I started my career as an SDR more than 10 years ago. Since then, I've run a team of 70 SDRs and have coached and trained thousands. I have personally used all of the big players in the sales engagement space, heard countless reviews of many others, and always kept my finger on the pulse of the market.
I inherited two different sales engagement solutions—Outreach and Yesware—when I started at Clari in 2019. The SDR team was using Outreach. The AE team was using Yesware.
This is a pretty common setup for revenue teams. The logic is that AEs don't need all of the bells and whistles that SDRs do, so teams try to manage costs by bringing on a cheaper solution with basic functionality.
My take: That approach reduces cost, but it significantly increases complexity and kills teamwork. So the first thing I did was rip out Yesware and get everyone working on Outreach.
The problems we had
We spent the next three years trying—and failing—to optimize Outreach for our entire revenue team. Despite my best efforts, many hours with our ops team, and countless dollars spent on Outreach professional services, we never were able to solve some critical issues:
- The "shadow CRM"
Outreach and other sales engagement solutions manage contact data outside of CRM platforms. This effectively creates a secondary CRM, which causes major compliance issues with the GDPR regulations of the world. It also creates major data sync issues between Outreach and CRM. Only about 60 to 70% of our activity data ever made its way back into CRM, so we had an incomplete sense of what people were doing and what was working. Ultimately, we couldn’t easily A/B test our outbound messaging, which was challenging and frustrating for our team.
- Incomplete analytics
Because of the activity and contact sync errors, I couldn't do any meaningful analysis on the revenue outcomes our team was driving. Yes, there are analytics built into Outreach, but most of the success criteria there have to do with call dispositions or meetings booked. That's useful, but ultimately is not what I am accountable for. What I need to analyze are pipeline and revenue. Outreach couldn't do that.
- Broken SDR <> AE relationship
Sadly, the AE adoption of Outreach was never super strong despite our training and enablement. The main reason: Outreach does not manifest in an AE's flow of work. It's yet another thing that they have to go out of their way to use. And when they did log in, they found the UI overly complex. Which means ... it didn't get used.
Enter Groove
I started looking into Groove in late 2021 as I was undergoing yet another round with Outreach's professional services (PS) team. It finally became clear that the issues I was having with Outreach were not going away, so I was against the clock to find a better way.
We brought Groove on after a deep eval, plenty of backchanneling, and a trial with a subset of our team. Eighteen months later, I can confidently say that it's the best solution on the market. Here's why:
- Deep Salesforce.com integration
No more shadow CRM! Every contact in Groove has to be a contact in SFDC. This solves the operational headache of compliance issues, ensures all activities are captured fully, and gives me confidence in the data I receive. It also significantly reduces the admin burden since Groove reads and responds to role hierarchies that already exist in SFDC.
- Meaningful analytics
Groove makes it possible to finally see how top- and mid-funnel activities impact revenue results because of the deep SFDC integration. The holy grail! I now have a lot more confidence in and control over the plays we're running. This, of course, is in addition to all the wonderful activity analytics that prospecting teams need to hone their outbounding skills.
- Tight SDR<>AE relationships
Groove has a wonderful Gmail experience, so reps actually use it! Bonus: Groove's account planning capabilities are wonderful for joint prospecting efforts between AEs and SDRs. This has increased the level of strategy that goes into our outbound plays and has created incredible bonds between AEs and SDRs. The UI is simple, with no real barrier of entry. All reps get immediate value, and the solution actually gets used.
Change management
On top of all of the great outcomes, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the night and day difference between Groove's and Outreach's PS teams. I was nervous about switching off a tool that Clari had been using for more than five years. But Groove made it fast, easy, and painless.
It also served as something of a "cleansing fire" for all of the outbound content we had. We had something unsustainable (like 5,000 sequences) and knew that was far from a best practice (this was a big contributor to the analytics issue we were having). Our teams went through the content together, picked out the 20 or so flows we wanted to keep, and Groove took care of the rest.
Content was migrated in a couple of days, our team was up and running a couple of days later, and the team was fully productive a few days after that. All in all, migration and training took about two weeks. The Groove PS team led the training (which was actually good!) and were super responsive to questions and needs of end users. I have never had a smoother onboarding experience.
And now we're one company
I could not be more excited to welcome Groove to the Clari family. By integrating all of Groove's workflows into the Clari platform, we're going to unlock tremendous value for all revenue-critical employees.
Finally, there's a single Revenue Platform to execute all of your key workflows. That means internal workflows like forecasting, deal inspection, QBRs, and board meetings, as well as external workflows like prospecting, deal management, buyer collaboration, and more.
Clari's deep capabilities across key categories like revenue operations, conversation intelligence, and sales engagement will produce compounding value between one another. No more siloed apps, siloed data, or siloed workflows. Everything you need to run revenue is here in a single unified platform.
Out with the old way. In with the new way to Revenue.
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