Clari – Nipping at Salesforce’s Heels?
A brief while ago I had the chance of talking to Andy Byrne, CEO of Clari, about how AI can help making sales organizations more effective and efficient. Clari is a vendor of Opportunity-to-Close solutions. G2Crowd lists the company amongst the leaders of its Sales Analytics Software quadrant, while Gartner Group in 2017 named it a cool vendor in the Tech Go-To-Market. Shortly after the conversation Clari announced the closure of a $35 Million funding round “following record growth”, essentially a tripling of their customer base while maintaining a near 100 per cent renewal rate. According to Andy, the company applies “machine learning focused on sales”, i.e. predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve pipeline visibility and to get more insight into which opportunities are more likely to close than others. This helps in focusing on these opportunities. This solution was developed after having in depth conversation with a number of big sales teams, figuring out their challenges/problems. As a result of this the company is addressing three problems. Many to most sales reps do not consider CRM systems (or SFA systems, for that matter) as particularly helpful. Sales managers do have a poor visibility into what their teams are doing, with which opportunities they spend their time. Executives and Sales Operations are dealing with “XLS hell” because the system’s forecasting ability is broken. All in all, points two and three are consequences of point one. If a system is not of help it is a time-waster and tends to be avoided. Data about opportunities will not be entered in a timely manner nor will it be very accurate. Clari’s...
Rethink CRM to be CEM
Businesses are in a difficult situation. Today’s customers demand more experiences and contextually relevant engagements than they are equipped to deliver. The secret behind the abbreviation CEM is more important than ever. This places the businesses on a difficult and challenging trail that they need to carefully navigate in order to be and stay successful. The business challenge is that technology helps everyone, especially customers. This is because to the increasing proliferation of consumer technology, it is far easier and cheaper for customers to implement and use technology to their advantage as it is for businesses. A director of merchandising of a 1 Bn+ retailer put like this: “By the time we catch up to technology it will have moved past us again.” Examples for the truth of this statement in the past decade include the meteoric rise of messaging services and, before that, social media, powered by smartphones that made the Internet ubiquitous. As a consequence of this today’s customer is less depending on company marketing- or sales organizations and has a far higher reach when it comes to satisfying an information need. Consequently, Google finds that a whopping 99.8 per cent of all online ads are simply … ignored. Sales representatives are on the verge of becoming irrelevant. An increasing number of studies find that customers contact a sales representative only after a product decision has been made. Other studies determine that customers are abandoning shopping carts already following a single poor service experience. While these studies often are commissioned by vendors there still are too many of them to not indicate that there is a problem....
Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 – A Quantum Leap?
The News On February 14, 2018 Nimble announced the launch of Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, their new powerful mobile contact, relationship and pipeline manager for Office 365 and G-Suite. The company also announced a bundling of PieSync’s B2B cloud integration platform to become an end-to-end social relationship management platform for all company contact records, regardless of where those records are stored. The new mobile app “unifies contacts from siloed mobile, cloud based and desktop records into a comprehensive relationship manager. It delivers the history of conversations and social context for everyone you meet, and it enables you to easily follow up and follow through on opportunities …” Besides introducing important features like business card scanning, the ability to send templated and tracked emails, and a mobile pipeline manager for tracking follow-through, Nimble Mobile 3.0 provides easy access to all company contact records, including social enrichment and history of email and Twitter interactions. In addition, the software introduces the ability to research new contacts on the fly via a deep integration with the iOS share menu. The latter enables users to stay within one app instead of toggling between them, which is a drag on mobile productivity. The ability to research new contacts on the fly gives teams and professionals valuable sales intelligence by using the iOS Share menu to “Nimble” a person, i.e. discover their social profiles, areas of influence, company, work description, etc. In other words, it is possible to build a Nimble record for contacts in your email, calendar and contacts apps, on the Internet or for a variety of other apps, in real time. The application...