We think it’s no coincidence that Clari was included across four different categories in this year’s Gartner’s Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technologies. We have learned from our customers over the course of our journey thus far that it’s not enough to just solve one piece of the revenue operations puzzle.
You need to bring the entire go-to-market team together (sales reps, managers, execs, sales ops, marketing ops, demand gen, customer success — everyone!) to really achieve sales execution greatness and predictable revenue.
CRM is not enough to drive predictable revenue
B2B organizations need to deliver predictable revenue. It is expected by their board of directors, shareholders, customers and employees. They all stand to benefit from a more predictable business.
But conventional CRM tools just can’t solve this alone. While CRM has become a must-have system of record for contact and transaction information, it is not automated (and requires a ton of manual data entry), can’t model the specifics of your business, doesn’t have enough data for meaningful AI insights and actually perpetuates silos across the revenue organization (what we call the “bring your own report” mentality).
It’s no surprise than that Gartner has been publishing a long list of innovative solutions that are built outside of the core Sales Force Automation (SFA) critical capabilities in the Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technologies.
Here are the four categories we’ve been named as a sample vendor in:
- Knowledge Graphs for Sales: Knowledge graph for sales is a new way to organize information for more sophisticated and business-aware AI insights to be derived from sales activity data. According to Gartner, “knowledge graphs for sales offer the ability to build an AI-enabled knowledge model of real-world entities and their relationships to one another, expressed in a data schema. This emerging technology affords the ability to create data-driven sales organizations using graphs arranged in a network of nodes rather than in tables of rows and columns. The significance is the ability to correlate sales activities and benchmark against performance metrics in a more digestible and insightful way, which is often too complex for human analysis.”
- Algorithmic Guided Selling: The report states, “algorithmic guided selling solutions use predictive and prescriptive machine learning algorithms to manage the sequential sales actions that managers expect sales users to consistently execute. Application leaders supporting sales select these tools to improve sales effectiveness, using them to enforce process discipline and to remove the uncertainty about “what to do next” in complex sales processes.”
- Predictive Sales Forecasting: Sales predictive analytics increases sales forecast and pipeline inspection accuracy and improves sales velocity by supporting better decision making of sales reps, managers and leaders. Gartner points out that clients “cite improvements in deal closure rates and complex forecast accuracy.” The report also provides the following advice: “IT and sales leaders want to increase sales velocity and augment their sales processes with solutions that reduce the uncertainty that is inherent in sales cycles. But if you don’t want to invest time and resources in the statistical tools common to advanced analytics solutions, evaluate adoption of this technology as SFA tools lag behind point solutions in capabilities”.
- Mobile Sales Productivity: Mobile sales productivity apps increase sales adoption and improve data quality by using a less intrusive approach to collecting and updating sales data. As defined by Gartner, “Mobile sales productivity apps are high-benefit systems. Unlike a mobile SFA app that requires salespeople to adapt their behavior to how the app is designed, mobile sales productivity apps capture information automatically based on salesperson behavior”.
Bringing it all together
A sales knowledge graph that understands the way your business operates, a robust forecasting platform that works for your entire revenue team, and an engagement platform for guiding your sellers to achieve the right outcomes that includes a compelling, native mobile experience are all essential and all core to Clari’s Connected Revenue Operations Platform.
When added to CRM, it allows companies to automate time-consuming, error-prone CRM processes like data entry, illuminate risk, opportunity and AI insights throughout the B2B revenue process, and accurately predict the KPIs of the business.
We’ve seen this play out over and over again because for the last 6 years we’ve been working with the world’s leading sales teams to help them transform their revenue operations to be connected, efficient and predictable. The results are higher win rates, better conversions, shorter sales cycles, reduced churn, and more accurate forecasts.
To learn more, schedule a demo.
You can access the report here (subscription needed).
Gartner, Hype Cycle for CRM Sales Technology, 2019, Adnan Zijadic,Theodore Travis,Melissa Hilbert, 10 July 2019
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