I'm incredibly excited to welcome Medallia to the Clari family. If you haven't already come across Medallia, they're the global leader in helping companies capture and interpret customer feedback, all to improve the customer experience. It's powerful stuff driving their growth to over 700 employees and a total investment of $255 million.
In 2016, Medallia is ready to kick their growth into an even higher gear. So after a hands-on evaluation, they chose Clari.
I'd like to share details about the high bar they set for us. If you're a sales leader with ambitious growth goals, I'm confident that you'll find useful insight—and maybe some inspiration—in Medallia's demands.
The Medallia Challenge
Medallia challenged us to deliver a sales management suite to accelerate their already breakneck growth. They needed to see value in four areas (and, to me, these are the four most important areas of sales management):
- Deal Management: How are deals changing? How active are reps and how engaged are customers? How can managers and execs take instant action to help close key deals?
- Pipeline Health: How many new deals have we created? Does our pipeline support our sales goals? How is it changing? What percent of our "Commit" and "Best Case" deals do we need to close to hit our number this quarter?
- Improved Forecasting: How can data science, comparison with past quarters, and early warning on at-risk deals increase our confidence? How can we increase the mix of science in the art of forecasting?
- Sales Analytics: How can predictive analytics and clarity on rep activity and CRM data improve coaching and decision making? Obviously, sales analytics shows up in the other three areas too. But calling it out suggests the ability to ask more general questions; for example, does the time deals spend in each stage give us insight to improve our sales focus and efficiency?
At the same time, any system had to save time for Medallia's reps, managers, and execs: mobile access and data entry, at-a-glance clarity, easy sharing among team members, and deep insight just a click or tap away.
Our ability to meet this challenge is why Medallia joined the Clari family. As Allen Kobayashi, VP of Sales Ops, Medallia said, "Clari provides clarity into opportunity activity, deal stage and forecast levels. And most importantly, saves time for our reps and leaders."
To me, Medallia nailed their demands. They have their finger on the pulse of what's needed to accelerate their extraordinary growth.
If you're a sales or sales ops leader working to boost your own revenue growth, I'll bet you have vendors calling daily with glowing promises. I encourage you to challenge any vendor—us included—to prove their ability to improve the big four: deal management, pipeline health, forecasting, and sales analytics. Because when you elevate all four, you're prepared to step on the gas. Just ask our friends at Medallia.