Save time wasted by copying and pasting information from Salesforce into documents by automatically pulling the information straight from Salesforce records, merging it into templates, and presenting your users with final documents almost instantly.
Highlights
- Bring your Salesforce data to life: Generate documents that use your Salesforce data using templates, streamlining your internal user’s document generation experience.
- Goodbye, copy-and-paste: Save your business a significant amount of time and error by skipping the manual effort and automating document generation.
- Truly robust workflows: Advanced features allow you to engage with your customers and partners in unique ways by integrating with powerful tools.
- Create memorable experiences for your customers: Gain a competitive edge in your industry by creating unmatched experiences.
Conga Composer is an all-in-one document generation solution for Salesforce. You can easily convert your existing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or even PDF templates to work with Conga, which is embedded seamlessly into your Salesforce environment.
Conga Composer has been a top AppExchange app for years, and it’s easy to see why. Designed specifically for Salesforce, it’s continually updated to leverage the platform’s advances. You can also leverage a breadth of resources such as product user groups, knowledge base articles, best practices, learning courses, and webinars, all available in the Conga Customer Community to make learning Conga Composer that much easier.
This in-depth review will dive into Conga Composer’s features, ideal use cases, setup efforts, and the potential impact that adding this app to your Salesforce stack could bring.
Features
Conga is an incredibly comprehensive application, requiring multiple bits of data from different objects inside your Salesforce org.
Composer works using Conga Solution records, which store all the information on that document template including the outputs, behaviors, data queries, and more.
Although building Conga Solutions by hand, piece by piece is possible; however, it’s not ideal. Fortunately, this is where Conga’s greatest strength shines.
Conga’s point-and-click builders allow you to administer the app with ease: Conga Solutions can be created quickly and simply using the Solution Builder (or Document Automation Wizard). No need to learn code when building out your Conga Queries (you can do it with the Query Builder), and if you need to code a template, you have the Template Builder.
Let’s start by looking at the user experience and interface.
Conga Lightning Component
Add the ‘Conga Document Generation’ Lightning component to any page so users can generate documents directly from the record. As you can see, it looks and feels like Lightning so users will take to it naturally.
The user doesn’t need to leave the page, boosting their productivity and making toggling between tabs a thing of the past.
You can add the component to any object (both standard and custom). Being Lightning-ready means it’s responsive and optimized for display on mobile devices and tablets. That’s one of Conga’s overriding priorities: to cater to users on the go.
From the component, users can access Conga email templates that are related to that document:
Select other options, including which related records to include, the output action (email or download), activity logging, and where to save a document copy.
Finally, users can preview the document within the frame, allowing them to toggle options if the document isn’t spot on:
Conga Email Templates
Creating email templates isn’t a groundbreaking idea, but check out what you can embed! An admin can create the email templates to include tables to display information clearly:
Real-time Document Insights
In March 2020, the Conga Composer team released Composer Advanced Features based on functionality in a similar Conga product, Collaborate.
This update to their Enterprise edition delivers a document via a link, removing any restrictions on file sizes sent in an attachment. This also allows for document tracking insights and real-time notifications of document engagement.
To get these insights, choose ‘create email and link.’ Once delivered, Conga reports metrics such as who viewed the document, the last time it was viewed, and more. This tracking is synced back to the Salesforce record and gives teams additional insight.
Conga Collaborate, their document generation product specifically for sales proposals, delivers real-time document collaboration with additional document engagement analysis. Collaborate delivers more than just a static document to the recipient. It’s a similar concept to Google Docs, where internal and external stakeholders can actively work together to create, modify, accept, and sign documents.
Conga Batch
Another win for user productivity! Conga Batch empowers users to send multiple documents simultaneously from a grid-like interface (Conga Grid).
These sends can be scheduled for a date in the future, for example, sending invoices out to all closed won opportunities, or scheduling a payment reminder at the end of the week for all late unpaid invoices:
Conga Trigger
Tie Conga Composer into Salesforce workflows. When criteria are met on a record, for example, an opportunity is Closed Won, it’ll trigger the document generation and output action.
A great plus point for admins – you can tie Composer into existing workflow processes that you would have spent hours planning and you can build new automation using the familiar workflow rule interface within Salesforce setup.
Conga Quick Start
Moving on to all that Conga Composer offers admins.
All your document generation information, including the template you’re populating, the queries you’re using to get data to use in the template, and any additional behavior parameters (save as PDF, run in background mode, automatically add to Files, etc.) are stored under a parent Conga Solution record. Below is an example of a Conga Solution record, including child records.
As a new admin, the Quick Start feature is the best place to start. If this is your first time using Conga Composer, you may want to use one of the pre-built solutions available to you to wrap your head around Composer by seeing how it works.
Access this via the Conga Quick Start tab (available with the Conga Composer Lightning app):
Then, to access Quick Start, you’ll want to visit the one on the left:
Select from four pre-built Solutions that are available to you. There are three Word Solutions and one Excel. Let’s look at the Account Brief Solution:
Once you’ve added the button to your page layouts, you can click to open Composer.
You’ll see a preview of the Account Brief Template with the settings pre-selected, so all you need to do is click ‘Merge & Download’:
After your PDF downloads, you’ll see that it’s pulled in some high-level information about your Account and the Contacts that relate to the Account.
Document Automation Wizard
Next up is the Document Automation Wizard. This is where you can get up and running with your own customized solution – fast. Launch the Document Automation Wizard from the same place as Conga Quick Start:
Here, add your Conga Template, select Conga Queries to pull data into the template, and assign behavior parameters to your Solution such as the ability to save to PDF, attach to Files, or run in Background Mode. You can see from the path in the image below that this is a truly guided setup:
Now that you understand how Conga works and what it can do, let’s look at how to build templates for Conga.
Template Builder
The Template Builder makes it super easy to convert your existing business templates into tagged Conga Templates from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF formats.
Inside the Template Builder, you’ll see a list of available records and fields pulled from some standard information (that Conga pulls in as default each time), or your own custom Queries, which we’ll visit in the next section.
Note: ‘Contacts’ in the image above is a custom-built Conga Query.
To add a field to a Template, select it from the panel on the left and add it to the panel on the right. In the screenshot below, you’ll notice that the Contacts fields have some red text appear on either side – TableStart and TableEnd. This is because there are multiple records associated with the contacts dataset, and Conga needs to handle these individually during document generation.
Query Builder
Conga Queries allow users to run a Solution on a record and dynamically pull data from relevant records to build the document. Conga’s Query Builder makes it possible to build SOQL-based Conga Query records without having to write the code. It uses these Queries to get data from Salesforce to insert into your document template.
Below is a screenshot of an example Conga Query record.
From the Query Builder, you can select the fields to use in your Conga Solution. These are the fields you want to populate into your template document when Conga runs. For the Contact, in this example, I’ve chosen the Full Name, Title, and Mobile Phone fields.
These Queries will pull data from your Salesforce database to be populated into your Templates.
External Data Sources
In addition to any Salesforce org data, it’s also possible to query data from an external source such as an integrated ERP, accounting system, or another CRM. Conga leverages the OData Service to connect to external data sources beyond your Salesforce org.
Once you’ve connected to an external data source, you can create a Composer OData query to gather your data through an OData Endpoint. This is super handy if you’ve got multiple databases that you need to reference when creating documents.
Note: this is available for Conga Enterprise customers.
Use Cases
Sales
Proposals and quotes are a standard part of B2B sales, and building them can be a nightmare. Human error runs rampant, and minor changes can take days. Not with Conga! Contracts can pull information from relevant Salesforce records and build standard contracts in just seconds, speeding up your sales cycle and eliminating salesperson frustration.
Finance
As we saw with Conga Batch, sending out invoices in mass is a productivity win for finance teams who are processing multiple clients.
Marketing
Having standard brochure templates is outdated. Instead, marketers could populate one-pagers and other collateral for each prospect according to their interests. If product or campaign messaging changes, the updates can be made in one place (the Template Builder) and reflected in all collateral generated going forward. Think how powerful it is for the marketing team to put this into the hands of business development teams.
Setup
Conga has worked hard to develop a thorough documentation library for their products, including Composer.
As we’ve already seen, Composer suits admins at any level in their Conga learning – from Quick Start Solutions and the Document Automation Wizard for newcomers to Query Builder and Template Builder. All offer robust functionality to those who’ve mastered Composer.
To summarize: you can get Conga Composer up and running quickly for your users, offering them an intuitive interface for sending documents (the ‘Conga Document Generation’ Lightning component).
Pricing
Rather than trying to wedge every business into the same cookie-cutting pricing, Conga Composer’s pricing is customized for each business individually according to their needs. They’ll work closely with your team to identify your functional needs within the Composer tool and pull together a personalized quote that gives you all that you need at a price that’ll work well for your business.
If you’re curious about the costs associated with Conga Composer, you can reach out to the team via the Pricing page on their website.
Summary
Conga Composer is available from the AppExchange, plus you can download a trial free of charge for your org. As always, it’s best to test apps in a Sandbox or Developer Org first. To find out about Conga’s pricing, contact a team member directly. Finally, register for the Conga Customer Community for exclusive access to important content and learning materials.
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