Prior to joining Clari, I spent six years at Looker – a business intelligence platform acquired by Google in 2019. I wanted nothing more than for Looker to solve my sales and marketing use cases. But as hard as we worked to make that happen, it always fell short. The first time I saw Clari in action I thought, “Finally! This is what I’ve needed all these years!”
Here are the top three shortcomings I found trying to run revenue workflows with BI technology.
#1 Garbage in, garbage out
You’ve probably heard that phrase before. It’s never truer than when discussing CRM analytics. As much as you may try to browbeat your reps into putting their contacts, activities, and deal insights into the CRM, it’s probably never going to happen. The result? Untrustworthy data that creates untrustworthy reporting.
Clari helps solve this with our Capture capabilities. We easily connect to your reps' email and calendar clients in order to create new contacts, attach them to opportunities, and track all the engagement with them. We also connect with dozens of sales and marketing technologies (like Marketo, Outreach, Gainsight, etc) to expose their touch points in our user interface.
Your reps spend more time selling instead of doing menial work. Your CRM becomes more complete and credible. And therefore, the analysis you do can be trusted and verified.
#2 Impossible to go from macro to micro
Even though we knew the deal-level data wasn’t entirely reliable, we still tried to solve some revenue use cases with Looker. We built super impressive reports, dashboards, and visualizations and felt like we had a pretty good sense of what was happening at a macro, aggregated level. We could see trends, understand performance, and keep our finger on the pulse of the business.
But that high level of insight was the extent of the value. Any time I wanted to understand not just what was happening but why it was happening, I got stuck. Why is pipeline getting stuck? What stakeholders do we need to engage? What kind of competitive pressure exists? What kinds of regional or industry trends are we seeing? Why??
As I navigated the drill paths from our dashboards, I inevitably got stuck. Because I couldn’t get answers from the data, I had to get answers from people. And as much as I love people, they can’t always be trusted to give an unbiased answer. As I tried to make decisions either to press an advantage or course-correct a deficiency, I knew I was operating with incomplete, qualitative information that may not be the best guidance. That kind of uncertain decision-making leads to a lot of wasted time and effort and allows a lot of revenue to leak out of the funnel.
Clari completely eliminates this paradigm. Because the foundation of trustworthy data exists, and because Clari was purpose-built for these kinds of revenue workflows, it’s incredibly easy to go from macro-level insight to micro-level detail. To see the trends, inspect the deals, and make confident, data-driven decisions.
#3 BI can’t tell me what’s going to happen in the future
Setting aside the two issues above, BI tools are useful to understand what’s already happened. Useful, but that’s only half the battle. I worked closely with an unbelievably talented analyst / data scientist for two years trying to develop Looker modeling for predictive analytics. But we never could make it happen. Relying on BI tools to help determine what’s going to happen from a revenue perspective is very, very tough.
Because of this, I often felt like I was scrambling to put out various fires I didn’t see coming. Being hyper-reactive to fill gaps or stop leaks, and forced into making rushed decisions for highly impactful revenue scenarios. This might be all too familiar too you, too.
But this is where Clari really shines. We’ve got thousands of machine learning models running and create bespoke models for each of our customers. The result is high-fidelity, trustworthy projections of what your revenue future is going to be. I can easily vet our pipeline position and likely future outcomes by geo, segment, and industry. And then, I can make confident forward-looking decisions about where and how to allocate budget to ensure we’re creating and strengthening pipeline in the right areas that support our revenue targets.
Conclusion
Trustworthy revenue data, macro-to-micro drill paths, and predictive analytics. Clari is purpose-built to run revenue in ways that BI tools can’t possibly be. More productive reps, data-driven actions, and a clear view of the future.
If you’re interested to see the impact Clari can make on your business, let’s chat. Click here.