Clari's roots are simple: field sales is too hard.
Last week, a sales ops manager from an Austin, Texas-based SaaS company told me, "The pressure is intense. We're growing, so quotas need to go up. I'm constantly working on how my team can help with rep productivity, yet our CRM system is not designed to help us solve this problem."
I personally felt this same emotional pain for the last 7 years of my career. Before Clari, members of our founding team started Clearwell. We sold e-discovery software to medium and large companies in multiple countries. We were successful—reaching a $100-million run rate in a few years—but the sales process was incredibly hard. Reps needed to focus on customers, but sales ops and management needed visibility into how the quarter was going. And every sales manager needed to know how and where to help to move deals forward. For our reps and managers, this meant countless late nights, missed soccer and lacrosse games, and far too little family time. I see this stress in every high-performing sales team. Manual, time-consuming, and inefficient processes are tough on everyone. And, in the end, they don't work very well—it only takes a quick look at the completion status of customer records in the CRM system to confirm this.
We knew there had to be a better way.
We realized that the mobile revolution opened the door to making field sales easier, more efficient, and, most importantly, more effective. We saw how the combination of a smart cloud service, an engaging mobile experience, and new thinking about how to reach, organize, and find actionable content across data silos could simplify selling, provide better visibility into deals, and drive more revenue, making a win-win for both sales teams and managers in the field.
This company—and this blog—are about making field selling easier. As a team, we know and live sales. And we know and obsess over how to apply mobile and cloud technology to create a user experience people love—all to make sales teams more effective and productive.
On a personal note, I think sales is not only a noble profession—it is the most important function in any company on the planet. It's what drives growth. It's what drives shareholder value. Our job is to make selling easier and the purpose of this blog is to share what we learn along the way.