Conga Composer vs. Qvidian RFP & Proposal Automation

From my experience, Conga Composer is particularly well-suited for generating documents, such as quotes and contracts, directly from Salesforce. It saves us a great deal of time, which is remarkably beneficial for companies with sales teams. Not suitable for companies lacking significant Salesforce expertise or administrative support.

Incentivized

Functionality and support are my two main areas. I want to be able to speak to someone when I have an issue. To Quvidian's defense, my company didn't see the value in sending someone to NH for the training. I'd used an RFP machine before so they thought that was sufficient. It was a poor decision on the company's part because although it was similar, it was not the same.

• It allows us to generate multiple documents at once using batch generation. This simple automation saves a lot of time for our team.
• Its very user friendly. Even a newbie can simply generate document by clicking a button once this is setup by the admin.
• Integrate Conga Sign with Conga Composer and it will automatically sent for e- signature once generated saving lot of time. we previously had to wait a lot for the signature.

Incentivized

• The search function ranks information based upon usage and is adaptive, learning/improving rankings with every search. This makes finding the right piece of information quick and easy.
• The tool offers flexibility to build various types of sales documents (proposals, presentations, case studies). This drastically reduces the time it takes to put together a client-facing document.
• The content management functionality allows for various content formats and related content can be connected. This simplifies tracking content updates by knowing which other pieces of information may also need review and update when a change is made outside the normal update cycle.

• Not very intuitive. Once you know the system it's fine but there is a learning curve
• I would like to see training opportunities on features that I am not using or aware of
• I am sure I am only using about 3% of it's full potential

Incentivized

• This is a weird one but when adding content to the 'Q' the tab in word sometimes disappears. Not sure why that happens and we haven't really tried to trouble shoot yet. My solution at the moment is just closing it and re-opening it. Sometimes it works and sometimes I have to do it a few times.
• While being a great place to keep content for our team to access, there is always the thought of whether the information is still accurate. Especially when comes to statistics and facts. We at times get so used to just using what is in our boilerplate that we forget to question whether information is accurate or not. This is more of an observation for users rather than an issue with 'Q' however the information is only as good as it's accuracy.

We most likely will renew conga because of it's strong salesforce integration and we're so engrained into it with all of our different brands and products/services. It would take a lot of time, money and resources to switch to something else.

Incentivized

We've already renewed our contract with Qvidian and plan on using it for the foreseeable future. Apart from the fact that Qvidian has all the features we need to respond to RFPs and maintain a large informational database, the time that would need to be spent researching and testing out a different piece of software just wouldn't be worth it. All of our users are well learned in Qvidian, and it's easy to teach to new users. Having to learn a brand new application when the current one works great is pointless. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here.

It's a fairly simple tool to integrate into your current business structure. When we've had issues, we were able to resolve them extremely quickly. The users click a button and it can bring in all the quote lines, and our credit application seamlessly into our tool. I'd definitely recommend it to other colleagues

Incentivized

The shift they made in architecting documents from content to outline, is now reversed allowing outline creation first, then content which is more natural. But, due to the fact that we went through a migration of content to get to the new version, it feels less optimized than if we would have re-implemented.

End users having to configure settings more often than desired

It was available, it just didn't always work depending on what glitches were happening within our app

Incentivized

Qvidian system maintenance is performed on weekends, usually at odd hours, and advanced notice is given so that teams can plan accordingly.

This product appears to work well. It was not a fit for us this time, but we would consider in future

Remote or VPN employees seem to have somewhat slower access time. Server maintenance has improved performance.

Finding occasional recurring prompts to update settings in Microsoft (Explorer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

As a conga parter we have created more than 50+ cases with conga support and many times we have got the answers on the chat support itself. A very effective knowledge base and conga university give you all the study material to enhance your product knowledge. Conga support has been very effective and has always responded quickly to questions and issues

Incentivized

They are very much in support of great customer service. They respond quickly with emails and in some cases phone calls to resolve any issues and often times user questions in the past when I could not figure something out.

Incentivized

Live instructor training is expensive, though we have had instructors come to our offices for a ‘refresher’ before. The refresher was more of a “let us fix that for you” than a training on how to do it ourselves.

Online training is limited in my opinion.

It was painful internally to build out all of the templates, but the actual implementation of the product was okay.

Incentivized

IT works great. UPgrades are handled automatically. I was not involved in setup but I know they are there when we need them

Incentivized

We have not been able to find an offering that allowed for the level of customization or could handle the complexity of the solutions we've built using Conga's products. We selected Conga originally as it was recommended at the time (2012) and there weren't any better alternatives - but we have looked recently and still can't find anything better.

Incentivized

Of the competitive vendor demos I have reviewed over the years, each may have its own strength. Some may be set up to drive compelling differentiators or solutions (E.g., propLIBRARY.com). Some may be built on existing CRMs (E.g., Qorus). Some may have tablet-friendly interfaces (E.g., SAVO). Others focus on collaboration (E.g., XaitPorter). There is nothing wrong with any of these models. You will just have to perform your own gap analysis and see what best addresses your needs. For Blackboard Inc., none of the aforementioned competition offered a holistic and robust replacement for our current PA tool. We have senior writers to craft compelling differentiators. We use SFDC, not SharePoint as our EA CRM. While our strategic writing and architectural needs outweigh having the slickest tablet-friendly user interface, we still have an interface and user experience that is geared toward usability and performance while being cognizant of adoption. New collaborative tools are a big draw, especially when responding to private sector proposals with a 10-to-20 day turnaround. However, not only has this not been a pain point for us (we currently have a versioning process in place) but the conversion and adoption hurdles just for one feature where there is already a workaround in place does not justify the migration.

We used it for something simple and it was still a pain to use

Incentivized

• We have been able to standardize our branding in documents to give them a more professional appearance.
• The number of manual errors is significantly reduced, thereby improving our turnaround time by 30%.
• Our overall working efficiency has improved by over 70% with the introduction of Conga Composer.

Incentivized

• Our experience has been largely positive. It's allowed our RFP team to quickly and efficiently produce very professional documents. This has lead to more time being able to speak to the clients needs specifically. We've received lots of positive feedback from clients saying that the RFP looked tailored to them, and not just some content dumped in a binder. That was our goal.