Founded in 1880, Elsevier, part of RELX, is a global research publishing and information analytics provider, headquartered in Amsterdam and with offices worldwide in the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa. The company has grown significantly in recent years, expanding from its roots in research publishing – which includes more than 470,000 articles published in 2,500 journals annually – to delivering analytical solutions and digital tools that allow researchers to manage and share papers, discover new data and collaborate online.
With a number of acquisitions in recent years, Elsevier’s global quote to cash processes and workflows were becoming increasingly complicated. With contracts being created, negotiated and executed in different regional locations, Elsevier’s sales team was finding that complex and manual processes were leading to a number of roadblocks across the contract lifecycle, resulting in longer processing times and impacting the customer experience.
“The fragmented quote-to-cash process was resulting in version control issues, contract mistakes, long processing times and a lack of insight into contract status,” said Matt Cumberlidge, Head of Quote to Cash programme at Elsevier. “Our sales team would have to step outside the Salesforce CPQ system to complete their work, which was adding turnaround time to the contract lifecycle. This was ultimately impacting customer satisfaction and was being flagged as an issue in our surveys.”
With the tender process beginning in 2019, including a field of five companies and two rounds of selection, Elsevier chose Conga Contracts for Salesforce, due to its functionality, seamless user experience and compatibility with Salesforce.
Conga Contracts for Salesforce enables Elsevier to take control of its contract processes, enabling it to create, negotiate and execute contracts through automation. It enables the sales team to stay in Salesforce, so all contracting information stays accurate and up-to-date, and all actions get recorded. It also maintains an automated audit trail of changes and versions in Salesforce, even down to the individual clause level. Conga also removes the headache for legal teams, by ensuring the company is protected through supply language and clauses legal has already approved, so the sales team can concentrate on negotiating and executing contracts, while still remaining compliant with policies and procedures.
Since implementing Conga globally, Elsevier has reduced its contract creation time from days to hours.
Business outcomes
- Simplified creation, negotiation, and approval of contracts in Salesforce • Contract generation time has been reduced from days to hours
- Faster-time to revenue and freeing up the sales team’s time
“Our customers were at the forefront of our mind when selecting a technology solution. We wanted to get contracts into the hands of our customers within 24 hours – Conga has enabled us to achieve that goal.”
Matt Cumberlidge, Head of Quote to Cash programme at Elsevier