February 18, 2016
By Oren Smilansky,

Clari Launches Flow Analytics to Boost Sales Team Performance

Clari, a provider of predictive sales tools, today released Flow Analytics, designed to give organizations insights into their customer pipelines for making the adjustments necessary to close deals.

Clari’s products utilize data science and machine learning capabilities to assist sales organizations in efficiently tending to their daily tasks. The goal is to empower executives with accurate forecasts while giving managers the information they need to coach reps and ultimately help them make better decisions during customer interactions.

"We've been [specializing in] sales analytics for about three years now, and one of the fundamental premises of what we're trying to do as a company—[and one] that's very different from a traditional business intelligence (BI) approach—is [ that we are] trying to understand sales teams," says Kurt Leafstrand, vice president of product at Clari. To that end, each of Clari's new releases is intended to further connect what Leafstrand refers to as the "golden triangle" of the sales organization—executives, managers, and reps—so that they may improve their overall team performance.

To encourage ongoing cooperation among the corners of the triangle, Flow Analytics displays all stages of an opportunity in a single, "consumer-oriented" chart. According to Leafstrand, the solution differs from traditional CRM and BI tools in that it paints a detailed history and includes visibility into customer activity as well as a "data science score," all of which gives users a clear understanding of what occurred with a particular prospect and why. The dashboard displays “Won” deals in green, “Slipped” deals in yellow, and “Lost” deals in red, and enables users to dig into individual instances and see how the status of a prospect has changed over time.

"We've designed Flow to be flexible," Leafstrand stresses. Rather than operating as a static dashboard, it is an interactive tool that can be operated in a number of unique ways. Managers, for instance, can tap into it to view day-to-day or week-to-week updates that enable them to oversee opportunities that are most in danger. With such real-time knowledge, leaders can take action and coach their reps to resurrect customer conversations that are “falling off the radar,” Leafstrand says.

The dashboard also allows users “to go back in time—which is actually a pretty unique feature—and look at what happened over the last month of a quarter,” Leafstrand says. Like a football team going over old game videos, sales teams can compare their plans for a quarter and how they panned out, and use that information to strategize for their future sales periods.

So far, the product has been employed by companies like Five9 and Nimble Storage. Clari's products are geared toward midsize to large tech companies with sophisticated sales teams that "have seen how hard it is to get going with traditional approaches to CRM and analytics," Leafstrand says. The vendor's other customers include Box, Juniper Networks, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks.

An upcoming release, which will be announced in the coming months, will address customer requests for added mobile functionality, Leafstrand says. The release will introduce the immediacy of Flow Analytics to handheld environments and include push notifications that signal that action needs to be taken on an account.