It's 10:23 pm and Marketing has asked me to write a blog. I'm completely fried with a total mental block.
But then I start thinking about Groove, our latest acquisition. I think about our history and all that we've accomplished. I think about the future innovations we're building for customers. I think about our team, our market leadership position, our balance sheet, our board, our customers, our culture. And then BOOM ... the juices flow through me.
Let me say right away that we love the Groove product, technology, and people. Shout out to all of the Groovers. You've built something special and we're going to show it to the world!
This might seem like an odd way to start off a blog about a major acquisition, but let me explain ...
Two years ago, our head of marketing said. "We've been evaluating a new sales engagement solution that is far superior to our current vendor with rich capabilities that span across our SDRs, AEs, and AMs." So we deployed it across all teams and they fell in love with it, period. All teams increased pipeline, conversion rates, and win rates.
As the months went on, we kept hearing great things about Groove in the market and I kept hearing from our internal teams, "We love Groove!"
Then, coincidentally, I got a call from a valued customer at a Fortune 500 company (#64 on the list). He said:
I keep hearing great things in the hallways and through various Slack channels about Clari and Groove. It's 'Clari this' and 'Groove that.' You're both critical platforms for running revenue for us. I know the CEO well over there. You guys would get along great, you've both built great products, you think alike, and you've both built amazing cultures. You should consider a partnership. You want an introduction?
So began the courtship.
Fun fact: Nearly the exact same process occurred when we acquired Wingman, the best solution for Conversational Intelligence (CI). We evaluated it, our teams fell in love with it, we replaced the incumbent solution we had, we acquired the company, and now it's fully integrated into our platform with a lovely unified experience with 500+ customers loving it.
Yes, we're getting pretty good at identifying and acquiring world-class product and companies. On the journey to legendary, building an M&A machine can be a strategic weapon, and we’re excited about our progress here. But if you asked me what I am most excited about, it's not just Groove. We have a new level of internal R&D velocity (at much larger scale) that I've never seen before in my career, which is turning out new innovations that customers love.
OK, now that you have the courtside seat highlights, let me share some history—and where we're taking our platform, our customers, and the category.
For the last 12 years, it's been our professional responsibility to help customers transform how they Run Revenue. We see ourselves as fiduciaries, building deep trusted relationships with each customer, optimizing each critical step of their end-to-end revenue process. The net result:
- Today, more than 1,500 customers use Clari's Revenue Platform to drive more efficiency, growth, and predictability
- Executive teams, boards, and investment firms look to Clari for guidance and best practices on how to identify Revenue Leak across their companies
- The world's best consulting firms are building Revenue Transformation practices, showcasing how clients can use RevDB (Clari's purpose-built Revenue database) to achieve new levels of Revenue Precision
- We introduced a new way of thinking that is the most important topic in board meetings: Revenue Collaboration & Governance (RevCG)
- And along the way, we created one of the most exciting categories in software and the fastest growing job in America, per CNBC, Revenue Operations
We're proud of this and we're excited about this. But our excitement is eclipsed by what will happen in the next 24 months. Spoiler alert: It starts with the consolidation of the RevTech stack, simplifying how companies Run Revenue, and ends with AI transforming the Revenue Process end-to-end in ways you can't even imagine.
I always marvel at our job. It's a real privilege. We're helping some of the smartest people in the world solve really hard problems that are holding back the velocity of the most important business process in every company around the world: Revenue. That fires me up. That's what has kept me up past midnight writing this. That's what keeps me going at Mach 5. There's so much more to do. Excited to do more for you. Excited to do more with you. Thank you.
- If you want to evaluate Groove and increase your pipe, conversions, and win rates, request a Clari demo
- If you are a revenue leader wanting to learn more about RevCG, the most important topic at the executive table and in board meetings, keep reading...
OK: If you got this far, you came to a really good part of the story. If you're curious about revenue, leadership, and strategy, I think you'll really enjoy this read. Here we go:
There's so much more to talk about when it comes to Running Revenue. It's the most important topic for all CEOs. Let me give you a specific example from last week. I was at a CEO conference in Park City, Utah, where Running Revenue was the most popular topic in formal fireside chats, in group breakouts, and in casual 1:1s. What else is more important? CEOs are responsible for answering the most important question in business: Will they meet, beat or miss on Revenue?
I spent most of my time at the conference sharing the best practices and insights we've gathered over our last decade of work. Insights that have transformed how the best companies think about Running Revenue. We've framed these up into an operational strategy that revenue leaders use to drive more efficiency, growth, and predictability. We call it Revenue Collaboration & Governance (RevCG).
Revenue Collaboration
Legendary companies always have some sort of lore that describes how "the entrepreneur saw something that others didn't." What we saw was (shockingly) right under our noses, hiding in plain sight. It was how companies were Running Revenue. We saw (and studied incredibly hard) all of the meetings that were happening across all the revenue-critical employees across all departments—every meeting, of every day, of every week, of every month of the 13-week quarter.
We saw revenue-critical employees in these meetings trying incredibly hard to collaborate but struggling. The revenue-critical employees that couldn't make the meetings struggled to follow up and catch up. The revenue-critical employees outside of sales (in marketing, finance, supply chain) were in different systems, feeling handcuffed by those general-purpose legacy systems that were not purpose-built to help them collaborate around revenue and do their best work.
They were frustrated, they were angry, they felt ripped-off. I'm not kidding. There was not a single revenue-critical employee that was satisfied with the systems they were using to help them do their jobs. It was nuts!
Crazy fact: Across many customers, up to 50% of their employees are "revenue-critical!" That is, they perform some function in their department that will impact the company’s ability to generate revenue. Yet they are all in different disparate systems that were not designed to Run Revenue. Isn't that crazy?
This "aha moment" led to the design of a new AI-driven architecture, a new type of data store (RevDB), and a new set of beautiful user experiences (aka Revenue Workflows). It was the birth of a new level of thinking: Revenue Collaboration. Let me try to simplify. I will repeat this again: every meeting, of every day, of every week, of every month of the 13-week quarter. Look at how all of your revenue-critical employees need to collaborate in these meetings and do the things they need to do between these meetings to—wait for it—Run Revenue.
OK, let's take a big pause.
Think about the blueprint of how you run your 13-week revenue cadence (both CQ & NQ) and ask yourself, "Is it world-class?" Most leaders that I speak to about this topic are starving for shared learnings and best practices.
This is where Clari comes in. Here's how:
We map out and optimize your Run Revenue blueprint, we provide access to a new system (that's purpose-built) to run each meeting, across the 13-week cadence, helping all revenue-critical employees collaborate in those meetings and between meetings. We help all revenue-critical employees do their part to Run Revenue. It is the biggest opportunity hiding in plain sight for Revenue teams. What is the value of Revenue Collaboration? Increased efficiency, higher win rates, more consistent growth, and happier employees. It's not bullshit. I get LinkedIn messages and emails nearly every day from a revenue professional saying, "My life is so much easier because of Clari. Thank you!"
OK, so that's Revenue Collaboration—the "C" in RevCG
Start thinking differently about how you need to Run Revenue—how all revenue-critical employees need to collaborate—and watch what happens to your company and career (up and to the right!).
Revenue Governance
If Collaboration is the Yin, Governance is the Yang. When we think about Revenue, what is the end goal of boards and executive teams? They want consistent, durable growth quarter over quarter achieved in the most efficient and effective manner—consistently, repeatedly, predictably. Revenue Governance is the core strategy that enables executive teams to achieve this end goal.
Again, let me try to take this down to "street level" understanding for us.
Every CRO I've spent time with over the last decade wants (no—needs) to drive a level of accountability, discipline, and behavior across all of their revenue teams, from marketing and pre-sales to finance and post-sales. Accountability, discipline, and behavior that can produce consistent and predictable results, quarter after quarter. The best CROs discuss having a TOP LEVEL methodology that they deploy both down and across their army of quota carriers and supporting cast. This, too, is rooted in the 13-week Revenue cadence.
As we watched how these leaders tried to deploy their methodologies down and across their teams—and as we studied the analytical needs of each Revenue leader from the first-line managers to the second line, to the third line, all the way up to the CRO, CFO, and executive management teams—we identified a huge set of issues that the leaders faced.
Let me make one big-picture point right now. We were spending time with the very best revenue leaders in the industry, and yet the systems that they were using were failing them. They had myriad blind spots across their deals, teams, and regions. They struggled to get real-time insights that would expose the risk and upside across their businesses. The CRM would fail them so they'd go to Excel, then Excel would fail them, so they'd go to BI, and everyone knows you can't Run Revenue through a bunch of reports. As a result, these best-in-class leaders never realized their fullest potential, which in turn limited their own team's potential and their company's potential. It was kind of tragic, really.
So, here comes our second "aha moment" on our journey. If Revenue Collaboration helps all revenue-critical employees perform their jobs at the highest level (Yin), Revenue Governance helps all leaders drive the consistent operational and behavior patterns—both deep and wide—that lead to the best and most predictable results (Yang). This led to the design of a new type of predictive analytical engine, a new type of API, and a new set of "executive-focused" user experiences (aka workflows). Workflows (and insights) that leaders could use to drive new levels of accountability, discipline, and behaviors that drive more efficiency, growth, and predictability. It was the birth of Revenue Governance. Again, this is a new thinking, but it's the most important thinking happening in boardrooms.
So, how does Clari help drive more Yang, you ask? Working off your Run Revenue blueprint, we provide revenue leaders—from the front line all the way up to the exec staff—with access to a new (purpose-built) system that provides AI-driven insights across every dimension of Revenue. Something that, frankly, is just not possible with CRM/XLS/BI. This is not a knock against these tools. They weren't built from the ground up to perform AI or Run Revenue.
What's the value of Revenue Governance? Consistency, predictability, durability—enabling revenue leaders to execute a "beat and raise" cadence, quarter after quarter. This too is not bullshit. At the CEO conference I was at last week, with more than 150 CEOs from the best companies in the world, time and time again, I had CEOs come up to me and express their gratitude for what we have built, how it makes their lives easier, how it makes their teams better, how they can do more than ever before with our Revenue Platform. Their companies are scaling, and Clari is the engine behind that.
Let me end by saying this. Does this mean our software is perfect? No way. We have so much to work on. There are tons of things we can do better for customers. These are really hard problems. It is super painful at times to solve these problems the right way (e.g. make scalable, extensible, adaptable), but it is so worth it. So, let the suffering continue ;-) More to do for you!
Grateful,
Andy