Upgrading Document Automation in a Shifting Market

Tara Porter: Welcome, everyone. My name is Tara Porter, and I'm happy to have you here for our webinar today. We're going to be talking about upgrading document automation in a shifting market. I'm really excited that we are joined by our guests — Jamison Reitinger, the staff competitive intelligence analyst here at Conga. Welcome, Jamison. 

Jamison Reitinger: Thank you so much, Tara. I'm excited to be here. 

Tara Porter: Awesome. We also have Karan Bhadiadra here, the implementation expert for Pink Samurais — another great expert on document automation. Welcome, Karan. 

This is going to be a wonderful event. We are going to be chatting all about document automation, and I want to give you an opportunity to win some swag along the way. After this webinar, we're going to pick one random active participant to win some new Conga swag. All you have to do is participate in the chat and polls for your chance to win. We'll reach out to the winner after the event. 

To get us started, I'd like you to drop your department in the chat — whether that's sales, legal, finance, whatever — and that is going to automatically get you started as a possible winner for today's giveaway. With that, let me pass it over to you, Jamison.

Jamison Reitinger: We're going to jump into a quick poll right now. What's your biggest document automation pain point? 

Tara Porter: All right, let's look at the results. We've got almost even across the board — 29% on time, 29% on consistency and customer experience, and interoperability not far behind at 14%. That's really interesting. Let's take this a step further. Karan, can you tell us about what you're seeing enterprises struggle with — some of the real-world pain points, and the lessons you've learned from implementing this across enterprise teams? 

REAL-WORLD USE CASES & IMPLEMENTATION LESSONS 

Karan Bhadiadra: Thanks, Jamison. Document automation can be a really broad term, so let me give you three specific examples. 

First, the sales use case. Say it's a Tuesday and somebody on the sales team is given a task to create a QBR deck. What does that person do? They go to the CRM, copy-paste some data. They go to the billing system, copy-paste some data. They go to the finance system, look at the budget, copy-paste the data, and then create a deck. That process takes four to six hours — probably not the best use of anyone's time. Instead of using that time to analyze the data and decide how to act on it, people are spending their time on creating the document itself. From an IT point of view, this is a defined set of actions happening every quarter — data from the same sources, in the same format — and all of it can be automated using a tool like Conga. 

Second, for caseworkers in government or healthcare, where you may need to generate hundreds of thousands of documents from case data, all requiring a full audit trail and governance — having an automated system handles that far more efficiently and with full governance built in. 

Third, in education, whether you're generating student certificates or offer letters in bulk — potentially hundreds of thousands — all of that can be achieved by pulling data from the right sources and generating documents in real time. 

In terms of implementation lessons: make sure you identify your workflow very clearly, including the upstream and downstream systems and where handovers happen. You don't want to automate something by breaking something else. Define the system architecture clearly — whether it's CRM data, billing data, or case master data. And define clear governance rules: who will do what. You don't want multiple versions circulating through the system, because that will eventually take you back to the same problem you were trying to fix. 

Jamison Reitinger: That's great, Karan. Whether it's four to six hours for a single sales rep every quarter for a QBR, or thousands of documents for a government employee who needs a clean audit trail — these are all great examples of how companies are answering the question: how do we do more with fewer resources? 

EVALUATING THE MARKET: WHAT TO LOOK FOR 

Jamison Reitinger: When you're evaluating document automation, the question isn't which tool is cheapest. The question is which tool can actually handle all of this. 

When you lay out the real requirements — receive data from anywhere, generate any document type, deliver it anywhere, seamless e-signature functionality, integration across platforms, solutions that elevate your brand — these are table stakes. The most foundational requirements you should want in a vendor. And when you look at which vendor can actually do all of these, a lot of them start dropping off the list. 

There is one solution built from the ground up to handle all of this, and that solution is Conga. Two products sit at the heart of what we've been discussing. Conga Composer is your engine for business-critical document generation — not just a template tool, but a sophisticated automation platform that pulls live data from Salesforce, your CRM, wherever your data lives, and generates polished, accurate, compliant documents at scale. Quotes, contracts, invoices, proposals, statements — generated automatically, consistently, and correctly. 

And then you have CongaSign closing the loop. Once your document is generated, CongaSign delivers it for e-signature — embedded natively into your workflow, trackable in real time, and fully compliant. No switching between platforms, no copy-paste, no waiting. 

Together, they cover the entire lifecycle of a business-critical document, from creation to signature to storage. The workflows you've been running manually — they run themselves. The documents your team has been assembling by hand — they generate in seconds. The signatures that were being chased down over email for days — completed on the customer's timeline, on their device, at their convenience. 

It's not about the document. It's about the process. The document is just how the process becomes real. When you automate that process — when you make it seamless and fast and self-service — everything downstream gets better. Revenue moves faster, risk goes down, and customer satisfaction goes up. 

IMPLEMENTATION: TIMELINE & BEST PRACTICES 

Karan Bhadiadra: With document automation, just because it solves complex problems doesn't mean it's complex to implement — most of the complexity is managed by the flexibility of the tool itself. 

To give you real numbers: setting up a single CongaSign instance could be done in a day or two. Setting up a standard template for document automation could be done in a week. For more complex environments — multi-system data sources, regulated industries with heavy governance requirements — that's where you'd want to involve experts who bring tried-and-tested approaches to design, integration patterns, and template structure to ensure it's done right the first time. 

Even for complex projects, for medium to high complexity you can get into testing in about a month and be production-ready in two months. 

A few tips if you're building this yourself: design your templates in a modular way so you can reuse headers, table content, and clause libraries — that makes any new template far faster to build and maintain. And identify who will be the primary owner of the templates. The last thing you want is many people updating the master template and ending up with a sea of versions where users don't know which one to use. 

Jamison Reitinger: Implementation is often a lot faster than people would expect, and there are resources like Karan and Pink Samurais available to help you build for the future. 

ADDITIONAL USE CASES BY DEPARTMENT 

Karan Bhadiadra: On the sales side, document automation starts much earlier in the sales cycle than most people think. Imagine a salesperson searching through a sea of templates to find the latest marketing and legal-approved document. With an automation system, they click a button and the latest approved version is ready — fast and error-free. 

For legal, whether it's NDAs, MSAs, or any contract, I've seen documents from one page to 50 or 100 pages running smoothly through automation. 

For finance, the major use case is bulk generation of invoices and purchase orders, all with full governance controls and audit trails so nothing goes out without prior approvals. 

For HR — offer letters, policy documents, benefits materials — all handled through automation. 

And for RevOps, tied to both sales and finance, you can automate your renewals and generate your quarterly or monthly business reviews systematically. These use cases stretch across every department in an organization. 

Jamison Reitinger: That's great, Karan. It really shows how documents are the backbone of the business — how revenue happens, how growth happens — and how that stretches across multiple departments. 

CUSTOMER STORY: CALIXIA 

Jamison Reitinger: Kalixia, a company managing thousands of highly complex contracts, came to Conga with a painful situation. Their documents were 15 pages each, loaded with variation, and retrieving just 7,000 contracts was taking 5 full days. Their internal goal was 24 hours — they weren't close. Late contract delivery was triggering penalties, and their existing templates were complex enough that any migration felt like a massive lift. 

Here's what happened after they moved to Conga Composer and the Conga Advantage platform. What used to take three and a half days to generate now takes only 45 minutes — a 99% reduction in document generation time, roughly 160 times faster. The penalties stopped, their error management improved, and their templates migrated as-is, which meant they didn't have to rebuild everything from scratch. In their CTO's words, the migration was incredibly fast and had no issues. 

That's what we mean when we say Conga is built for business-critical documents — not just faster, but fundamentally better across time, accuracy, compliance, and control. 

WHO SHOULD BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION 

Jamison Reitinger: One of the questions I get most often is, who in my organization should actually be part of this conversation? More people than you might expect. Document automation isn't just an IT project or a sales ops initiative — it touches almost every function in the business. 

IT leaders are usually the ones who have to live with whatever gets implemented. Their big concerns are vendor sprawl and integration. Conga connects via API, which means it fits into your existing stack rather than replacing it. RevOps owns the quote-to-close motion, and document bottlenecks are one of the most common reasons deals stall. Legal needs clause libraries, approval workflows, and audit trails — not as a nice-to-have, but as a compliance requirement. Procurement is often dealing with purchase orders and contracts across multiple geographies, languages, and legal frameworks. And sales wants branded, error-free proposals in minutes — not an hour, not a day, minutes. 

Conga speaks to all of them, because it was built to solve across the entire document lifecycle, not just one piece of it. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS 

Jamison Reitinger: A few key takeaways from today. 

First, your documents are not administrative overhead — they're your revenue engine. Every contract, proposal, invoice, and agreement is a moment where your business either moves forward or slows down. Viewing document automation as a strategic investment, not a line item, is the mindset that separates the companies growing right now from the ones that are struggling. 

Second, the "do more with less" mandate is very real and it's not going anywhere. The businesses winning today aren't working harder — they're working with better systems. 

Third, your customers already expect self-service, and every day of friction costs you. When your document processes can't match the consumer bar of instant, digital, on demand, you feel it in your satisfaction scores and deal velocity. 

And fourth, not all document automation platforms are created equal. When you evaluate your options against the full picture — complexity, compliance, integration, self-service, e-signatures, scale — the list gets short fast. Conga is the only platform built to handle all of it, end-to-end, for businesses with real complexity and real stakes.

Q&A

Tara Porter: How do you keep an audit trail intact when a document gets changed mid-signature?

Karan Bhadiadra: With Conga, if it's a contract document using a combination of Conga CLM and Composer, every change is tracked and captured within the system in what's called a clause library. If it's a non-contract document, all versions are still tracked within the system, so you have a full audit of everything that was changed throughout the document lifecycle — both before and after signature.

Tara Porter: For the caseworker usecase involving hundreds of thousands of documents, how does Conga handle batch generation without hitting Salesforce governor limits — like heap size or daily API request limits?

Karan Bhadiadra: Conga has what it calls Platform, which operates completely off Salesforce. All heavy bulk generation is done off-platform, which allows you to bypass Salesforce governor limits entirely. That's exactly how we support large-volume generation.

Jamison Reitinger: One thing I'd add — by using Conga's API, you're also able to bypass some of those limits even while staying within the Salesforce ecosystem. I'd recommend reaching out after this webinar so we can connect you with the right person on our team to go through the specifics of your environment.

Tara Porter: We're a Salesforce shop with a small development team. Realistically, how much of this can we build and maintain ourselves?

Karan Bhadiadra: For both the education and QBR clients I mentioned, after an initial build of about five to six weeks, their IT teams were able to maintain the system fully on their own. Once you understand the framework and the initial structure is in place, making changes or adding new templates is very manageable.

Tara Porter: How are templates governed across a multi-sandbox Salesforce architecture? Can Conga templates and queries be deployed through standard CI/CD pipelines like Gearset or Azure DevOps, or do they have to be migrated manually?

Karan Bhadiadra: Conga has what it calls a Migration Manager, which helps you migrate templates while maintaining the corresponding org references so that your IDs are not broken. Conga gives you the full toolset to link into your pipeline, and you use that tool to ensure IDs remain intact through the migration.

Tara Porter: How do you keep clause and template control when legal wants standardization but the business needs exceptions?

Karan Bhadiadra: That's a very common situation — legal wants control, sales wants flexibility. You define a set of approved clauses in a clause library that legal has signed off on. Legal can also pre-approve alternative clauses within the platform. So instead of a clause saying "30-day payment terms," you might have a pre-approved alternative of "45-day payment terms" that the system can offer without requiring a new approval cycle each time. The third level of control is approvals — if a clause is redlined beyond the standard and alternative options, approvals are automatically triggered. The tool provides flexibility while maintaining full audit and control.

Tara Porter: How do we all see AI changing customer self-service and document generation experiences over the next few years?

Jamison Reitinger: A few years is a long time when it comes to AI. One thing I find really exciting is the ability for non-technical users to build workflows they might not otherwise be able to without technical support. You describe what you want to accomplish and the AI generates the code or the process, so a non-developer can plug and play that into their workflows without bogging down the IT or engineering team. That's personally one of the most exciting things I've seen.

Karan Bhadiadra: I see it happening in three waves. The first is what we all know — templates with merge fields that pull data and allow you to generate documents faster. The second wave is AI as most of us use it now — whether it's Anthropic or GPT — helping you summarize a document or create a first draft quickly based on a few queries and data points. The third wave is agentic AI: based on your workflow, the system knows when it's time to create a proposal, goes out and pulls the data, and generates the document automatically. Having said that, all of this requires a very clear layer of audit and governance. The right sequence is: first establish your clause definitions and document structure, then let AI feed on that foundation to generate documents faster.

Tara Porter: How does Conga maintain the integrity of the audit history when a template or clause framework is updated? Is the log stored within Salesforce custom object records, or tracked via an off-platform ledger?

Karan Bhadiadra: The master data is maintained in Salesforce custom objects. We handle this at two levels. If a template is being maintained by the business, changes are made in production but not activated until they've been tested using an inactive version — the full audit trail of the master data is maintained in Salesforce. If you're doing sandbox-to-production migration, then your audit trail lives in your CI/CD pipeline. We recommend that approach so you have data available at both levels and nothing is lost in the gaps.

CLOSING

Tara Porter: That wraps up our Q&A. If you have more questions, we're happy to set up a demo and talk through your specific use cases. You'll find links to both Conga and Pink Samurais in the resources section. Jamison and Karan, thank you so much for being with us today.

Karan Bhadiadra: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Jamison Reitinger: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Tara Porter: Everyone, we hope to be in touch soon. Thanks for joining, and have a wonderful day.