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| Clari - Nipping at Salesforce's Heels? |
A brief while ago I had the chance of
talking to Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari,
about how AI can help making sales organizations more effective and efficient. Clari
is a vendor of Opportunity-to-Close solutions. G2Crowd lists the company
amongst the leaders of its Sales Analytics
Software quadrant, while Gartner Group in 2017 named it a cool vendor in
the Tech Go-To-Market.
Shortly after the conversation Clari
announced the closure
of a $35 Million funding round “following record growth”, essentially a
tripling of their customer base while maintaining a near 100 per cent renewal
rate.
According to Andy, the company applies
“machine learning focused on sales”, i.e. predictive and prescriptive analytics
to improve pipeline visibility and to get more insight into which opportunities
are more likely to close than others. This helps in focusing on these
opportunities.
This solution was developed after having in
depth conversation with a number of big sales teams, figuring out their
challenges/problems.
As a result of this the company is
addressing three problems.
1.
Many to most sales reps do not
consider CRM systems (or SFA systems, for that matter) as particularly helpful.
2.
Sales managers do have a poor
visibility into what their teams are doing, with which opportunities they spend
their time.
3.
Executives and Sales Operations
are dealing with “XLS hell” because the system’s forecasting ability is broken.
All in all, points two and three are
consequences of point one.
If a system is not of help it is a
time-waster and tends to be avoided. Data about opportunities will not be
entered in a timely manner nor will it be very accurate.
Clari’s solution to this is to help the
sales reps by taking the chores out of the process by tying other systems into the
opportunity management process. These systems include Gmail and Exchange for
email and calendaring, but also attachments. Further connections to marketing
information systems (e.g. Marketo,), Docusign, Xactly, ClearSlide, and others
are in the pipeline.
Data coming from all these sources is used
to feed Clari’s prediction- and prescription engine to score the opportunities
as well as suggest activities for opportunities.
That way, Clari wants to improve sales
reps’ productivity, while giving managers insight and the chance of coaching
their teams – all with the goal of increasing the conversion rate.
At this moment Clari integrates with
Salesforce, but plans to integrate to other CRM/SFA systems, too. The approach
is to not position itself as a competition but to augment and enhance the user
experience by “marrying AI with beautiful design”.
MyPoV and Analysis
Having seen the capabilities and the UI of
Clari, I came away duly impressed. Clari offers a clean user interface that
helps people in instantly grasping the status and risk of the pipeline as well
as the individual opportunities along with the activities going on to pursue
them.
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| Opportunity Analysis with Clari |
And, looking at Salesforce being the main
system to integrate into, this is quite a proposition, especially as
Salesforce’s Einstein is still quite tied to Salesforce data. However, Salesforce
is addressing exactly the challenges that Clari looks at. The company
recently announced corresponding improvements to Sales Cloud Einstein, the Salesforce,
Inbox and improved sales analytics. And the recent acquisitions of Cloudcraze
and especially Mulesoft
will improve Salesforce’s ability of tapping into very relevant data, which
improves the company’s position.
The same holds true for Microsoft and SAP
Hybris. Both solutions also offer opportunity-scoring solutions based upon
machine learning. In the case of Microsoft already since late 2016. Both
solutions take in data from various sources, too, although the link to past sales
rep activities is less pronounced. Still, all three vendors, Microsoft,
Salesforce, and SAP, offer activity recommendations targeted at optimizing the
chances to successfully close opportunities.
And there are not only doing it for
opportunities but also for leads and other entities.
Still, the VC community is upbeat about
Clari, as evidenced by the successful recent funding round.
The Cautions
While Clari seems to have a strong
Opportunity-to-Closure solution this laser focus also puts the company into a
niche that the big vendors will close themselves, if not as good as Clari does,
but still ‘good enough’. And they are on it. Personally I do not see Clari as
an acquisition target of one of the big 4 (yet).
Further, there are not yet many
partnerships with CRM vendors. Salesforce is a good starting place, but it is
exactly that: A start. And Salesforce is known for usurping spaces that are
owned by partners, if it sees an opportunity (this is not only true for
Salesforce, of course).
For Clari this means that the company needs
to do four things
·
Stay ahead of the competition
from an output point of view. Integrating with Clari must show clear and
measurable benefits for customers using a CRM system which already offers
similar functionality
·
Go SMB. This is a largely
underserved market that is still very fragmented and mainly covered by vendors
that do not have the scale to offer wide solutions
·
Partner, partner, partner with
vendors of CRM solutions, to gain broader exposure
·
Based upon the current
offering, build complementary solutions that solve real business problems
And all this while staying at an attractive
price point.
All in all, Clari offers a solution that enterprises
and SMBs should look at.
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