Clari, who develops software focused on the process of closing the OTC, plans to announce integrations with DocuSign, Clearslide and Xactly Wednesday at Dreamforce 2017 in San Francisco.
Clari's OTC Artificial Intelligence platform already integrates Google and Microsoft messaging and calendaring, allowing sales teams to immediately know the behavior of salespeople and prospects.
The new integrations will give salespeople an overview of the following:
- the extent to which a prospect engages in files, documents and presentations;
- when prospects engage with documents, as well as the overall activity around files shared with them; and
- how the planned opportunities will affect their sales commissions.
"There is probably no stronger signal when you send a document and see that there is no commitment," said David Karel, CEO of Clari.
"For example, a representative might think that a $ 100,000 US contract will end this quarter – but thanks to Clari, the sales manager can see that there is no comment on this, "he told CRM Buyer.
Clari already provides users with real-time information anytime during the quarter and allows users to view all of their professional activities with the help of a single configurable dashboard.
"Even at the beginning of the quarter, we can help sales organizations predict the number of sales," said Karel.
The integrations with Docusign and Clearslide "will give access to more buyer signals," he noted. "There is all this buyer behavior locked into other systems, like Docusign and Clearslide, that we can now unlock and give commercials better access."
Most importantly, this information will be given in the workflow context, Karel emphasized. "In this way, a sales manager has an extra signal to see the nature of the deal, it's not about putting 100 reports in front of you – it's about a targeted flow of relevant information. "
Improve Salesforce capabilities
Clari's product is a Software as a Service offer that "integrates very nicely with Salesforce," Karel said.
"Today, 100% of our customers use Salesforce, which means that they get value by adding Clari to Salesforce to help them in pipeline inspection and better forecasts "he noted.
Clari is "more of a mining prospector than a CRM platform, although there is a lot of overlap, especially since Salesforce came down from the rabbit hole [with Einstein]," observes Michael Jude. , Director of Research at Stratecast / Frost & Sullivan.
"It's more about seeing opportunities in the CRM dataset," he told CRM Buyer.
CRM packages are "basically limited by representatives providing information, which is always a fight," said Karel. "We are not limited to the information of the RCMP: since the early days we have been receiving additional information from other systems such as email and calendar, and we are just scratching the surface."
Clari and AI
AI "is the heart of our platform," said Karel. "We have internal data scientists who really put very practical applications with AI."
Clari has more than 100 sales organizations that use his hands-on applications of AI, he noted.
Among these applications, there is the scoring of opportunities. "We look at patterns that lead to the probability of winning or losing [a sale]," said Karel.
"We are seeing increased focus on sales activation platforms," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research.
"The rise of AI has led to new capabilities and new suppliers," she told CRM Buyer.
Many of these applications are marketed as additions to the CRM, "because it's an easier sell than replacing an existing sales force automation package. ", observes Wettemann," but many also have SFA capabilities. "
While CRM vendors such as Salesforce offer their own commercial performance management capabilities, niche players like Clari "often offer lower-cost tools," notes Wettemann, "with more prepackaged capabilities than larger vendors, which means less tedious administrative work to put in place. "
Richard Adhikari has been a reporter at ECT News Network since 2008. His fields of intervention are cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, the software development, the central and midrange computer. and the development of applications. He has written and edited for many publications, including Information Week and Computerworld . He is the author of two books on client / server technology.
Email Richard.