The way that customers buy products has fundamentally changed. Customers are conducting their own research long before a buying conversation even happens, and with subscription-based business models, what happens after the sale is just as important as what happens before the sale.
This means that there is a new level of coordination and consistency required, from the first marketing touchpoint to the sale to the renewal. The entire revenue team—marketing, sales, and customer success—must all be aligned in order to succeed.
Achieving this level of coordination is hard, and it's made worse by each team being disconnected with its own set of tools, data, reports, and view of the business. And while we started our business supporting sales teams, we noticed that our best-in-class customers deploy Clari well beyond the sales organization to marketing, customer success, and even finance. Having a shared system helped those organizations achieve breakthrough results.
Today, we're building on those learnings by announcing the first connected revenue operations platform, taking the work we've done to transform sales and extending it to the entire revenue team. The result is full-funnel accountability: every team and every team member knowing how their contribution fits into the revenue picture and what they need to do to meet their commitments.
Creating a new normal for revenue operations teams
For so many B2B companies, marketing, sales, and customer success operate in their own disconnected silos, much like a bucket brigade passing prospects from one team to the next as they make their way down the customer journey.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Marketing teams are tasked with building pipeline and driving conversions to hit revenue targets, but are disconnected from how sales is working accounts and who they're engaging with. Unable to understand the buyer's journey, marketers can't optimize investment or secure budgets needed to support the sales effort and increase funnel conversions at each stage.
Sales teams are unable to accurately forecast or consistently hit their number. The CRM is inaccurate and out-of-date because reps don't have time to manually input data, so managers are forced to interrogate reps as they try to forecast outcomes. Because the CRM is disconnected from actual sales activity, execs have no foresight around risk or ability to spot emerging opportunities, so the business is unpredictable.
Meanwhile, customer success is handed newly signed customers with little to no information about where they came from. Because they are disconnected from the selling process, when it comes time to renew, they are unable to identify who is at risk of churn or has more potential for an upsell.
Disconnected go-to-market teams have been operating this way for so long that it seems normal. But that's just not good enough anymore.
So, how are we fixing this?
Clari's connected revenue operations platform automatically harvests contacts and connects activity data from dozens of partners to accounts and deals, updating the CRM so reps don't have to. Your entire go-to-market organization can rely on an intuitive single source of truth backed up by AI-powered analytics, giving the team the power to:
- Get on the same page. Clari connects signals from sales activity data and customer engagement systems into one place, allowing the entire revenue team to use one platform to drive and measure revenue results.
- Predict outcomes. Clari's AI platform learns from historical execution data to predict where revenue teams have risk and opportunity in the sales cycle. Now you're able to not only see where you've been, but also where you're going.
- Drive results. Clari provides visibility into every stage of the deal to build trust and give back massive time savings for every member of the revenue team, from the sales rep to the CRO.
To take full advantage of the platform and achieve predictable revenue, follow our step-by-step guide to creating a revenue operations framework.