to come in because what they'll do is not, they'll challenge why you're doing things. 'Cause sometimes people get used to doing things the same way and it's good to have an outside person to say what the world is doing. And also to maybe, and if there's any conflict the way things should do it to help you get to that best practice. So meet individually, bring everyone together, and an outside expert is always a great help.

Thanks, Ash. Another question just came in. What's the best indicators to know if you're doing well in the revenue operations versus your peers in the industry?

Ah, so we're doing a lot of work and actually tracking all of our customers and where they are in the maturity model. And the key indicators for me, like I said, is measuring each stage of maturity. What you need to do is make sure at the foundation level you've got complete visibility on where you are in the pipeline of sales, where you are in the contract. So how many contracts you have, where they are at the negotiation. You're now being more predictable on the revenue. So you can see where you are and you're starting to be more proactive. You know, the other thing is adoption on the system, measuring speed in the sales cycle. Are you getting smarter? Are you getting better? Is the, are the teams collaborating, working well together? So as I saw in the last slide, there were stages of things you should track as you climb in the maturity model and get more sophisticated. It's all about maximizing revenue yield. So are you making money? Are you getting greater efficiencies? Is the cycle time speeding up? And also, are you using data to actually see where you're going wrong? And that to me is a true success on revenue operations. You learn what channels are working, what channels make the most money, and what products and pricing are working best for customers. So you're becoming more predictable and more proactive rather than reactive. But this is something when we work with customers, we help them build these dashboards, because if you're not measuring, what's the point?

Thanks. This looks like the last question from Daniel. Do you think legal teams should be more involved in the overall business process?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Without a doubt. And it's a big thing. We're seeing legal operations as a persona that's growing very, very quickly. And the key thing about it for me, especially my legal teams, because I had to bring them into the system. And we've got lots of tools to make them on the system, but not feel they have to learn an entire system. I think legal operations or the legal teams need to be definitely highly involved. They have to liaise with salespeople. They have to liaise with customers. They have to understand what clauses are working, where the bottlenecks are. And they will only do that if they're engaged in the entire business and not in a silo. Revenue operations is about breaking silos, bringing legal teams into those conversations, even if it's building your CPQ or your proposal management, they want to know what products, what prices, what discounts, where's my risk. And then the billing team, they want to know, am I delaying anything on that side? So please, yes, no more silos. Those days are gone. Bring your legal teams in. They have a lot to add to the process.

Ash, I spoke too soon. One last question slipped in.

That's okay.

What's one trend in revenue operations that you're most most excited about?

Making teams work together. That's the thing. Integration and automation are the two things that really, really excite me. Everyone gets caught up in CPQs and CLMs and the technology. And now by looking at automation and integration, it has so much more meaning. It's about getting people in the room and everybody's learning. It's about making a fun and engaged business and automating those processes so your teams can be more engaged with customers and not complaining about Excel spreadsheets and can't find the right information. So yeah, the two stages on the maturity curve that really excite me is automation and inspiration because they're the things that change culture. So yeah, they're my favorite stages.

Thanks, Ash.

Thank you. That's it for me. Brilliant, thank you. Thanks everyone for joining. Have a good day.