>> Live from San Francisco, it's the Cube covering Conga, Connect West 2018 Brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeff Frick with the Cube, we're at Salesforce Dreamforce in downtown, San Francisco, 170,000 people. As I said before please take public transit, take a scooter, take a bird, but do not get on the roads. We're excited to be here. We have our first guest from Salesforce. We're so excited. It's Greg Gsell, he's the VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce CPQ and billing. Greg, great to see you. >> Really happy to be here. >> Along with him is Ken Cavallon the EDP of Conga. Great to see you. >> Nice to meet you as well, thanks for having us here. >> Oh, for sure. So first off, Greg, you've been with, said almost your 13th anniversary with Salesforce. >> That's correct, my 13th, been with the company for 12 years. First band I saw was Train and there was about 5000 people at the conference. >> I was going to say, I want to get your perspective. There was 5000 people at the conference. >> Yeah, maybe a little bit more than that, but it was right around there, so it was much smaller. We only had one of the Moscone buildings. We were still growing as fast as we could back then. >> Did they bring this cruise ship in this year? I can't remember. I remember Lynn Vojvodich brought the cruise ship in a couple of years ago for a room. >> The dream boat has not come back. It made one appearance and I have not been back for the conference yet. >> Okay, so a lot of stuff going on, obviously you guys work very close together, but today some big product announcements, over the last couple of days, what if you can kind of run through those for us? >> Yeah, it's been super exciting. So we've been working with Conga for a long time. They've been a great Salesforce partner since 2006, I think. Now we just announced a brand new product Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ and Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, which is a purpose filled application that allows our CPQ and billing customers to build pixel perfect quotes using Conga right inside a Salesforce CPQ. It's a great product announcement. >> So you've integrated the Conga functionality into the Salesforce application around that specific >> Exactly right. >> Application. >> Exactly right. >> So why did you go that way? Why didn't you just build it yourself? >> We do configure pricing quotes, you're generating a quote and a quote's not good unless it gets signed by a customer. So generating the documents is such an integral part of that process. Conga's one of the leaders so we decided to make this partnership to bring it all together. >> That's great. So Ken, you got to be pretty excited. You got to like that, huh? >> I'm extremely excited about this opportunity, I've been working with Salesforce for the last ten years, in many other capacities as a partner on the outside looking in. This has been an amazing experience, having Salesforce bring a partner to the inside saying help us solve these customers' problems. I mean Salesforce is all about customer success and helping customers be more successful. It was phenomenal to see an ecosystem owner like Salesforce realize that they could use a partner to actually drive more success for their customers. As the leader in document generation, on the Salesforce platform, we help make those pixel perfect format-friendly documents out of the customer's data in Salesforce applying their rules and their templates to their format, the way they want it. The CPQ team, the CPQ and billing team came to us and said as the best in doc gen we want you guys to produce the quotes that come out of our quoting system. The Salesforce CPQ system is amazing. We're also a customer. We use the technology, not just the Salesforce platform, but Salesforce CPQ as well. We know what it's like to actually need to satisfy a customer in getting that sale through the funnel faster. Being able to tie these two technologies together and allow the Salesforce themselves to take this to the customer, they now have one point of contact where they can get all of CPQ in the way they want it. >> It's really interesting as people think about the generation, kind of the mechanics of working through the configuration and all the options, that's a really simple thing to generate a document that somebody can actually sign. Pretty important step that a lot of people don't tie the whole bow back together. >> That's right, that's right. >> So now we've got the best of breed in both solutions coming together and being able to take to market by the Salesforce team. I actually am not really familiar with another opportunity where there's been a partner that can actually support Salesforce in that way. Generally Salesforce takes Salesforce products to market and then to have the us take to market on their price book and in their quotes to their customers is a great privilege. We treat it that way, working with Greg and his team on the product marketing side, with Dan and his team on the technology side, to build a new product on Lightning, as a Lightning component to take it to market. Great experience. >> So Greg, I'm just curious, that's a super development, you've been working on the CPQ and the billing for a while. What are some of the things on your road map, what are some of the priorities that you got as you look forward? >> Sure, on CPQ and billing we just launched billing about three weeks ago, so billing completes the last mile of the sales cycle, so it's where we've really been focused. Billing allows all of our customers to generate invoices to collect payment, to automate their renewals, it really transforms a new business model. Still enabling our customers to take advantage of the subscription based or recurring revenue based business model that we hear so much about in our consumer life. We're really bringing those business models into new companies and enabling them to launch new products. That's where our head's at, we've been really focused on billing, we're really excited to bring that to market here at Dreamforce. >> So I wonder if you can unpack some of the complexity around subscriptions and some of these new kind of business relationships between vendors and customers. Because it's not just the I buy it, get an invoice, and we can finish the transaction, but there's all these new variances. The subscription thing is huge and a growing piece of the economy. >> Subscriptions are nothing new, right, newspaper subscriptions have been around for hundreds of years. So it's not a new concept, but taking that and applying it in a B to B setting is actually is really new because it gets really complex. The devil is in the details here. A traditional back end systems, your ERP, were built to quote a widget, sell a widget, and bill for a widget, then you collect your money and you move on. It's not that recurring relationship. With billing, it was subscription based products and recurring relationships, now midway through that contract, you could upgrade, you could swap out a product, you could renew early. There's so many different variations that you could do and you actually have to go in and amend that contract. In the past, all of our customers had their contract, it's a piece of paper with an actual signature on it, long before Conga Sign, that sat in someone's folder, in a drawer in the basement. It's very, very difficult to actually go back in and amend that contract in your ERP system. So we see lots of challenges with scale, manual processes, manually updating data, that physically prevented companies from moving into this subscription model. But now with Salesforce billing, bill right on the Salesforce platform, we are able to unlock that, enable all these new dramatic changes. >> Then we talked earlier, Ken, with some other people from Conga about the contract management piece of that too that's got to dovetail in with the billing and everything else because the T's and C's depending on what you buy, how much you buy, and when you buy could be very, very different, right? >> It can govern the next sell. As Greg was talking about transforming that configure pricing quote process to modernize business, to allow for these new business models, Conga wraps around Salesforce CPQ and billing to help digially transform the sales business process. Better presentations, built out of data that are customized to a specific customer engagement, better proposals that can lead to the quoting process so that you can make sure that the customer really knows what they're buying and then is able to get a quote. Better set of reports that come afterwards to show that consumption and visualize for the customer and help them understand what to buy next. Then Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing generates that actual invoice document for them. This entire sales business process digitally transformation journey, a lot of customers are in that journey today and they just really don't know how to do it and they can unlock the power of Salesforce and all that technology they've got with the custom master records so they can move that throughout the entire sales process. That's what Conga's here to do and we're here to do in partnership with Salesforce CPQ and billing. >> Just curious, how much of the push to these types of development to the application are driven by the customer request like hey, we want to do some of these new things, can you please put it in, or is it more, hey, now you have this, classic chicken and egg, now you can start to explore some of these transformative ways of doing business? What do you kind of see in the field, is it more of we want it, or here you have it, now we can do it? >> Different customers are at different points in their journey in that digital transformation. This is the fourth industrial revolution where we're going from where we were in the past of that transactional business where it starts and stops and you have to restart it again to a constant flow of business that they have with their customers. Depending upon where they are in that journey, depends on whether or not they're pulling us along, saying I've got to innovate further, or we have to go explore with them what's possible, the art of possible. I have to give Marc and the Salesforce team a lot of credit. Salesforce over the last 20 years has done such an amazing job at helping business figure out how to unlock that potential that they've got, and this platform has allowed Conga to thrive. Conga was born on the AppExchange a little more than 10 years ago, we've grown with the AppExchange ever since and as you can see from this great event we've got going on here today, we're able to solve a lot of customers' problems. To answer your question directly, it's where they are in that journey depends on whether or not they need a little push, or they're going to pull us. >> Right, so Greg, a little shifting gears. I'm just curious from a product marketing, product development point of view, when you operate with such a robust ecosystem and you're making decisions as to what do we buy, what do we partner, what do we integrate, of the 100,000 plus whatever people here, a whole lot of them are partners. It's a super robust ecosystem, so as you look at that, how do you prioritize or you kind of looking for partners for new things or you looking for them to fill holes, how do you fit that portfolio into what you're trying to build natively in the product? >> Sure I mean it always just comes back to customer success. We listen to our customers and we see what is available out there and we look to partners like Conga and the rest of the three, four thousand plus applications, I think on the AppExchange to make sure that we're filling all of our customers' needs. It's always about what is going to help our customers be the most successful in the fourth industrial revolution like Ken was saying. >> Ken, Greg, congrats on the announcement, on the integration. I'm sure it will have tremendous success for both of you. >> Thank you very much. >> He's Ken, he's Greg, I'm Jeff, you're watching the Cube. We're at Conga Connect West at Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, come on down, free food, free drink, and free I think entertainment. Thanks for watching.

>> From San Francisco, it's The Cube Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Salesforce Dreamforce, they say a hundred and seventy thousand people have descended into downtown San Francisco, it's absolutely bananas. We found a little respite, a little oasis if you will. Couple doors down to the Thirsty Bear's, the Conga Connect West event, come on down they've rented out The Thirsty Bear for three days of, I just was told, free food, free drink and a lot of entertainment, also a lot of great Conga people as well, and The Cube's here, so come on by. We're excited to have, for our next segment, people that are really getting close to the customer because at the end of the day, it's really about the customer. So we've got Natasha Reid, she is the senior product management for Conga, good to see you. And also Justin Mongroo, the VP of sales excellence from Conga, also great to see you. >> Thanks. Before we get in I got to ask you, Justin, that is a great title, VP of sales excellence. I mean there really, it says something about what you think is important which is being good at selling, not a used car sales approach at all. How did you come up with that title and what does that personify for your team? >> Yeah, well I didn't come up the title but I think for us, Conga, what it means, sales excellence is about selling with integrity, our product provides real benefits to customers and so unlike a lot of products where they can't talk about the full set, sales excellence to us is being able really let the product shine and identify how it's going to help the businesses we work with. >> Right, and Natasha that's what I hear you spend a lot of your time with customers on. You know, you're product management, but you're using a lot of customer input to drive what you prioritize how you're kind of setting out your road map, what you're working on. >> Yes, absolutely. So, from a customer perspective, we really pride ourselves on customer interviews. There's really nothing that helps you understand what customers are doing and using with your products than watching them firsthand in their own environment, and it really just provides invaluable feedback to help drive where we take our products in the future. >> It's funny, we did the Intuit Quickbooks Connect show a couple years ago, we had Scott Cook on, and he used to talk about it at Intuit, they would just go, like you said, and sit and watch people engage with the application, not even surveys but actually see how users use it and it's interesting even if you watch someone else just use Excel, we all use it in a very different way, so that must be incredibly valuable feedback. >> Yes, I mean you really see the good parts of the application, you see the parts that maybe need improvement as well, but it's feedback that you really can't gather in any way except watching somebody. >> Right, I think it also is the philosophy that's very very different than kind of looking at the competitors all the time, if you listen to Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos at Amazon who are just kicking tail and taking names, they're maniacally focused on what the customer wants. They don't really look at the competition, they don't really talk about the competition, they're always looking at that customer. What do they need, what do they need next, and you guys continuing to evolve your product line to kind of continue to go down that path. >> Well, and the reality is is the customer defines the product in a lot of cases, right? What better way to understand your market than to talk to the people who are already working with you and finding out what they want to buy next? >> Right, right. So you guys have some exciting announcements here at Salesforce this year, Salesforce is now integrating some of the Conga functionality inside of some of their core applications if you could give us a little bit more color on that. >> Sure, so we just launched Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, and Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ. So, these two products are taking the power of the flagship document generation product Conga Composer, and we're leveraging that functionality for very purpose-specific built document generation with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing. >> That's pretty awesome. >> Yes, that is pretty awesome. >> So why did pick you guys? What were some of the feature sets, or working with Conga that helped Salesforce come to this decision? >> Sure, so Conga Composer, well known for best in class document generation, pixel perfect documents, so when you need to get your formatting just right, when you need very sharp, clean lines, et cetera, leveraging things like the ability to provide more information or merge more product line items into your documents, as well as supporting the formats that people want, things like Word and PDF. >> Yeah, and I would say in addition to the functionality, Salesforce also is able to trust just by seeing our customer experience through our net promoter score and our reviews online knowing that they could partner with us and that we would take care of our joint customers they way they want them to be. >> That's a pretty significant move by them to adopt your guys' technology as part of the core within some of their offerings >> It is, it's not something that Salesforce does often, so we're very proud and we're very grateful that they looked to us to help provide these solutions. I think another component of this is just ease of use. So very easy to install, Lightning-ready, very forward thinking in that capacity. >> Yeah, the Lightning thing is interesting, you get used to the old, "Who moved my cheese?" I was the old school front end on Salesforce and they finally made me jump over to Lightning, but I'm sure that opened up all types of new opportunities for you to deliver new functionality in that. >> It does, and I'll empathize with that sentiment. I think change is always hard, right? People always struggle a little bit when they're used to doing something one way and Lightning is a very different look and feel from Salesforce Classic. I will say though that once you move to Lightning, Salesforce has done a really great job of, Lightning is more than just a CRM, It helps you do your job better. It makes suggestions, they put a lot of work into UI, user interface and user experience, you don't have to think about how to do your job better, it actually just helps you do your job better. >> Right. >> So being able to build and develop on the Lightning framework is actually a tremendous benefit. >> It has been, and in the last piece you guys are sitting on a bunch of different pieces in this document life cycle, if you will. You don't call it that, but you're into the contracts, you're into the document generation, you're into the life cycle management, so all these things too, I imagine now are coming together in a more kind of synchronized, cohesive way. >> Well I mean it's really if you think about the customer's story they need a generated document to communicate with their customers before they are a customer, and then they need to do a quote to show them how much it's going to cost, and they may or may not need to negotiate that and then they need to sign it, and every business has this sort of interaction with their customers, from, "Here's what we do." to "Do you like it "enough to buy it from us?" To, "Here's how we make it legally binding". I mean that's business, and Conga has met our customers along every stage of that journey that they go through in making a customer a customer, and doing that in a visually stimulating, professional way. >> So, fun fact about Conga Sign, our e-signature product we launched in February of this year. E-signature was the #1 feature request, or problem to solve that the conga customer base has provided in the last couple of years. So, everybody wanted e-signature. We listened, we heard, and we built you e-signature. >> So how long did it take you to get it out, from the time you decided, okay we'll go ahead? >> Well, as the original product manager I can actually answer that very specifically. So, we started building in July of last year and we launched on February thirteenth of this year. >> So, less than a year? >> Yes. >> Definitely less than a year. >> Okay, great. And just final thoughts on this event? Dreamforce, obviously a huge event for you guys, big investment in this Thirsty Bear celebration at Connect West. What do you hope to get out of this week, what are you excited to see from both the Salesforce folks across the street, as well as this kind of gathering with all your customers? >> You know, for me I hope to learn. I want to learn what our customers are interested in, I want to learn what our reps are seeing in the market as they walk around, and what other businesses are doing, and then learn from the ecosystem and what tools are available that we can use ourselves to better help our customer which is our employees. >> My favorite part of Dreamforce is actually the Conga booth at the Moscone main hall. So we actually get lots of our customers who come to find us, who come to find specific people. They'll come and ask for, "Hey, this support person "helped us", and they'll actually identify that person by name, or "Hey, this professional "service person helped us, can I meet them? "Are they here?" And it's just incredibly gratifying, like it's very difficult to describe. You have literally hundreds of people coming to find you to just say, "Thank you, we love your products, "it makes my life so much easier, "what else are you guys doing?" >> That's great, and it's always so gratifying to know that there's always someone on the other side that appreciates the work and it's always fun when you get some kind of an electronic relationship, to cement that with a face and a voice and a name and a handshake. Well, thanks again for stopping by and congratulations on the big announcement. >> [Natasha And Justin] Thank you. >> Alright, he's Justin, she's Natasha, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're here at Conga Connect West at Salesforce at Thirsty bear, see you next time.