Sales and RevOps leaders know that to remain competitive today, their teams need data-driven technologies that surface actionable, predictive insights to help them win more deals and hit their goals.
Revenue intelligence solutions use data and AI to provide information that sellers can confidently act on, like sales forecasts, red flags in the pipeline, upsell opportunities, and the likelihood a deal will close.
There is a lot to consider when choosing between top revenue intelligence solutions like Clari and Salesforce. As a leading Revenue Intelligence partner, we run into Clari often, and clients are always looking to better understand the pros and cons of the tool. Hitting revenue targets is business critical, so it’s worth taking the time to evaluate what your team needs to be most successful.
Keep reading to learn more about the capabilities to look for and how to move forward with implementing a new revenue intelligence platform in your business.
What is revenue intelligence?
To boil it all the way down, revenue intelligence (or RevIntel) is exactly what it sounds like — technology that makes your revenue operations smarter.
To make the concept more tangible, I’ll use the example of a smart thermostat (like Nest) versus a traditional thermostat. For decades, traditional thermostats were simply used to display the current temperature and set the desired temperature in your house. With a smart thermostat, you get that basic functionality plus an app that provides insights and recommendations to help you adjust your temperature to meet your family’s needs at any given time. It can even help you save money on your electric bill with eco-friendly settings. You get real-time data to make better decisions about heating and cooling your home.
Revenue intelligence software works in a similar (albeit, more complex) way. It does more than just track deals and activities — it analyzes customer and pipeline data and applies predictive analytics to help sales and RevOps teams make more informed decisions and take smart, timely actions to drive more revenue. These insights can be delivered in the CRM via dashboards, alerts, data visualizations, team leaderboards, and more.
Sales reps are served up insights about the health of their pipeline and the best actions to take on each opportunity to keep things progressing. Sales managers and leaders get a bigger picture look at forecasts, pipeline coverage, how the team is trending, deals at risk, KPIs and metrics, etc. Essentially, your RevIntel solution is keeping a thousand fingers on a thousand different pulses in your business to help you close more deals, faster and more efficiently.
What to look for in a revenue intelligence solution
When choosing the right RevIntel solution for your organization, you want one that provides all the functionality your team needs today, plus the flexibility to make customizations and the scalability to grow with your business.
At a minimum, your revenue intelligence tool should deliver:
- Revenue metrics. Data that speaks to the overall health of your pipeline (e.g., deal velocity, open pipeline, etc.)
- Opportunity insights. Metrics to gauge the health of individual deals, supplemented with AI predictions (e.g., opportunity scoring, whitespace opportunities, etc.)
- Rep performance insights. Metrics that help managers see how individual team members are performing and where they may need coaching and support (e.g., rep win rate, days to close, average deal size, etc.)
- Team performance insights. Metrics that allow managers and leaders to get a big-picture view of team performance, identify top performers, and flag process gaps or at-risk deals (e.g., closed-won sales, pipeline coverage, activities completed, etc.)
- Predictive forecasting metrics. Compares your current sales performance against past performance with pipeline trends over time and uses predictive models for increased forecast accuracy and actionability.
When shopping for revenue intelligence solutions, consider the state of your revenue operations today, and how you’d ideally like things to be down the road. Always choose technologies that integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, don’t require a lot of extra clicks for your team, and can grow with you as you make process improvements.
Clari vs. Salesforce Revenue Intelligence
Clari and Salesforce both offer leading solutions for revenue intelligence, so it makes sense that you might be evaluating both. As a Salesforce partner, we’re admittedly a bit biased, but have good reason to recommend it over point solutions like Clari, especially if you’re already using Salesforce CRM.
While Clari provides most of the standard functionality mentioned in the list above, the platform is built for a narrow set of use cases and is, for the most part, one-size-fits-all. It focuses primarily on forecasting use cases and doesn’t allow for predictions outside of Clari’s core objects. Clari’s platform is also limited in terms of flexibility, as it allows for little to no customization of data models to fit the unique complexities of your business.
Salesforce Revenue Intelligence, on the other hand, offers a fully customizable analytics suite with configurable components, and the ability to build your own scoring model to increase forecasting accuracy.
With Salesforce’s RevIntel solution, you get a full suite of predictive analytics capabilities and dashboards out of the box, embedded right into Sales Cloud, where your team is already working. You also get the flexibility to customize your functionality and visualizations so the solution fits within the context of your business (not the other way around).
Get it all (for less) with Einstein 1
If you made your way to this blog post, chances are good you already house most of your revenue-related data in Salesforce. (If not, we can help with that!) So rather than tack on a separate RevIntel point solution to your tech stack, it probably makes more sense to keep those data sources connected and surface revenue insights in one central location, to maintain a 360 customer view.
With the recent release of Salesforce Einstein 1, you now get RevIntel plus Data Cloud, generative AI, and all the analytics capabilities you need to forecast revenue more accurately and surface predictive insights across the entire buying cycle — all while consolidating your tech stack and reducing your total cost of ownership.
The Einstein 1 bundle is a revenue efficiency powerhouse. It includes Einstein Copilot, Salesforce’s generative AI solution that automates daily tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, updating records, and more. Einstein 1 also includes a Slack integration that allows sales reps to view and update their opportunities right within Slack.
The idea behind bundling your RevOps solutions within Salesforce is that your sales team should be able to have all the insights and tools they need built into the normal flow of work, so they can spend less time swiveling between siloed systems and more time having valuable conversations with customers and prospects.
Let’s make your RevOps dreams a reality
Just getting started with revenue intelligence? While Salesforce’s Einstein 1 bundle has incredible capabilities right out of the box, Atrium offers a set of pre-built accelerators to further supplement your RevIntel implementation.
Have a complex business or want more flexibility in your revenue operations? Our data science and AI experts can help you build custom visualizations and the best user experience to meet your needs, with business outcomes in mind.
Looking to get started? Our Revenue Intelligence Quickstart has you covered.
