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.
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.
“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’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:
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.
It allows for new insight generation capabilities – Conversational Intelligence employs NLP for generating additional insights to drive pipeline and deal health analytics.
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.”
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).
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 acquiredconversational 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.”
