Databricks is a powerhouse.
We're on track to be one of the fastest growing software companies in history. CB Insights ranks us the 9th most valuable startup in the world.
On our way to achieving all that—we brought in Clari.
Of course, the key to any revenue platform isn't just the tech, but how you use it to enhance your business. Every company, every manager, faces obstacles. Here's how I'm navigating mine in the sales organization.
Before Clari, we faced the constant frustration of inaccurate results, duplicative data entry, and wasted time as we forecasted in spreadsheets. We’d try to bring everything to a neat wrap by the Monday morning forecasting call, only to find that inevitably, something had broken at the last minute. And as our deal volume and headcount grew, this unwieldy process limited our visibility into deal strategy.
Today, I’m in Clari on a daily basis, and I use it to overcome our growth obstacles in three ways:
- Coach reps toward operational excellence
- Plan ahead to beat gaps
- Focus time on selling
Here’s how.
1. Coach reps toward operational excellence
I lead the rapidly-expanding growth and start-up sales team of 36 account executives and five first line managers. I expect reps to be the CEO of their territories, but that expectation wasn’t always easy to support before Clari.
Now, we have the deal insights we need to coach reps toward more strategic and critical management. When a first line manager and I sit down for a forecasting review with a rep, we start with one of Clari’s analytics modules, Trend. There, Clari's artificial intelligence predicts a forecast for the quarter.
If that forecast differs from a rep's call, we dig deeper into the opportunities to figure out why. Clari gives each opportunity a numerical score between 0-100, with 100 indicating a deal will likely close. If we notice a rep has committed a deal, but Clari’s score is a 22, we dig in: What are we missing?
Not only do these continual, data-based conversations breed operational rigor, but these tools help reps understand which aspects of a deal are most important for their success.
2. Plan ahead to beat gaps
I like to say, “We don’t have a crystal ball, but we have Clari.”
I rely on Clari to understand the run rate side of the business and build ahead of the plan for upcoming quarters, so that we can get ahead of any challenges.
Take a traditionally low-visibility area like “created and closed” within the quarter. When I’m reviewing historical trends in Clari, I ask questions like:
- What's this team’s historical track record of creating and closing net-new pipeline within an existing quarter?
- If I look at our goals, what we currently have in a pipeline, and what this team has historically created and closed, how will we track against this target?
If answers to these questions uncover that we’re tracking behind, I start activating pipeline generation programs to help us meet the goal.
3. Focus time on selling
Reps on my team get 50% of their time back by forecasting in Clari. Instead of navigating between opportunity updates in the CRM and duplicating that data in spreadsheets, or spending time updating those spreadsheets in the first place, they can make direct edits to each opportunity already inside Clari. They’re getting half their time back to spend on deal strategy, territory planning, and pipeline generation, all of which are much more valuable to us than data entry.
My first line managers and I benefit, too. We can jump straight into deal strategy with reps, helping us avoid revenue leak—to the tune of a 169% increase in win rate for slipping deals (that aligns to a 13% increase in won revenue) and 19% decrease in slipped deal rate. We have a focused lens on the business with more insights and without any of the “death by additional object or field” we used to get in our CRM. We’re also getting a bit of work-life balance back, too.
But in the end, it’s not only the saved time that makes a difference. The shared framework we have in Clari enables us to run revenue: every team at Databricks can speak the same language about revenue, helping us take down obstacles as one unit. Thanks to Clari, our smooth revenue process will help us cement our title as one of the fastest growing software companies of all time.
Read the full case study here.
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