The sales and revenue operations tech space is consolidating at a rapid pace.
Customer demand for all-in-one solutions is on the rise.
The RevTech category is exploding.
Data and AI are being built into every platform at breakneck speeds.
These trends have a significant impact on the way sales and revenue operations teams operate today and how they'll operate in the future.
Kyle Coleman, sales pro turned SVP of Marketing at Clari, recently sat down with Chris Rothstein, the co-founder and CEO of Groove, and now SVP and GM of Groove, a Clari company, post-acquisition, to talk tech consolidation.
Chris's background stems from his work at Google Enterprise (now Google Cloud) in the early days of its growth run. That's where his coworker (and now co-founder) had the idea for Groove.
Chris brings a wealth of knowledge about tech consolidation, which arises from tech fatigue.
First, let's first level-set on tech fatigue.
What is tech fatigue and how do we overcome it?
Point solutions have dominated budgets and tech stacks for over a decade.
One RevsOps leader recently half-jokingly asked a group of his peers at a round table event, "How many tools should my team have at this point? It's getting out of hand; it's exhausting."
She's not alone.
This proliferation of tools slows your team down, creates inefficiencies in your revenue process, and prevents revenue from running effectively.
That's tech fatigue—a term we coined after talking to hundreds of revenue pros.
Chris says this tech overlap is in the 10-20% range and "increasing by the day."
We see tech fatigue manifesting itself in three key areas of the business:
- Leaders lack a single business view, making critical decisions more challenging (and slower). They can't effectively govern revenue.
- RevOps are constantly scrambling to maintain the tech stack while trying to reconcile various datasets from disparate sources. The constant sprint is exhausting.
- Sales reps are under increased pressure to perform, yet are "tool hopping" and "task switching"—two activities proven to slow humans down. Read: Inefficient. Also, per Chris, this leads to pressure to train sales teams on so many different tools.
The net negative here: Revenue leak, the revenue loss resulting from breakdowns across the end-to-end revenue process.
"Equally as bad," says Chris, "is the disjointed experience that your customers feel as they move from one team and process to the next."
That's the bad news.
But there is a solution: tech bundling or consolidation.
The key, says Chris, is ensuring that the platform consolidates all of the necessary tools and does everything well. "A variety of players try to consolidate, but they have one core area and then a bunch of areas where they just barely check the box. Each of the sub-areas is too important. Consolidation without compromise is critical."
Bonus: Tech consolidation usually saves money.
How do you achieve that highly sought-after "ideal" consolidation?
From tech fatigue to consolidation: The brief story of Clari acquiring Groove
Clari has been strategic with our recent consolidations (acquisitions): Copilot (formerly Wingman) and Groove.
And we've learned a thing or ten along the way.
Here's one lesson and one still-in-progress mini-case study.
Consolidation should complement or replace existing software.
One of the issues we see most often when evaluating other software platforms is that they can create more work.
Not ideal.
When consolidating your tech stack, the new software must complement (or completely replace) what you currently have. If not, you end up with another platform somebody has to administer and merge into your existing one. This leads to more tech fatigue.
Groove was architected from Day 1 to complement the CRM, not duplicate it and create more work.
The Clari platform, with the addition of Groove, is the ultimate example of consolidation.
Here's how Kyle breaks down the power of Clari, now with Groove:
"Clari is a system of insight. It's powered by our revenue database—a unified data model that's pulling in data from all of the deals you're working on from your calendar, email, and so on, and collating that into a single database. That insight is then provided to sellers, sales teams, and revenue leaders—the 'what's next' best practices to move the deal forward."
While those insights on their own are plenty valuable, adding Groove supercharges that data. With Groove, you can take those insights and act on them immediately from within the same platform—a closed loop between what needs to happen and what is happening.
Organizations no longer have to review what happened in the past and try to figure out how to improve the next time—diagnose the past. Now, they can easily and quickly analyze and act immediately—close an identified gap or double down on an uncovered advantage and so on.
The connection between insight and action lives in one platform.
See how you can "consolidate without compromise" and overcome tech fatigue using Clari's Revenue Platform.