If you’re using Clari’s Autocapture feature, life just got a little better. We’ve been hard at work improving our Autocapture product to give you better, more complete data about your customer relationships while giving your reps time back to sell. We have done this by spending a lot of time with our customers and learning about key gaps in manually entered CRM data that could be filled using AI and automation. The result of all these Zoom meetings, whiteboard sessions, double espressos and Slack messages is a set of three new features that we are very excited to share.
But first, a little refresher on why you need Autocapture to run your business and drive revenue growth and retention.
Autocapture Overview
Customer relationship management (CRM) software was created 20 years ago to give businesses a way to store data about their customer relationships. Over the past 2 decades, it has become increasingly clear that while CRM is a critical part of the tech stack for any B2B business, the data it contains is, at best, a vague indication of the state of those relationships. The saying “the map is not the territory” feels appropriate here.
The consequences of the discrepancy between CRM data and the true state of customer relationships can be significant:
- It can be the difference between recognizing the need to mitigate risk on a key deal for the quarter and ultimately saving the deal, and missing the warning signs and losing it.
- It can require a new rep taking over an account to completely rebuild the relationship from scratch, not knowing who the most relevant stakeholders are.
- It can prevent marketing teams from understanding which campaigns are influencing won business, forcing them to invest millions of dollars based on intuition rather than data.
The reason this discrepancy exists in the first place is that CRM relies on manual data entry to be complete and accurate. As it is, sales reps spend a lot of their time updating CRM data: adding and tweaking opportunities, filling in next steps, creating new contacts — the list goes on and on.
Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, no matter how much time is spent on these tasks, the data quality will never reach the proverbial summit.
We created Autocapture to give our customers another way to solve this problem. By integrating directly with sales reps’ emails and calendars, Autocapture harvests every customer interaction as it happens, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
All of this data — over 300 million sales emails and 40 million sales meetings in the last year alone — is analyzed in our industry-leading “Data Hub” and intelligently associated with relevant CRM objects. This then allows us to automate key data-entry tasks such as new contact creation, opportunity-contact role association and activity logging.
The following features are recent Autocapture enhancements that have further raised the bar on the completeness and quality of your CRM data.
New and Improved Activity Logging
All of the rich activity data in Clari’s Data Hub is used to power insights about your opportunities, accounts and reps in our application. While we have tried to address the most common questions facing revenue operations teams, there will always be more ways that customers can tap into this gold mine of data than we can support in the product.
Having every sales rep activity in CRM has long been a dream for our customers, in large part because it enables that data to be used and analyzed in many different ways.
That dream is now a reality thanks to some big improvements in Autocapture’s capabilities around syncing meetings and emails with Salesforce. Unlike many tools in the activity-logging space, Autocapture requires no action by sales reps to get managers the data they need. It may sound simple, but even requiring reps to check a box to log an activity to CRM will drastically reduce adoption.
Contact Enrichment
With our new contact-enrichment capabilities, we can give you even more information about the people that your reps are engaging with throughout the sales cycle. Having data points like “Title” for every member of the buying team allows you to do things like analyze the personas that are involved in successful deals. Armed with these insights, you can ensure that you have the necessary marketing collateral to target those personas as well as factor this into your sales managers’ deal inspection process.
Automated Lead Conversion
Many of the people whom reps meet with during a sales cycle never get created as contacts at all (as many as 70% in the data we’ve analyzed). But that’s not the only data-quality issue related to contact data. Some of the people who get involved in the later stages of a deal may already be in CRM as a lead, but ask your closest sales rep when they last converted a lead to a contact while trying to get a deal over the finish line. The answer will most likely be never.
Why does this matter?
Those existing leads have valuable data associated with them, such as the history of marketing campaigns they have engaged with. Unless that lead is converted to a contact and associated with the relevant opportunity, your marketing team won’t have visibility into which campaign touches helped win business.
We may sound like a broken record at this point, but the only viable solution to this problem is automation. Now Autocapture can convert existing leads into contacts as soon as they engage with your sales rep. In the process we also ensure that all dots are connected by associating the newly converted contact with the relevant account and opportunity.
If you are a current Clari Autocapture customer, reach out to your CSM to ensure that you are taking advantage of the latest and greatest capabilities.
For those of you who aren’t Clari Autocapture customers, are you wondering why your sales team isn’t using this already? Us too. Request a demo to learn more about how AI and automation can fill in critical CRM blindspots.