Edmentum speeds up contract times from signature to fulfillment with Conga 

Edmentum is the leading provider of K-12 digital curriculum, assessments, and services to 43,000 schools in all 50 states and over 100 countries worldwide. They partner with educators to create instructional technology that is proven, easy-to-use, individualized, and aligned to state standards. 

Challenge 

As a provider of online learning programs, Edmentum’s customer base is largely made up of schools and districts. Many of their business transactions with these customers come in the form of purchase orders and contracts. Edmentum saw issues with receiving unsigned order forms or missing pages as well as purchase orders returned separately from the order form, which then had to be waited for or tracked down.  These issues caused a delay in time to close for their sales teams and a more manual process for operations.  A challenge for Edmentum’s legal team was not having customers sign the order form also acknowledging Edmentum’s Terms & Conditions.  Additionally, vendor contracts were saved in various places throughout the organization making it difficult to locate and review contracts early and from one central location.  By not having an official eSignature solution to unify their documents and streamline both the internal order process and the customer signature process, it took more steps to complete an order resulting in a longer time to close.  

Edmentum also ran into issues with contract visibility due to many of the manual processes the teams were using. They would often send orders or contracts out to the customer and lose sight of where it sat in the process or if the document was sent to another person to sign. This resulted in an elongated time to close, which created risk for the business to efficiently close their deals. 

Once orders were closed, the sales team struggled to generate list views and reports to show how they are tracking against their quotas within Salesforce, which Edmentum uses as their main customer relationship management (CRM) tool. While Salesforce is a powerful tool, there was often confusion on how to leverage supporting data easily across teams. 

Edmentum found themselves in need of a contract management system that was built on the Salesforce platform to simplify and accelerate the sales cycle. Ann Baker, Director of Business Systems at Edmentum, knew that if she could help eliminate many of these manual and time-consuming tasks for her, and other teams, they could then channel their energy and creativity into bringing new improvements and innovation to the organization. 

Solution 

One important factor that led to Edmentum’s decision to move forward with Conga was that the solutions they needed were built on the Force.com platform, allowing for a simple integration into their Salesforce CRM. “I’m thrilled to have something that makes Salesforce stickier. One of my goals is for it to be so sticky, that Salesforce is where staff want to work. Adding Conga Sign and Conga Contracts for Salesforce encourages our staff to become more proficient in Salesforce and efficient in their work,” says Baker. 

Knowing the importance of abundant communication and allowing time for change to take root, Baker opted for a phased approach to bring on each piece of their Conga solution. She knew that they needed to find a solution for their disjointed signature process first, so they started with Conga Sign. Edmentum recruited the help of Englhard Consulting for their implementation. Englhard was a critical partner in their successful rollout and adoption of their Conga products.  

Conga Sign provided Edmentum with some immediate relief for their sales team, with the ability to write back data directly into Salesforce, create audit trails for better visibility, and allow customers to easily reassign a signer. These Conga Sign features created a better experience for both employees and customers. 

 “Our customers are delighted with the new process! The fact that they can just sign and send it electronically, removing the tedious task of having to print, scan, and email back to us—is so much easier and more efficient. Our customers are serving children’s critical academic needs, and us being able to take any little task off their plate is a big help, especially in their busiest time of the year.”   

The Edmentum Order Process and Provisioning (OPP) team also benefited heavily from the addition of Conga Sign. Their new ability to write everything back into Salesforce gave this team significant time savings from their previous processes of needing to manually verify and populate these fields before. Now they are confident that everything is accurate from the audit record as they start fulfilling each order.  

In the next phase, Edmentum moved to implement Conga Contracts for Salesforce for their procurement and legal teams. Contracts for Salesforce allowed Edmentum to view and store all their vendor contracts in one place. With the help of the managed clauses feature, they gained a level of visibility and deeper insight into the details of their contracts they didn’t have previously. 

Edmentum’s continued rollout of Conga products brought them next to Conga Composer, which they used to help simplify and unify their document generation approach by creating one master template. Now as brand updates or contract changes are made, they can easily update one master template. Branding and formatting remain cohesive and consistent throughout all their contracts without having to track down and maintain 10 different templates.  

Edmentum also used Composer and Sign to create a custom button to help solve a challenge around securing purchase order (PO) requests. Despite having the option available to attach the PO to the Order Form sent with Conga Sign, it was common for these to be forgotten or not ready or available to the signer. Creating a PO Request button allowed the sales team to simply click to send a request to the customer for the missing PO. When they replied with the PO, the information was written back directly to Salesforce, eliminating the timely process of sales and OPP having to chase down the information manually. 

Looking ahead, Edmentum plans to bring Conga Grid into the equation next. Baker's future vision is to use Grid to allow sales representatives to solve the reporting challenges they face currently in Salesforce by enabling them to accurately view their pipeline and where contracts are in the process all from one place. Baker said, “This is going to be an absolute game changer for sales and I'm excited to get started with Conga Grid.” 

With the addition of these Conga products, Edmentum was able to cut time to signature dramatically—what once took them three to four weeks now only takes one week or less, resulting in a 75% boost in efficiency. Baker hopes that the further integration of Conga’s solutions into a wider variety of teams will help relieve the manual, heavy processes that bog people down today.  

Business Outcomes 

• Contract cycle time reduced by 75% or more, from 3-4 weeks to 1 week or less. 
• Reducing the number of contract templates needed from 10 to 1 
• Reduced manual order fulfillment work required for multiple teams 
• Faster client signature turnaround times leading to decreased time to close deals 
• Discovery of manual processes that can be automated in the future