Up to half of your employees are revenue-critical. But the tools they rely on to run revenue are outdated and ineffective. This is the reality of many tech stacks, and it’s exactly what’s stopping companies from mastering revenue—especially in uncertain times. And the disconnect isn’t your fault—the problem is that there hadn't a true enterprise system dedicated to running revenue.
Despite your best efforts to equip your sellers with the tools they need, disconnected and disjointed tools make it difficult for revenue-critical employees to collaborate. Despite your investment, everyone runs their own processes, making the overall revenue process nearly impossible to govern and control.
The outcome? Execs have a hard time answering the most important question in business: Are we going to meet, beat, or miss on revenue?
How CRM, Business Intelligence Tools, and Spreadsheets Are Failing You
Business intelligence and CRM have become integral parts of our tech stacks, but as Marshall Goldsmith noted, “what got you here won’t get you there.” These tools are holding you back from creating a truly integrated tech stack.
Sales Operations managers might benefit from CRM data, but that leaves an entire group of revenue-critical employees who don’t get the same visibility into the same information—which leads to revenue falling through the cracks.
The result? Lost deals, missed quarters, and billions in lost shareholder value. Every $1 of Revenue Leak equals over $9 lost in equity value according to research done by NYU Stern.
The Top 3 Culprits Stifling Your Business Growth
| CRM | Business Intelligence Tools | Spreadsheets |
| Data quality in your CRM is bad at best and sketchy at worst. | In theory, BI should answer big questions like, "What's working for my reps and what's not?" | The problem with tracking data in spreadsheets? Everyone tends to use their own. When team members save data in different documents, forecasting becomes a nightmare. |
| The systems that were built "for sales" are like hungry beasts. Updating them requires too much manual data entry—aka feeding them by hand. | The reality is that most BI tools only work for organization-wide execs who only need the big picture and don't need to take immediate action. | Revenue is a process—one that requires constant vigilance and maintenance. Because deals are constantly evolving, spreadsheets, by nature, are always outdated. |
| Is there any wonder your reps only spend 33% of their time selling? They’re being bogged down by administrative tasks, like logging sales data and customer notes. | BI doesn't give mid-and upper-level sales managers the simplicity, speed, and insights they need to grow the business. |
Your Biggest Problem Hiding in Plain Sight: Revenue Leak
During difficult economic times, why should your tech stack get attention over the myriad of other business problems? Here's why: Disjointed systems lead to revenue leak, blocking you from reaching goals and scaling. And in tough times now, every drop of revenue counts.
Revenue leak is exactly what it sounds like: The inability to capture the revenue you’ve already earned because of subtle breakdowns in your sales processes. And because of the status quo tech stack’s limitations, many companies don’t even realize revenue leak is happening.
Here’s what it looks like: You’ve achieved go-to-market fit, you know demand exists, and now you need to convert that demand into revenue. On the surface, it may seem like your revenue team is chugging along and business is holding steady, but for some reason, you’re struggling to hit goals or find repeatable success.
The average company is leaking nearly 15% of its revenue according to Clari’s data science team. In fact, Boston Consulting Group estimates that organizations lose over $2 trillion a year in missed revenue capture, sales waste, and lost enterprise value. To stop revenue leak and unlock your company’s growth during tough times you must prioritize every area of Revenue Leak, get your teams collaborating on solutions, and govern sustainable processes.
Master Revenue With a Lean Tech Stack
Hitting your number at the end of the quarter doesn’t just happen. It requires careful inspection and execution throughout the quarter. Improving your revenue accuracy can yield big results. Companies with accurate sales forecasts are 10% likelier to grow their revenue year-over-year and more than 7% more likely to reach their quotas.
Revenue precision is the full capture of revenue—predictably and repeatedly. To achieve revenue precision, people, systems, and processes must work together, allowing them to:
- Discover their blindspots
- Consolidate tools and processes
- Ensure constant collaboration between teams
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"Revenue Precision is achieved when people, processes, and systems work seamlessly together," says Andy Byrne, Clari's CEO. "This means discovering their blind spots, consolidating their tools and processes, and ensuring constant collaboration between their teams." - Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari |
Three Areas of Focus for Mastering Revenue
| Implementing Revenue Collaboration & Governance | Achieving Revenue Precision | Identifying and Stopping Revenue Leak |
| Revenue Collaboration & Governance is a strategic framework that brings together every revenue-critical employee in every department to work together on revenue. | Achieving Revenue Precision means getting really detailed about your revenue with clean, shared, up-to-date data. | Revenue Leak is the revenue that you should be capturing but aren't because of breakdowns across the revenue. |
| This framework governs every part of the revenue process for execution at scale. | Revenue precision allows your CEO to accurately forecast and answer the most important business question: Will we meet, beat, or miss our revenue target? | Stopping Revenue Leak should be a priority for every sales leader during tough economic times because every drop of revenue matters. |
Despite all the hype about building the right tech stack, the bottom line is this: You need a platform designed just for revenue that's simple and fast, automatically captures data, uses predictive analytics, shows value immediately, and drives your team to action. One that captures every conversation and highlights key buying signals so that reps, managers, and execs can all collaborate on making customer journeys smoother and faster.
To win more deals, you need a lean tech stack that combines the following capabilities:
| Pipeline Management and Analytics |
Having total visibility into your pipeline means knowing where you stand and what to do next. By using the right tools to manage your pipeline, changes are instantly reflected so you can quickly spot deal risks. Data visualization makes it easy to prioritize deals based on concrete data instead of guesses. |
| Conversation Intelligence |
Conversation intelligence as we know it is dead. Sales teams are recording calls, and it's not scalable to sift through the calls, share them, and assess the data. In 2022, you need actionable conversation intelligence that leverages AI to do that work for you. The technology itself listens in on every one of your reps' calls, listening for keywords and phrases, serving up the right battle cards, materials, and coaching cues in the moment, allowing remote coaching at scale. |
| Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) |
MAPs (also known as go-live plans, mutual success plans, or joint execution plans) answer the question: "Who needs to do what to make this deal happen?" This process can and should be automated to build the process with the buyer, standardize with templates, and streamline implementation and handoffs. |
| Forecasting |
When your forecasts are accurate, you feel confident about scaling, marketing, and hiring. Having all your data in one place and making it accessible across the organization is key to accurate forecasting. |
| Account Engagement |
How can you ensure that your key accounts are receiving the attention they need to win more business? Getting a bird's eye view of your account relationships will let you see all engagement data at a glance—making segmentation and territory planning so much easier. |
Technology Consolidation Tips for Cost Savings
As the economy stumbles, cutting costs is top of mind for every CFO and revenue leader. But the truly elite ones know that mastering the revenue process is just as important. Executives who lead the market use recessions to optimize existing and potential revenue streams to make sure they're not leaving any revenue on the table—and to set themselves up for stronger growth when the economy picks back up.
Focus on these technology consolidation strategies to cut costs without compromising revenue:
1. Minimize context-switching, maximize productivity
Software is designed to help people do more with less. Team members can spend more time actually doing their jobs when they use software that optimizes productivity through purpose-built workflows. A single product streamlining workflows makes users and budget owners happier.
2. Show me the ROI
The technology that can give concrete examples of the problem it solves and the ROI of solving them is the one that avoids the chopping block. Vendors should deeply understand their customer's business, including their organizational structures, their strategic goals, and growth plans. Then, they need a compelling value story around their tech and its impact on those areas.
3. Outcome driver vs. influencer
Is the technology directly responsible for driving meaningful revenue outcomes, or is it just something that sits on the sidelines? Meaningful outcomes are measurable, repeatable, and help run revenue.
4. Beware the point-solution
Buyers gravitate away from technology that solves only one problem (point solutions) and toward one-stop shops, like a Revenue Platform. Despite the point-solution bells and whistles that usually attract buyers, these features are rarely used to their fullest potential to add real value.
See It in Action: How One CFO Used a Revenue Platform to Consolidate and Save $750K
By focusing on efficiency, leadership, tracking, and hustle, business leaders can guide their teams through the current rollercoaster macroeconomic environment. Now more than ever, revenue leaders need the right Revenue Platform to run sales with full transparency and reliability from the boardroom to the front lines.
Here's a snapshot of the cost-saving benefits of tech stack consolidation:
- Prior to deploying Clari as their Revenue Platform, a handful of data scientists at company X were dedicated to revenue analysis. That is all now automated in their Revenue Platform, allowing data scientists to be redeployed to other strategic projects across the company.
- Company X was able to eliminate a bunch of underused licenses for the BI tool, since so much of the data leadership cares about is readily available in their Revenue Platform.
- They consolidated their tech spend by replacing their old CI tool (which was basically a glorified call recorder) and began using Wingman, an actionable conversation intelligence tool that connects all of their revenue data—conversation intelligence, pipeline, forecasting, and activity data—in a single Revenue Platform.
Now, all revenue-critical employees at company X operate out of a single unified platform. They're able to answer all key questions about the past, present, and future. And they're able to run revenue with precision and confidence. All while saving $750k.
Boosting Profitability With Tech Stack Consolidation
In a time when every drop of revenue counts, leaders must examine which tools are holding them back from creating a truly integrated tech stack. Disjointed sales tools are the number one culprit blocking enterprise organizations from reaching goals and scaling, which calls for a true enterprise system dedicated to running revenue.
To thrive during times of economic downturn leaders must prioritize revenue precision, improve Revenue Collaboration & Governance, and stop revenue leaks. To finally feel confident you'll hit your number at the end of each quarter, implement a platform designed just for sales that's simple and fast, automatically captures data, uses predictive analytics, works right out of the box, and drives your team to action.
Ready to run Revenue like a master? Book a demo today to see how Clari supports every aspect of the revenue process.
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