Take your sales forecast out of the rearview mirror

Last week, I attended Exceed, the first conference solely focused on Sales Operations leaders. Andy Byrne and his team at Clari have rightfully identified a significant gap in the market. Sales Operations is an underserved segment and the breadth of activities covered by Sales Ops warrants a dedicated event.

Exceed brought together 100+ Sales Ops practitioners,  featuring team management lessons by 49er legends Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig & Brent Jones, fireside chats with super-operator and newly minted Sequoia-partner Carl Eschenbach and advise from sales coaches Jason Jordan and John Kaplan. All interspersed with focused breakout discussions covering sales ops challenges.

While the event was not focused on Clari, it did provide a chance to take a much closer look at Clari's solution. Nearly everyone knows by now that "CRM" systems have not delivered their most fundamental promise - to be the ultimate sales planning and management tool.  Nearly every company I know still struggles with running the most fundamental of all sales processes, the forecast. Sales managers and execs leverage a smorgasbord of dashboards that allow them to look in the "rearview mirror" as to where they stand, but it's like driving a car without "windshield" (paraphrasing Carl Eschenbach). The most adventurous have gone down the predictive analytics route to quickly find out that you can't predict signal if all you have in your data is noise.

Clari has a unique approach to forecasting.  They have realized that you need to increase the signal before you can predict and they have done so with a mobile app for sales reps that focuses in a user-friendly, non-disruptive way on capturing accurately what matters - deal value, close date and sales stage. Couple this with actionable sales management dashboards at every level of the sales hierarchy, and you enable sales managers to have meaningful conversations with their teams on deals that slipped, shrunk, etc. and allowing time to focus on sales strategy instead of data collection.  All of this information and deal activity (emails, meetings,..) get fed into Clari's prediction engine which can now make much more meaningful inferences about the forecast.

This is only the beginning.  Having access to the level of deal information Clari does, without interfering with the sales rep's workflow, creates many possibilities.

Clari is definitely a company to watch.  And Exceed the Guild to join to discuss the future of Sales Management.