Tag: Clari

Flash: Clari Acquires Groove

Revenue Platform vendor Clari announced the acquisition of Sales Engagement Platform Groove this morning.  The transaction is expected to close on August 21.  No deal details were released.

“This is the most transformative day of our history,” Clari CEO Andy Byrne told VentureBeat. “It’s a big acquisition for us.  When we started this company, our thesis was grounded in the belief that AI would revolutionize how businesses manage revenue. More specifically, our vision was to assist CEOs in answering the critical question of whether they would meet or miss revenue targets.  We aimed to offer a predictive solution to address the common issue of revenue leaks that many companies face. Our goal was to help them achieve what we call revenue precision.”

The courtship began two years ago when Clari customers began asking about Groove. Around the same time, Groove was implemented internally. The firms launched a Groove / Clari integration last year with a strong UVP.

The deal brings the firms closer to creating a full customer lifecycle platform, with Groove supporting Sales Engagement and Engagement Analytics alongside Clari’s Conversational Intelligence (Clari Copilot), Digital Sales Room, and Revenue Operations capabilities.  Clari will recommend sales actions that limit revenue leakage, which reps can execute in Groove without switching applications.  Groove engagement data will be fed back into Clari, helping identify deals at risk.

“Most CEOs have a tough time answering the most important question in business: ‘Will we meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  By bringing together Clari and Groove, revenue leaders can implement their revenue collaboration and governance strategy across all internal and external workflows, giving them full visibility and control over the company’s most important business process – Revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Clari’s vision is to “bring the entire revenue process into one unified platform so our clients can consolidate, simplify, [and] accelerate” their go-to-market.

According to Clari CMO Kyle Coleman, every CRO, CFO, and CEO he has spoken with over the last six months has emphasized the need to consolidate, simplify, and accelerate their revenue cycle.

“We’re really excited to be able to lean onto this macro trend of consolidation.  But it’s not just consolidating for the sake of saving money.  It’s consolidating for the sake of reducing complexity, simplifying, and improving your revenue results,” Coleman explained to GZ Consulting.  He is ”really confident” in the firm’s expanded capabilities and sees them as “exactly what revenue teams [want] right now.”

From 2013 until 2021, Clari focused on building revenue reporting and a revenue database (RevDB) with time series data.  Information is gathered from CRMs, emails, calendars, etc., with Groove soon feeding its activity data.  RevDB also ingests external data from data warehouses and Clari’s digital sales room functionality.  Data is stored and analyzed in RevDB with support for six products:

“Clari’s RevDB architecture has been a long-term investment by Clari and is the secret sauce that powers the company’s unmatched revenue AI (RevAI) capabilities,” stated Clari.  “With Groove added to the Clari portfolio, revenue teams will get real-time insights and suggested actions across every revenue workflow to create and convert more pipeline, while company leaders will be able to see every input, tie every activity to results, and precisely predict revenue outcomes.”

Clari with Groove brings together six product categories to serve the full revenue team.

“We’re augmenting the CRM with information that reps are never going to create manually.  And then we’re pulling that into our database to build our machine learning and AI models,” explained Coleman.

Last year, Clari acquired Conversational Sales Platform Wingman and added it to its deal monitoring and analytics workflows.  The integrated service was recently rebranded Clari Copilot.

“It expanded the workflows that we’re running for revenue teams, bringing call recordings into the flow of work,” remarked Coleman.  “You can actually hear and see what the customer is saying…Making CI less of a call recording solution for a call center and really more of a purpose-built solution for revenue teams.  While we’re doing that, we’re also adding this whole new dataset into the revenue database that makes us very capable for NLP and prescriptive AI…The RevAI capabilities we have made us capable of recording all these new AI use cases…We have all these different types of AI that we leverage across the platform.  We have the predictive components.  We have the generative components, and we have the natural language processing.  And we’re finding the right ways to expose that…in the flow of a rep’s work [and] in the flow of an executive’s work, so they’re actually getting the insight they need when they need it.”

Groove, already a Clari partner, allows sales reps to go from forecast and deal risk alerts to integrated actions, providing feedback loops and recommendations as a “closed loop of Insight and Action.”

When I spoke to the firms last year about their partnership, they presented an excellent joint value proposition presentation.  This messaging continued forward into their acquisition briefing.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the entire revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time by Clari, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track. 

When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove.  Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.

As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.  Groove activity will also begin feeding into Clari’s RevDB time-series activities and conversations database.

“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant.  “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue, is pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”

Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal.  And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it.  Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized.  Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” and governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.

“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on them?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

Clari customers benefit from a consolidated selling platform for prospecting and engagement.  The platform will turn insight into action, allowing sales reps to kick off a Groove Flow immediately.  They will also better understand “top-of-the-funnel effectiveness and tie it to down-funnel results.”

Clari customers “can use it [Groove] both to fill the funnel and execute the funnel, turning insights into action in real-time – closing that loop and knowing what’s happening at the top of the funnel.”  Revenue teams can tie activities to revenue results and “hone and change” their revenue process.

Groove customers also benefit from platform unification as they prioritize activities, simplify forecasting, and enjoy a better understanding of deal status.  They will leverage analytics that tie activity to revenue impact, thus improving outcome predictions.

Furthermore, leaders will receive “end-to-end visibility of the revenue process by connecting sales engagement with conversion.”

“The goal is to consolidate all revenue-critical technology for all revenue-critical employees,” stated Coleman.  While the focus is on supporting the revenue team, Clari is finding that other stakeholders, such as finance and product management, also benefit from the ability to track sales activity.

For antitrust reasons, Clari has not discussed pricing with Groove for the six products but expects to have it locked down by the end of the month.  Reps will be quickly trained on the combined offering, and a unified team will be at Dreamforce.

“We’re bringing all of our quota carriers together for a two-day super deep dive – everything you need to know about the Groove product [and] everything you need to know about the combined platform.  We don’t want our sales reps to show up uninformed when they take the first meetings, and we expect there to be a healthy amount of demand coming in for this combination,” explained Coleman.  “We’re on this path to be a truly multi-product company.  And part of that journey is creating a true co-sell playbook.  When does it make sense to sell the full platform?  When should it be Groove standalone?  When should it be Groove plus Copilot?”

“The ultimate goal from a Go-to-Market standpoint is to be the single revenue platform that’s used by all revenue employees,” continued Coleman.  “We feel really good about this vision that we have to be the most used platform.”

Clari already has $1.5 trillion in revenue under management and over 1,500 customers.

Groove co-founders Chris Rothstein and Austin Wang will join Clari and oversee the Groove product line’s strategy, product direction, and customer success.

“I’m incredibly excited about the power of combining Clari’s Revenue Platform with Groove’s best-in-class pipeline creation and conversion capabilities,” said Rothstein.  “Together, we will create more pipeline and enable sellers to act on opportunities with incredible speed and effectiveness.  Revenue teams are looking to win more, faster — and Groove and Clari are bringing the rocket fuel.”

The first stage of the Groove integration is planned for October.

“This acquisition will create a sense of urgency in the market that leads all key players to step up their focus to create their own version of a revenue orchestration platform,” opined Forrester Principal Analyst Seth Marrs.  “It’s a significant win for all companies looking to improve sales performance.”

“Consolidating to create a more comprehensive platform is the best option in this environment,” continued Marrs.  “Those that don’t, face the less appealing prospect of a down round or going out of business.”

“B2B sales tech buyers want to take advantage of AI for sales and simultaneously reduce complexity in their tech stack,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Dan Gottlieb.  “Clari with Groove now has the pieces to deliver a complete revenue hub with interconnected workflows and deep data integrations.”

Clari RevGPT

Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari announced Automatic Call Summaries to its Wingman Conversational Sales module.  The new RevGPT functionality, powered by ChatGPT, supports call summaries, next steps, and suggested actions in Slack in a conversational format.  Users can view the call or send follow-up emails from Slack.

Wingman already offers real-time cues and battle cards for overcoming objections during calls.  Furthermore, it alerts managers to “high-impact coaching moments that define deal outcomes, like pricing hurdles, competitor mentions, and more.”

“Are you going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  That’s the single most important question in business — and today’s introduction of RevGPT represents a quantum leap forward in helping companies get revenue answers.  By training generative AI to harness the industry-leading store of conversational intelligence and historical revenue data contained in RevDB, we’re giving revenue teams the ability to identify sources of revenue leak and take corrective action at scale and with extraordinary speed.  RevGPT will quickly become the indispensable guidance system that empowers every revenue-impacting employee to achieve more.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari’s database of revenue under management, RevGPT will enjoy a feedback loop that continuously improves Clari’s recommendations.  This “flywheel effect” will offer “better answers, better actions, better outcomes, and faster time to revenue.”  Future functionality includes “recommended prompts for every revenue-critical team — sales, revenue operations, customer success, marketing, finance, and leadership — enabling even greater productivity gains and revenue outcomes.”

RevGPT will soon recommend and automatically assist with follow-up actions, including drafting emails, scheduling meetings, updating CRM systems, and revising forecasts.

Wingman supports the following integrations:

  • Syncs with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive
  • Records, transcribes, analyzes/summarizes Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet
  • Alerts via Slack and Teams.  Alerts and guidance are also displayed in its desktop app.

“This is just the beginning of Clari’s RevGPT generative AI capabilities that are purpose-built to run revenue,” said the firm.  “And we’re not stopping here.  Soon you’ll be able to ask RevGPT to compose an email follow-up for you with just one click.”

Clari promises to address “revenue leaks,” including the difficulty of “combing through mountains of data buried in legacy systems — CRM software, spreadsheets, BI tools — to find, analyze, and take action on the information that can help them in revenue-critical moments.”  By combining RevGPT and RevDB, Clari reduces “time to answers and action,” resulting in greater revenue precision and reduced time performing revenue-based search and analysis.

Last year, Clari identified $26 billion in annual revenue leakage across its 550 customers.  Overall, the Boston Consulting Group estimates companies suffer $2 trillion in annual revenue leaks due to missed revenue capture, sales waste, and lost enterprise value.

Clari is offering thirty-day free trials to RevGPT, “ChatGPT’s cousin with a quota,” to revenue leaders.  The functionality is live.

Wingman pricing and packaging

Wingman offers three packages: Growth ($60/user/month), Accelerator ($90/user/month), and Enterprise (starting at $110/user/month), with the firm planning on including RevGPT in the Accelerator and Enterprise editions.

Clari acquired Wingman and its conversational sales capabilities last June.

Resources:

Clari Acquires and Integrates Wingman into its Revenue Intelligence Platform

In June, Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari acquired Conversational Intelligence vendor Wingman, bringing together two complementary SalesTech vendors.  Wingman provided Clari users with additional account intelligence derived from calls, meetings, and emails.  The goal was to provide “visibility plus action all the way from the boardroom to the bullpen,” said Wingman CEO Shruti Kapoor.

Clari recently announced that Wingman is fully integrated into its service.

“The acquisition of Wingman, a leader in conversation intelligence, gives Clari’s category-leading Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes,” announced Clari.  “Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters.”

“A major part of our strategic vision is conversation intelligence, which is why we’re thrilled to announce that Clari has acquired Wingman, a leader in CI.  This gives Clari’s Revenue Platform the unprecedented ability to analyze customer and employee conversation data, extract valuable AI-driven insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes.  The full value of conversation intelligence has never been fully realized, until now.  Clari helps your team move beyond siloed, departmental systems and processes that cause endless breakdowns across your revenue process and brings all revenue-critical employees into a unified platform to run revenue.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

“As we think about scaling our impact, it’s clear to us that we want to free up these insights for everyone who’s revenue-critical, from the bullpen to the boardroom,” blogged Kapoor.  “We want to give you the ability to switch between micro (every customer interaction) and macro (the entire revenue pipeline) as easily as toggling channels on television.”

Wingman battle cards are displayed in real-time.

Wingman records, transcribes, and tags calls, storing them in a searchable library by keyword, tag (e.g., Price, Customer Pain, Blockers), or competitor mentions.  Topics may be customized to capture competitors, product names, technologies, etc.  Reps can also set live bookmarks across all supported video platforms.

Wingman also offers real-time battle cards, a set of short suggestions displayed in context during a call.  New sales reps will be confident that they are providing accurate information consistent with company positioning.  Other real-time coaching tools include long monologue alerts, word rate notices, and time-based cue cards.

Wingman game tapes provide a reference library of training snippets.

Call summaries include questions, next steps, pain points, blockers, and topics of interest.  Post-call analytics include call duration, longest monologue, engaging questions that elicited a response from the prospect, and interactivity.

To assist with coaching, Wingman automatically identifies speakers and creates speech tracks, letting managers or reps focus on specific individuals.  It also offers a “game tapes” library for new hire training.  Game tapes provide a set of best-of-breed video samples for pricing, blockers, features, etc.

Wingman also offers Deal Central deal intelligence.  Deal Central identifies deal health risks such as the lack of a decision-maker or pricing not being discussed.  It is this engagement intelligence that will complement Clari’s revenue intelligence capabilities.

“We were looking at all of the signals that are important for…our customers to help them make better decisions in their revenue execution…We have had great success bringing in data from CRM systems, email systems, meeting information for calendars,” stated CTO Venkat Rangan.  “One thing that we also recognized was bringing in conversational data – conversational intelligence analysis of call recordings – whether it’s voice calls or Zoom meeting calls…was going to fundamentally change the quality of the signals we bring in.”

Sales reps can also share meetings or snippets with colleagues, providing access to the customer’s voice.  Reps can also share call URLs with prospects and know when prospects view them.

Wingman is integrated with

  • CRM: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive
  • SEP: Outreach, Salesloft
  • Conferencing: Zoom, Teams, Google Meet
  • Dialer: RingCentral, Dialpad, Fresh Caller, Aircall, FrontSpin
  • Other: Slack, Zapier
Wingman Pricing

Wingman’s monthly pricing starts at $60 per rep.  It has “no hidden setup costs, no minimum seat requirement, and no charges for sales managers & observers.”

In the summer of 2021, Wingman was named a Gartner “Cool Vendor” in the Conversational Intelligence category.

When acquired in June, Bengaluru-based Wingman had 57 employees (per LinkedIn) and had doubled its ARR over the previous six months.  It was founded in 2018 and claims to have over 200 customers.

“Clari’s acquisition of Wingman will help customers turn recorded conversations into a strategic asset for spotting revenue leak and driving revenue precision.  At a time when leaders are looking to unify their teams and their tech stacks, adding Wingman solidifies Clari’s position as the only enterprise platform for running the end-to-end revenue process,” boasted Byrne.  “Wingman’s conversation intelligence technology leads the market in real-time guidance and coaching capabilities, providing actionable insights when sellers need them most to help close deals faster.  Revenue leadership can scale teams, methodologies, and go-to-market strategies with confidence knowing that all team members will have the latest messaging and collateral at their fingertips, in every conversation.”

Rangan said that Wingman was a strong fit to Clari across multiple dimensions: technologies, market approach, and culture.

Kapoor noted that the combination allows for conversational analysis at all levels.  Users can Zoom into a single conversation and deal health, while managers and executives can zoom out to pipeline analytics, revenue forecasting, and deals at risk. 

Bringing the organizations together was the “best and fastest way to get there together,” argued Kapoor.

Initially, Rangan would like to focus Wingman enhancements on the emerging and commercial segments due to a strong alignment between Wingman and customer needs.  The Wingman roadmap also lays out steps to make Wingman mid-market and enterprise ready.  Longer-term, conversational intelligence signals will be fed from Wingman into Clari and “serve all of the revenue workflows” across the boardroom, senior management, front-line management, and sales reps.  Conversational intelligence will feed the forecasting and pipeline inspection processes.

Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, was bullish on the transaction, noting that Clari has “stayed away from deeper revenue intelligence capabilities that focus on interaction execution, preferring to aggregate that information from other tools and present it in Clari.”  However, he sees four reasons that the acquisition makes sense:

  1. Adding CI eliminates a key dependency – While Clari had access to 28% of interactions via email and calendaring, it relied on third parties to capture 45% of interactions via phone and web conferencing.
  2. It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
  3. Valuations have come back to Earth – Six months ago, this deal may not have made financial sense, but “with funding drying up, this is the perfect time for late-stage market leaders with large war chests to acquire technology companies at a reasonable price.”
  4. This new capability aligns with Clari’s stated strategy – Deal health analytics derived from unstructured conversations will augment Clari’s vision of “predictable revenue growth.”  It will also capture and analyze internal deal review calls and potentially update deal progress and commit status automatically.  While deal status CRM updates are not a current capability, Marrs has suggested a logical future capability.

Conversation Intelligence is one of several product categories that are being merged into SalesTech platform solutions.  Converging technologies include Meeting Management, Sales Engagement, Conversational Intelligence, Revenue Intelligence, and Digital Salesrooms.  Clari now offers three of these (it also supports digital sales rooms via its 2021 DealPoint acquisition).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Clari Optimize and Groove Partnership

Revenue Platform Clari made a trio of announcements related to a partnership with Sales Engagement Platform Groove, the full integration of conversational sales platform Wingman, and the pending release of its Optimize module for controlling revenue leaks.  Optimize helps revenue teams diagnose and address revenue leaks, reducing revenue loss due to deal slippage, bad data, and error-prone manual processes.

“The Clari Revenue Platform gives revenue leaders the past, present, and future data they need to not just control revenue but help grow it,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne.  “Only Clari provides the full historical picture and adds real-time capabilities to act fast as well as the forward-looking projections to proactively strategize revenue precision.”

Optimize offers a “single, centralized view” of revenue metrics, including win rates, forecast accuracy, and deal cycle times.  In addition, Optimize helps revenue leaders answer questions such as “How is my team trending this quarter?  Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?  How can I ensure my reps are doing the right things to produce predictably winning results?”

Clari argues that market leaders have been unable to answer these questions proactively, making it difficult to mitigate issues and risks.  Clari combines historical and external data to assist with revenue benchmarking.  Thus, Clari can reach beyond the CRM to gather account intelligence.  For example, it can look at usage data to assess churn risk.

“Optimize is all about finding revenue leaks so customers can see not just where and why they’re missing revenue, but what they can do about it. No other solution on the market has the ability to harness past time series data to provide a historical view of revenue leak.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Optimize, available soon, will provide a single view for the whole organization of revenue and insights, capturing CRM intelligence, activity data, and forecasts.  With the integration of Wingman, its recently acquired conversational intelligence subsidiary, the voice of the customer is fully embedded within Clari analytics and forecasts.

Furthermore, Wingman provides real-time coaching during sales calls, helping reps avoid mistakes and providing real-time intelligence (e.g., technical information, competitive battlecards) to sales reps.  By improving sales objection handling, parrying competitive attacks, and preventing delays due to technical follow-ups, Wingman also reduces revenue leakage.

“It’s not just about coaching your teams to sell more, or about deal reviews,” said Holly Procter, senior vice president and global head of sales at Clari.  “It’s more about running your revenue better—governing revenue-critical moments for success and collaboration across revenue-critical people, which includes buyers as well as sellers.  Nobody else offers this collaborative, real-time approach.”

The Clari + Groove Joint Value Proposition

Clari and Groove announced a partnership at Dreamforce that helps “joint customers run revenue with more precision, greater collaboration, and faster execution.”  Sales Engagement Platform Groove acts as a “system of action,” while Revenue Intelligence platform Clari acts as a “system of collaboration and governance.” Both platforms sync with Salesforce, which serves as the “system of record” for sales activity.

The partners argue that while revenue is at the heart of every business, CEOs struggle to get a handle on revenue and are uncertain about whether they will meet, beat, or miss revenue projections.

“Up to fifty percent of entire company employees are revenue critical.  They are responsible in some form or fashion for delivering revenue.” 

Clari SVP of Marketing Kyle Coleman explained to GZ Consulting

Revenue responsibility is broader than quota carriers and includes SDRs, CSMs, AMs, leadership, product managers, and engineers.  Unfortunately, “consistent, predictable execution and collaboration” across these employees remain “very challenging” due to the lack of a unified platform shared across all these roles.

“It’s also very difficult, therefore, to govern any sort of revenue process or sub-process in a repeatable way,” continued Coleman.  “What revenue leaders end up doing is every quarter, they’re trying to capture this lightning in a bottle to know whether they’re going to meet, beat or miss, but it’s sort of a scramble more often than not.”

With the Groove / Clari partnership, “we will be able to govern processes, we’ll be able to replicate the best practices, we’ll be able to do the right kind of real-time analysis that leads to action in a closed loop way so that we know that everything is happening as it should be when it should be,” argued Coleman.

A common issue for revenue teams is identifying revenue leaks and mitigating them.  Revenue leaks exist across the full revenue lifecycle.  For example, deal slippage is identified in real-time, allowing reps to take action via Groove to bring the deal back on track. 

When Clari identifies a deal slipping for competitive reasons, it can suggest a play be executed in Groove.  Likewise, Clari can identify sub-par win rates, overly generous discounting, and low conversion rates for early-stage opportunities.

As Groove is native to Salesforce, it records all activities in real-time, providing “full-funnel forecasting” and analytics to Salesforce and Clari.

“We can tie our campaigns through to revenue in Salesforce, and that is something that they (Groove’s competitors) cannot do,” argued Groove VP of Marketing Kristin Hersant.  “Then all of that rich data, tying engagement through to revenue is able to be pulled into Clari and used in the analysis, and that is available today.”

Coleman explained that while you can’t win a deal at any moment, you can certainly break a deal.  And once a deal is lost, “it’s very difficult to un-lose” it.  Thus, “if you don’t do the right thing at the right time – handle the right objection, or pull the right person in or do the right kind of follow-up” – the deal could be jeopardized.  Therefore, “handling revenue critical moments expertly and in a prescribed way” that is governed by best practices is critical in addressing revenue leaks.

“Having all of that insight into all these moments that exist and then having confidence that every one of your employees is going to be able to execute on this?  Well, this is what’s so exciting to us,” said Coleman.

“Clari has always been about providing companies with the collaboration and governance required to run revenue with maximum precision, and Groove completes the equation by enabling our joint customers to turn the insights we provide into action,” said Byrne.  “We’ve seen incredibly strong results from joint customers using our two platforms together, and this formal partnership will help us transform even more revenue organizations.”

Groove offers enterprise customers a Salesforce-native SEP that records all activity directly to Salesforce.

“Groove and Clari coming together is definitely a ‘1 + 1 = 3’ scenario for revenue leaders,” said Groove CEO Chris Rothstein.  “Bringing together Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance capabilities with Groove’s strength in sales execution and productivity provides the ultimate value proposition: See the future with Clari and then create that future with Groove.”

Company Links: Groove | Clari

Clari Acquires DealPoint

DealPoint Collaboration Flow

Revenue Intelligence platform Clari announced the acquisition of DealPoint.  DealPoint supports deal management and collaboration by enabling “new visibility for sales teams into the connections and agreements between buyers and sellers.” In addition, DealPoint supports deal rooms and Mutual Action Plans (MAPs), helping reduce friction between buyers and sellers and fostering deal alignment.

“With mutual action plans, sales teams can improve alignment with buyers, drive scalable process and rigor, and improve win rates,” said Clari CEO Andy Byrne. “Our acquisition of DealPoint gives Clari customers a new insight they have never had — a view into what buyers are thinking. Combined with our new execution insights, managers and reps will have comprehensive visibility and new inspection capabilities in one unified workspace.”

At the front end of the collaboration, workflow is deal qualification, including defining the pains, processes, and priorities. Next, the teams develop a joint interactive timeline, team maps, and shared team resources (e.g., case studies, requirements, proposals).  Finally, engagement metrics help reps quickly determine “which buyers are engaged, and who’s just kicking the tires.”

DealPoint monitors milestone completion and warns reps when milestones have been missed, helping keep deals on schedule.

“With a MAP, sellers get instant validation on value prop, buyer team, and timeline. Because both sides are operating from an actual plan, frontline managers can see not only what has been done on a deal, but also what hasn’t been done.

In other words, we know which buyers are serious, which deals are going to stall, and what needs to happen to keep everything running smoothly.

Incorporating those buyer signals gives Clari new insight into deal health that will revolutionize deal inspections, resource allocation, and forecast accuracy for frontline managers.”

Tom Williams, Head of DealPoint

Having a joint plan assists with buy-in, providing a psychological edge for the sales team.  “By providing a clear plan to value, you guide the customer journey and keep the conversation focused on fixing their problem with your product,” states DealPoint.  “Buyers adopt your plan as their own, edging out competitors and reducing surprises.”

Sales Managers also benefit from instituting a repeatable process.  According to DealPoint, 50% of reps quickly abandon new methodologies.  Thus, streamlining the methodology helps ensure buy-in and compliance.

Once integrated with Clari, managers will have even more confidence in forecasts based upon milestone tracking.  Additionally, managers can ask reps what needs to be done to bring the deal back on plan, and sales reps can ask similar questions to buyers, helping foster shared accountability.

Customer Success teams benefit from smooth handoffs and pre-defined expectations.

DealPoint argues that taking a set of small steps helps foster trust that reduces perceived buyer risk as milestones are met.  Likewise, collaborating on a joint plan helps build relationships between the revenue team and the buying committee.

DealPoint comes with the MEDDIC methodology out of the box, but users can implement others.

DealPoint is priced at $59 per rep per month on an annual contract.  Seats include an unlimited number of customers and Mutual Action Plans. In addition, DealPoint is integrated with Salesforce and HubSpot.

Deal Rooms are a logical extension of Revenue Intelligence as they facilitate communications between sales reps, customer success, and buyers.  Collaboration also aligns buyers and sellers, fosters collaboration, reduces the probability of surprises, improves forecast confidence, and gooses close rates.

The integrated Deal Room GA is scheduled for Q4.  Acquisition terms were not announced.

Clari Series E

Revenue Intelligence vendor Clari closed on a $150 million Series E that valued the firm at $1.6 billion.  The round more than triples its 2019 Series D valuation. The financing was led by Silver Lake with B Capital Group and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Madrona Ventures, Thomvest, and Tenaya Capital also participating.   To date, Clari has raised $285 million.

Clari will deploy the funds to accelerate product development, expand ecosystem partnerships, and drive global expansion.  It is planning on doubling its headcount to 600 by the end of this year.  San Francisco-based Clari is “hiring across all departments.”

The firm’s ability to predict revenue was crucial over the past year as firms scrambled to understand their pipeline and opportunities during the pandemic.  Platform usage doubled last year and executive time increased 50%.  The firm also saw deal updates increase 80% last year while pipeline and forecast revenue doubled.

Seventy percent of Clari’s new customers inked multi-year deals, and 60% of existing customers increased their seat counts or invested in additional product capabilities last year.

The round comes at a time when Gartner is bullish on the RevOpps segment.

“By 2025, Gartner predicts 75 percent of high-growth tech companies will use RevOps for end-to-end revenue production enabling hyperautomated sales and omnichannel customer engagement. RevOps is a holistic organizational model that aligns the company around three elements of centralized ops and processes, a communal shared-data layer, and a continuous customer engagement capability, all measured around revenue production.”

Alastair Woolcock, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.

“Today’s news is more than just the next phase in Clari’s evolution,” said CEO Andy Byrne. “It’s validation for the entire revenue operations movement.  It’s a call to every company and every leader working to manage revenue generation as a predictable process, one that can be controlled, automated, and optimized, like any other business process.”

Byrne did not disclose 2020 revenue but noted that it beat the original plan by 110%.

“That’s why we’ve had such great investor interest…[VCs] were hearing in the investment community about how transformative Clari has been…Giving companies what we call revenue confidence, being able to go and understand where you’re going to be and to accurately predict the impact the pandemic is going to have on your trajectory, good or bad,” Byrne explained.

With strong revenue momentum and a healthy valuation, an IPO may be in Clari’s future.

“I would say the answer is unequivocally yes, and we’re building toward this,” said Byrne. “We don’t have a time frame upon which we know where we’re going to go public, but the next goal is to get to the IPO starting line.”

Part II, which discusses Clari’s recent enhancements, posts tomorrow.

Clari Revenue Insights

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.”

“Buying Groups: The New Norm for B2B Sales,” Clari, December 3, 2020.  Based on Closed-Won Deals.

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.

Clearbit for Clari

B2B Marketing Data vendor Clearbit partnered with Revenue Operations Platform Clari to deliver enriched contacts into CRMs.  Clari identifies external contacts from emails and meeting activity, helping fill out the buying committee.  According to Clari, only 30% of sales-engaged contacts are entered into the CRM.  By automating the contact identification process, sales reps have a clearer view of the full demand unit, allowing them to target messaging by function and recognize potential gaps in their knowledge of the buying committee.

By expanding knowledge of the demand unit, Clari can identify the broader set of decision-makers and reduce deal risk through multi-threaded relationship building.  Relying on one or two contacts has multiple risks:

  • The sales rep may not be messaging to the full demand unit
  • Their point of contact may be sidelined or leave the firm
  • Multiple points of contact may be set up dealing with different vendors, each providing a siloed perspective on the deal.
  • Post-sale, if users and administrators weren’t involved in the decision, adoption rates might be low, leading to higher churn rates.
  • The project champion may depart before renewal, forcing the rep to scramble to re-establish relationships at renewal time.

The expanded knowledge also helps marketing teams identify the key personas involved in deals and customize content and messaging.

“Now all the contacts that showed up for a sales meeting, even the ones that were added to the invite by the prospect, are automatically associated with the opportunity without your rep needing to lift a finger.”

Clari Marketing Programs Manager Maggie Kullman

Clearbit enriches the contacts with title, job function, and level. Firmographic and technographic details are also appended.

“As budgets get tighter and operating plans are reworked, having your prospects’ finance team involved early on is critical to accelerating the deal toward close,” wrote Clari Marketing Programs Manager Maggie Kullman.  “With the combination of Clari, Clearbit, and a little bit of automation, you can trigger an update to an opportunity field any time a CFO gets added to a meeting with the sales rep.  Now you can easily track which of your deals are missing a critical decision-maker and take actions to drive that relationship.”

Demand Units are a term coined by SiriusDecisions a few years ago when they updated their Demand Waterfall model for B2B sales and marketing. Each opportunity is associated with a set of decision-makers (e.g. technical, financial, functional directors) and influencers (e.g. users, admins). Demand Unit discovery is still in the early stages of development, but looking at email headers, out of office messages, and meeting attendees is a promising approach for organically identifying buying committee members.

Clari Partners with SalesLoft

Clari is the latest vendor to join the SalesLoft app directory of over fifty partners.  Clari’s Connected Revenue Operations Platform “automatically tracks sales activity data and engagement for your entire revenue operations team so you can measure the health of your pipeline and forecast more accurately,” announced SalesLoft.  “Increased signal intelligence helps reps and managers understand which opportunities are trending in the right direction, and which can use more engagement to drive them forward.”

Clari’s AI engine analyzes SalesLoft engagement activity including email opens, calls made, and LinkedIn messaging to help “reps focus on the right deals and managers make more accurate forecasts.”

Clari's "single pane of glass" aggregates activity intelligence across teams and sales reps by Opportunity
Clari’s “single pane of glass” aggregates activity intelligence across teams and sales reps by Opportunity.

SalesLoft noted that the buyer’s journey is complex with enterprise deals touching eight buyers and influencers at enterprise prospects.  Thus, “it can be tough to know what activities have occurred with which personas and even tougher to know which activities to attempt next to move the needle.”

The joint solution provides a single pane of glass for assessing sales rep activities, determining which activities move deals forward, and planning for next steps.

“Too often, go-to-market teams operate in disconnected silos.  We’re fixing this by using AI and automation to connect real-time business activity with back-office systems and processes so teams spend less time entering data, and sales, marketing, and customer success are always on the same page.  Bridging these silos makes every campaign, QBR [Quarterly Business Review], and forecast call more data-driven and actionable.”

Clari CEO Andy Byrne

Besides SalesLoft, Clari application partners include Outreach, Yesware, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, DiscoverOrg, Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, Gmail, and Outlook.