Who doesn’t love spending half a day drafting a sales-account forecast? Getting all the data together and rendering it with visuals can require a lot of tedious work with a handful of tools. One company found an application in Salesforce.com Inc.’s AppExchange that drastically cut the time it takes with the click of a button.

“I worked at Salesforce for about six years before I came to Conga, and one of the things that we often saw was that salespeople will sometimes put their data in Salesforce,” said Will Spendlove (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing at AppExtremes LLC (dba Conga). “But what they actually don’t do a lot of times is leverage the data that’s inside there once it’s there.”

Conga Composer is the number one sales tool for Salesforce because it makes it simpler for people to do stuff with their data. Salespeople can automate the creation of reports from Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and other second-party sources with one click in Composer, Spendlove pointed out.

Spendlove and Suzan O’Leary (pictured, right), continuous improvement leader at Abiomed Inc., spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Conga Connect West event in San Francisco. They discussed Conga Composer’s time- and hassle-saving capabilities for salespeople. (* Disclosure below.)

Freeing salespeople from the salt mines

Abiomed is a medical-device company that produces the world’s smallest heart pump. Even after joining Salesforce in 2009, the company still had some business processes that resided outside of Salesforce, which could be cumbersome, according to O’Leary. Generating sales-account reports and forecasts was one of those tasks.

“I’m probably not joking if I would say, half a day on Friday, if you were a cardiology account manager, you would be trying to cobble this together in a PowerPoint and then turn them into the office,” she said.

Merging Excel data with Composer to quickly turn out visualized reports was Abiomed’s first use for the app, and it’s invented many more since, O’Leary added.

The best part is that this liberates salespeople from chores that contribute nothing to their productivity. “They have the relationships with their customers; they know how to win the deals; they know how to take all those conversations to the next level,” O’Leary stated.

What’s that have to do with crunching numbers and messing around with reports? “There’s no value in that. So you find great tools that take the data and put it in a button — and … game changed,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Conga Connect West event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Conga Connect West at Dreamforce 2018. Neither Conga, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE