Sales Execution

2 Ways Activity Data Can Make Your Sales Team More Effective

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Will Patterson
Group Product Manager, Clari

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It's official. Clari Team Activity launches today—and it's going to improve sales team productivity against target accounts by enabling managers and other sales leaders to track and quantify account engagement, easily identify which accounts require more attention, and determine which reps may benefit from more coaching.

This might be a new product announcement, but we're not new to automating sales rep activity tracking. We've been harvesting email, meeting, and file data directly from Gmail and Outlook for more than five years, and our founding team has been working together indexing email at scale and applying machine learning to it since 2004. In the last year alone, Clari has analyzed close to 200M emails and 30M calendar events.

Deal-level activity insights have been one of our most highly-used features for a while now. In fact, we noticed that some customers found the insights so valuable that they were exporting real-time Clari activity data to Excel and BI tools for deeper offline analysis. Since it's generally our goal to keep sales teams out of spreadsheets, this caught our attention. We realized that activity data could also be used to address key business problems beyond evaluating the health of an individual deal—and the new Clari Team Activity solution was born.

Team Activity helps sales teams answer important questions about when and how reps engage with high-value accounts. With new visibility at the account level, managers and execs can better target sales capacity toward those prospects that have the potential to yield the best outcomes. There are many questions that can be answered by activity data, but here are two essential ones that we focused on in building Team Activity:

Which of Our Target Accounts Are We Actually Engaged With?

Many sales teams are implementing account-based selling strategies that focus on a set of target accounts. Whether you're pursuing a specific set of new logos, increasing the emphasis on upsell/cross sell within existing accounts, or building a stronger channel business, identifying these accounts and assigning them to reps is a huge investment of time and resources. And, until now, nobody really knew which of those painstakingly identified target accounts were actually being engaged with and which were being ignored.

Having visibility into key accounts that are not getting the attention they need allows you to take action, either by creating a plan of attack with your rep or reassigning the account to another rep that has the bandwidth to work it.

How Can We Make Our Sales Reps More Productive and Enable Better Coaching?

Whether you're a small startup with a team of ten sales reps or a global enterprise with hundreds of reps worldwide, you want to maximize selling time and make every member of your team more effective.

Manually logging deal data into CRM is not a good use of your reps' time and does little to move deals forward. Even when reps do make the time to update their opportunity records in a timely manner, the data they enter is often incomplete, inaccurate, or both. Clari Team Activity eliminates that problem by tracking rep activity automatically in real time.

All of this rich data also gives managers new visibility into how their reps are engaging with accounts, empowering them to provide better, more proactive coaching. Whether it's establishing benchmarks for what successful reps are doing or tracking the onboarding of new reps, activity data informs conversations that help sales reps focus their time in the right places. It also helps managers get more out of their teams.

With real-time activity data at your fingertips, you can drive better execution of account-based strategies, boost rep productivity, and empower managers to coach more effectively.