Conference Recap  ·  March 2026

I attended Conga Connect 2026 in Orlando, and it was good to see Dave Osborne again. When we met at the previous Conga Connect, he had just taken over as Chief Executive Officer. Watching him now, there is a clarity of direction that was still forming then. The conference itself had genuine energy — and it opened with a statement.

Celia kicked off the conference and during her talk launched the 2026 State of Commercial Operations research study at the conference, presenting findings from a survey of more than 1,200 commerce and contracting decision-makers globally. She shared that she previously spent three years as the CMO of PROS, and described the combination of Conga and PROS as “coming home a little bit.” That personal context gave the platform vision more human weight.

Dave Osborne during his keynote a brand refresh from the main stage. When your CEO opens a customer conference with a rebrand reveal, you are signalling how seriously the company takes its commercial positioning. It was a deliberate, confident move. What made it even more impressive was what happened next: Celia Fleischaker and her marketing team executed the brand change live during the conference — the new identity rolled out progressively as the event unfolded. That is a feat of planning and nerve that most marketing organisations would not attempt. It sent a clear message about how seriously Conga takes brand as a business discipline.

Amberly Dressler, who joined as head of Corporate Marketing four months ago, and Sarah Hoffman, now heading analyst relations after coming from PROS, rounded out a leadership team that felt genuinely coordinated rather than assembled. Amberly noted that roadshows are coming — with practical, market-specific guidance for customers across several regions. Rohit Chhabra brought real humour to a technical stage, which is harder to pull off than it looks.

The Four-Pillar Story

The product vision is built around four pillars: Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), Pricing Optimisation, Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), and Document Automation. All four sit along what Conga calls the Commerce Chain, positioned between CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning). The artificial intelligence layer is called AiMe, with personas mapped to Sales, Legal, Admin, Revenue Operations, and a general-purpose role called AiMe for You.

The ambition is a coherent, end-to-end commercial operating system rather than a collection of point solutions. That is not a modest claim, but Conga’s own research gives it grounding. Their 2026 State of Commercial Operations survey of more than 1,200 commerce and contracting decision-makers found that 55 per cent of organisations have only partially integrated their pricing, quoting, CLM, and billing systems. Only 34 per cent are confident their data is consistent and accurate enough to support AI at scale. These are not vendor-manufactured problems — they are the daily friction that sales, finance, legal, and procurement leaders recognise immediately.

The Cross-Sell Challenge Nobody Said Out Loud

Here is the observation I kept returning to during the sessions. Conga has a deeply entrenched enterprise installed base, and that is genuinely valuable. Satisfied customers in CLM or Document Automation trust the vendor. But the team managing contracts is not the same team managing pricing. The people who configure quotes are not the people reviewing renewal clauses. Each pillar has a different buyer, a different budget owner, a different set of success metrics, and a different reason to say yes — or no.

Expanding across all four pillars is not a product problem. It is a buying-motion problem. You cannot send a CLM account manager into a pricing conversation and expect the same playbook to work.

Lisa Martin, who joined as Chief Revenue Officer in November, seems to understand this acutely. Her framing — “you cannot sell your way out of a leaky bucket” — was the sharpest line of the conference (She was referring to the industry metrics and not to Conga) . She identified Net Retention Revenue (NRR) as the golden metric for Conga, and has created a dedicated client director role focused purely on retention and expansion within the existing installed base. That structural decision tells you Conga knows that cross-sell requires a fundamentally different motion than new logo acquisition.

Three pillars of her strategy stood out: a customer-first focus on retention and expansion, heavy investment in a digital customer success motion serving both large and long-tail accounts, and intentional partner alignment around vertical-specific use cases rather than generic platform messaging.

The PROS Synergy as a Beachhead

The PROS acquisition gives Conga a logical first cross-sell path: placing PROS pricing optimisation on top of existing Conga CPQ customers. That is the same buyer neighbourhood, an adjacent workflow, and a natural extension of an existing relationship. Lisa noted that early results from the first combined quarter showed strong interest in selling document automation and CLM into the PROS customer base as well — which suggests the motion works in both directions.

That is a credible beachhead. The test is whether Conga can build the vertical use cases, partner alignment, and persona-specific narratives needed to extend that motion across all four pillars inside a single enterprise account — without losing the thread as it moves from one buyer to the next.

The Analyst View

The Commerce Chain vision is coherent and the market problem is real. For technology leaders evaluating their quote-to-cash architecture, the key question is not whether Conga’s platform covers the right ground — it does — but whether your organisation has the cross-functional alignment to adopt it as a platform rather than a series of individual tool purchases. The same fragmentation that Conga’s research identifies in the market also exists inside the buying committee.

The community dimension Celia described — customers and peers generating product ideas together — is the kind of ecosystem signal that matters for long-term stickiness. A connected community is, in a sense, the fifth pillar.

Shashi Bellamkonda is a Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, covering marketing technology, collaboration platforms, customer experience, and artificial intelligence. He attended Conga Connect 2026 in Orlando as an industry analyst.