Revenue Operations vendor Clari announced Relationship Insights, its new Revenue Intelligence service.  Relationship Insights adds “visibility into all the buyers and sellers actively involved in sales pursuits.”  The new service helps revenue professionals assess the “true health of account relationships, more effectively manage their territories, and lead their teams in the new remote selling era.”

Relationship Insights ends the manual auditing of accounts by sales managers and interrogations of sales reps about customer and prospect relationships.  Relationship Insights lets them understand

• Who are we talking to?
• Are we single or multi-threaded at the account?
• When was the last time we interacted with the executive buyer?
• Have we engaged with the CFO?
• Do we have the right internal SMEs working on this account?

“Our data shows that deals over $250k require an average of 19 external stakeholders to close successfully,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne.  “With Relationship Insights, we’re providing total visibility to revenue teams so they can drive exceptional execution in their deals, accounts, and territories across their entire revenue process.”

Smaller deals require significant relationship building as well.  A Clari analysis of closed-won deals found that opportunities up to $50,000 required relationships with an average of seven external stakeholders.  Successful deals between $50,000 and $250,000 averaged ten relationships between the company and demand unit members at the closed opportunity.

“Buying groups are not only getting larger, [but] they’re also diverging in personal and organizational priorities. Sellers need to navigate this big group of influencers and decision-makers, including business line managers, IT practitioners, executives, and finance leaders.”

Hila Segal, Clari VP Product Marketing

Relationship Insights provides sales reps and sales management with a deeper understanding of the demand unit, letting them see all sales activities, including emails, meetings, and file exchanges.  This monitoring helps ensure that “all selling motions are multi-threaded.”

“An in-depth understanding of your customer relationship landscape is critical for building full buying consensus, reducing cycle time by uncovering potential blockers earlier, and increasing win-rate by getting multi-threaded (building relationships with multiple stakeholders) when your competition may have only relied on one or two contacts.”

Clari VP of Product Marketing Hila Segal

Clari Activity risk tracking identifies the risk of disengagement, providing reps the opportunity to re-engage before the deal goes south.  

“It’s not enough to see who is engaged. You need to understand the strength of the relationship over time—how many meetings did you have with a key individual, when was the last time you met with them, when is the next time you’re scheduled to connect, have they been responding to emails,” argued Segal.

Account auditing ensures that the primary personas and team members are engaged so that reps can run plays to broaden support.

Relationship intelligence also leverages the company’s varied skills and knowledge, so tracking who has been engaged on the selling side is critical.  Segal noted that successful enterprise sales “takes a village,” with many team members, including technical SMEs, product specialists, implementation consultants, and executive sponsors, helping close the biggest deals. “A clear understanding of key players in every account drives stronger account relationships resulting in more qualified pipeline, better win rates, faster cycles and more predictable revenue,” said Craig Rosenberg, Chief Analyst at TOPO.