How Udacity Reduced Deal Cycle Time by 15% and Churn by 10% Using Clari

Clari has helped Udacity decrease average deal cycle length by 15%

There is not one single factor that connects Ben with Clari (and Clari with Ben).

In fact, there are four:

1. Time savings; more automation: “With Clari, we spend significantly less time rolling up our forecast and more time being strategic,” says Ben.

Before Clari, the forecasting process was “all over the board ... very very manual,” said Ben. “Any changes became a hefty lift, and it was nearly impossible to look back at forecasting accuracy trends. Clari does that automatically.”

2. Accurate forecasting: To complicate matters further, each group within Udacity managed it differently — and very inefficiently.

• The B2C group used a homegrown forecasting tool.
• Part of the B2B group used Google Sheets, others had offline Excel sheets, and others cobbled through the forecast module within Salesforce.
• The Government group used the Salesforce forecasting module.

Rolling up a worldwide forecast with all the business units took time and effort and was next to impossible. And automation? Forget about it.

This entire process took more than a full day and was still unreliable!

3. User Interface (UI): Udacity also fell in love with the easy-to-navigate UI. “Clari is simple to ‘slice and dice’ and has one of the best, most intuitive user interfaces I’ve ever seen,” says Ben.

4. Scalable and repeatable: Finally, Clari has further empowered Udacity to triangulate its forecast — in a quick and repeatable manner. Per Ben, Clari is a “powerful, sophisticated engine with more factors than simply using Salesforce probabilities or stages.”

But Clari is not just for new logos.