Andy Byrne is the founder and CEO of Clari, an enterprise artificial intelligence B2B SaaS platform that enables companies to build more pipeline, accelerate revenue growth and increase revenue predictability.
Andy has a long-term relationship with machine learning from his previous company Clearwell Systems (acquired by Symantec), and that experience was the foundation of his vision for Clari. Andy identified that machine learning had not previously been used to help sales teams close deals faster, assist managers to accelerate revenue velocity, and enable executives to gain enhanced visibility into revenue forecasts.
The first topic we covered was the definition of Revenue Operations? Andy defined it as the people, the process, and the technology that drives a company's revenue engine and orchestrates sales, marketing, and post-sales activity.
Do we need another piece of technology to automate the revenue process? Andy highlighted that his customers are demanding a better way to align, integrate and orchestrate every step and point of engagement with the customer journey. Andy highlighted that with the rise of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), there is a real movement to re-engineer go-to-market processes and even organizational structures.
When asked about the CRO having both marketing and sales, Andy highlighted that the CMO is traditionally responsible for pipeline, brand, and product marketing. If you think about those three areas, the #1 priority is pipeline which creates an intimate connection between a CRO and CMO. Moreover, since the CMO also owns brand, it makes more sense for the CRO and CMO to be co-equal peers, and not worry about who reports to who.
Clari actually integrated demand generation and Sales Development into one integrated organization. Andy highlighted that took that integration one step further, but also creating a Value Engineering group into the same organization with the specific responsibility to measure and share the return on investment for their customers.
Value engineering is a combination of art and science, to prove the mathematical results of using your technology or platform using empirical evidence versus ad-hoc, anectodal stories. This approach to highlight the value received has led to the expansion of the Clari platform beyond sales, to both Marketing and Customer Success. In fact, the post-sales motion focused on up-sells and cross-sells directly increases Net Dollar Retention Rate is has been key to the increased acceleration of the Clari growth story.
Revenue Intelligence is a "buzz phrase" that is being tossed around the B2B SaaS industry. Revenue Intelligence is the ability to gain insights into communications and transactions with the target buyers and customers. A key term Andy highlighted was "signals" are coming from multiple sources - typically transactional systems like conversational intelligence, sales engagement, and even CRM platforms. By aggregating all of these signals into one "system", the ability to surface key insight nuggets materially increases the visibility for executives to make better decisions and increase revenue forecast accuracy.
If you are involved in a B2B company that is growing quickly, and needs to drive revenue across customer acquisition, retention, and expansion motions, listening to Andy's insights and experiences gained from hundreds of Clari customers, this is a great conversation that provides several "information nuggets" that can quickly be leveraged to accelerate predictable revenue growth.