As a revenue leader, you know your team’s ability to close a deal is highly tied to the availability and the quality of the deal data you have at your disposal.
Ideally, any person on your team with a revenue target should be able to inspect the exact deal-level details they need at any moment, so they can make sound decisions based on trusted data.
And yet, so many revenue teams struggle to achieve this level of visibility. Why is that?
At Clari, we strongly believe it’s because they’re relying upon cumbersome-to-build, ineffective sales reports.
Why Traditional Sales Reports Just Don’t Cut It
Reports are failing your team for a number of reasons:
Sales reports aren’t pulled by the people who use them. Sales reporting systems and tools are powerful, but have notoriously poor user experiences, leaving sales reps and leaders to spend valuable time fumbling around or too overwhelmed to even try. This means sales reports either end up with incorrect data or offloaded to sales ops. The latter scenario results in a lot of back and forth where sales ops has to guess which report has the right data for the right person. To top it off, this makes it very easy for a rep or manager to draw the wrong conclusions from a report, because they aren’t familiar with its internal logic.
Sales reports aren’t flexible. As their sales report workload grows, sales ops starts building reports that are generalized to answer a wide swath of possible questions. But that comes at the cost of personalization. With generalized sales reports, you’re still not able to truly hone in on all the details that matter most to you, such as identifying deals above a certain size or in a particular geography. Have a follow-up question about the data you’re looking at? That’s going to require you to go back to sales ops to ask for a new report.
Sales reports aren’t real-time. By the time you’ve actually accessed the sales report, it’s already out-of-date because some (or all) of the following reasons:
- The report is coming from a data source that isn’t fully up-to-date
- It took time to put the sales report together and QA and/or
- The report has been sitting in your inbox for a few days
If any of these things happen, you’re now attempting to draw insights from inaccurate data that does not reflect the current state of the business, which can be costly.
Sales reports aren’t actionable. Even if a report provides you some interesting information, it’s hard to know what to do with it. If you’re a manager looking at a report of fifty open opportunities that are currently in your commit, can you tell at a glance which ones are most at risk to close? Chances are, you need to do a lot of work to dig through the data just to come up with some guesses of where your team should focus their time, and sales reports typically don’t allow that level of inspection.
The Replacement for Sales Reports
At Clari, we help you evolve beyond the old way of pulling sales reports by making it easy for the entire revenue operations team (sales, marketing, customer success, finance) to get at the data they care about directly. You and your team can save time, be more productive, and overachieve on your revenue goals.
Here’s how Clari is helping revenue teams get rid of traditional reporting:
Drive results with data that’s always real-time and predictable.
Clari automatically tracks all sales activity and customer engagement data (emails, meetings, files sent, etc) and pulls it into a single platform visible to the entire revenue operations team. Clari’s real-time bi-directional sync with your CRM gives you the confidence that you’re acting on the most up-to-date information. Combined with Clari’s AI-driven predictive scoring and analytics, this can help your entire revenue team immediately spot slipped deals, prioritize the right opportunities to pursue, or provide timely coaching to reps — in real-time with just a few clicks of the mouse, and without pulling a single report.
Enable your team to self-serve their data needs through an intuitive, personalized experience.
At Clari, we took the time to understand how revenue teams interpret and interact with data so we could build an intuitive user experience for opportunity management.
With Clari, learning from your opportunity data is no longer a cumbersome task restricted to your CRM power users. In only a few clicks, anyone on your team can get to the exact deal data they need, and immediately take the appropriate next steps — no more waiting around for someone else to build a report. This also frees up sales ops from endless reporting requests, enabling them to focus on more strategic challenges.
What’s more, this simplicity doesn’t come at the expense of flexibility and analytical horsepower. Any field that’s in your CRM can be used as a filter or group, making the possibilities limitless.
Imagine being able to group or filter your deals by any of the below fields with just a few clicks:
- Close Date
- Pipeline Stage
- Deal Status
- Opportunity Owner (individual or region)
- Forecast Category (Commit, Best Case, Most Likely, etc)
- Deal Size
This enables everyone from reps to sales ops to CROs to maintain their own view of the business based on their individual needs. For example:
Spot specific deals based on type or status. When viewing all open opportunities, a manager can easily see deals in the final stage that need coaching to close, or early stage deals that might have potential to be brought in.
Get granular with predictive analytics. Using the ‘Pulse’ analytics module, a sales executive can see in real-time where the business is projected to land this quarter by triangulating their call with their managers call and Clari’s AI projection based on historical data analysis. If that executive wants to see how a specific region is projected to land so they can take action on coverage gaps, they can do that too
Reporting is a relic of the past. Instead, empower your revenue teams to always have the insights and information they need at their fingertips. Don’t reimagine reporting — replace it!
Learn more about Clari’s Connected Revenue Operations platform today.