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Case Study

How Skai Transformed Revenue Operations with Clari as Their Source of Truth

Company Size: Enterprise
Products Used
Table of Contents

When Sandy Shanman joined Skai as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) in 2019, Clari was already in place.

As the new face of revenue at Skai—“the only omnichannel platform for performance advertising”—one of Sandy’s first remits was to evaluate the current technology stack.

What were the must-haves vs. what’s getting the chopping block? First, as any solid CRO would do, he had to re-evaluate everything that impacted revenue.

Sandy spoke with his revenue peers and performed due diligence. “Everything checked out,” shared Sandy. “After vetting Clari, not only did I know it was a must-have platform, I wanted our team to use it even more—maximize every ounce of what Clari offered.”

Stephanie Herndon, Skai’s Vice President of Revenue Operations (VP, RevOps), had a similar introduction to Clari, albeit four years later.

With no prior RevOps experience, Stephanie had nothing to cloud her judgment. Her immediate reaction to Clari was positive.

“Clari was easy to use from Day 1. I just picked it up and started using it. Truthfully, I didn’t initially reach out to customer success. I didn’t use any of the help resources. I just dove in. Clari is so intuitive. Clari quickly became the source of truth for all things revenue at Skai.”

Challenge

It requires a lot of configuration to get real-time, meaningful data

The evolution of sales: from art to science to Clari

Sandy has been in sales for nearly his entire career. He went from sales rep to top sales rep to junior manager to senior leader. Over the past ten years, he’s lived in the C-Suite.

“Sales and tech have evolved significantly over those three decades, more so in the past 5 to 10 years,” said Sandy. “We live in a sales world driven by data and technology.”

Sandy sees sales historically as “three parts art, one part science.” Today? While we still need humans (phew!), sales teams are relying on science and data-driven decision-making now more than ever before

“We now need to pair the art (humans) with the science (data),” Sandy shared.

Regarding the tech, Sandy is still a Salesforce advocate, but he believes it requires a lot of configuration to get real-time, meaningful data.

With Clari, Sandy was immediately won over by how quickly he could forecast—breaking down the data by various layers of management, drilling into individual contributor data in real-time, and “changing filters to get exactly what we wanted.”

Over the past 6-12 months, Sandy and the revenue team have begun to create more sophisticated dashboards, looking at all sorts of views. Specifically, the team reviews the pipeline from many dimensions: Individual contributors vs. teams, regions vs. region, marketing vs. SDR vs. Account Executive, and this quarter compared to the previous quarter.

According to Stephanie, Sandy “pretty much lives in Clari’s forecast dashboards."

"Clari has become our single source of truth. There is no hiding. Everything is transparent. Everyone is held accountable. By the time we get off the call, we have identified the gaps and created a plan to eliminate them. Everyone knows exactly where we stand."

Sandy Shanman
CRO at Skai
Solution

Clari is the source of truth.

Clari is now used across Skai’s entire revenue process:

Business reviews: Clari.

Executive global forecast meeting: Clari.

Anyone who touches Revenue: Clari.

Let’s look at that weekly, executive global forecast meeting a bit closer.

Every Wednesday at 7 AM PT, Skai has a global forecast meeting where all the heads of revenue teams—and the C-suite—meet to discuss and strategize on revenue.

Clari is up and running the entire hour-long meeting.

Instead of spreadsheets and various apps open with everyone scrambling, it’s peaceful. Serene.

Everyone in the meeting has Clari open and follows along in real-time.

This new process represents a “total shift” in how the revenue team runs its business. The far majority of the (complex) work is done well before the meeting takes place. Instead of diving into the specific deals, leadership is helping to facilitate and identify (then remove) blockers: Is there a product gap? What about a legal bottleneck?

“Clari has become our single source of truth,’ said Sandy. ‘There is no hiding. Everything is transparent. Everyone is held accountable. By the time we get off the call,’ he added, ‘we have identified the gaps and created a plan to eliminate them. Everyone knows exactly where we stand.”

The fun. The future.

While this weekly global forecast meeting is essential to the success of Skai, it’s also important to have some fun to nurture the sales culture.

Stephanie has started to gamify Clari.

Playing off our revenue conversation intelligence and coaching product, Copilot*, the winner of the best Clari call of the week, earns a “call sign.” Ice Man. Goose. Bubbles. Sparky.

* Skai recently added Copilot because, in Sandy’s words, “it signaled Clari was investing in a full platform solution.”

Thanks to Clari, Skai now runs like a process—a repeatable cadence instead of something ad hoc that just happens.

For Sandy, this means a move from the Dark Ages to the Age of Data Science.

“Revenue forecasting has been an evolution from art to science. We don’t have to operate off gut or best guess. We don’t have to ponder how to handle an objection. Clari helps us with what to say and when.”

Stephanie agrees: “Revenue is a process with no finish line. The way we run a process today looks different than it did a quarter ago and will look different next quarter.”

And the Skai-Clari partnership? It “keeps getting better as we grow with Clari," said Stephanie.

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