Black Swan was running all their forecasting through spreadsheets. They didn’t even have a business intelligence tool to augment the data. The net result was the four pipeline issues presented above.
This is how Black Swan solved its forecasting challenges after partnering with Clari. Greg shared how the team:
"The Clari Revenue Platform is the industry leader when it comes to crucial business tools: revenue conversation intelligence and coaching (Copilot) + sales engagement and prospecting (Groove)," boasts Greg.
So how did they get there?
A better, more complete solution ... with best-in-class customer support ... and Groove is one-third of the cost of our previous solution? Yes. Yes. And yes. A no-brainer.
Greg Reardon
Director of Growth Operations and Strategy at Black Swan Data
“There was a huge need to uplevel our sales tooling and overall sales process,” shared Greg.
Black Swan traditionally relied heavily on consultants to run much of its data analysis. A move to a SaaS platform that automatically — through technology and AI — generates insights from ingested data “required us to change the way our go-to-market motion was focused,” said Greg.
Working with Clari was a substantial step towards transforming their sales motion.
Before Clari, there wasn’t a solid (nor standardized) forecasting process.
Greg: “We were chasing down a million things, manually prompting on the operation side. I was extrapolating here and there, but also spent a lot of time bugging people for updates: ‘Hey, can you convert this opportunity? Where are we at on this? Have you followed up with them?’”
To make matters even messier, with even less data integrity and accuracy, Black Swan’s Salesforce instance had “awful opportunity hygiene.”
It was, in Greg’s words, “a no-brainer” to use Clari.
Greg has participated in (and led) many sales tool rollouts over his career.
Clari was unique.
“I have never heard such overwhelming positive feedback as I got from Clari,” said Greg. “We heard comments such as ‘This thing's awesome’ many, many times, from both SDRs and AEs.”
And on the backend (support), Greg rates customer success 11 out of 10, the best customer support he’s ever experienced.
“There’s an umbrella of support that covers all aspects of everything we're doing within these three tools. With one email, I'm confident I’ll get connected to brilliant people who I trust and put in the extra effort.”
On the front end, Clari is simple, easy to use, intuitive, and has a clean interface.
However, powerful adjectives from sales team members are only a plus if those words are backed up with data that has a net positive impact on the company.
Since implementing Clari, Salesforce data has been “way way better” because it’s easy for account executives to update, take notes, and so on — right in the Clari interface.
Clari does all the heavy lifting, and Greg loves how the CRM score makes it “super easy” to see how “on top of things” AEs are.
Before Groove, Black Swan Data’s provider was “causing more issues than it was solving.” It was overpriced, there were too many unused licenses, and it was siloed — not taking into account the entire tech stack.
With Groove in place, everything's getting logged automatically — something their previous platform did not do well.
Greg loves how Groove “just sits on top of Salesforce” and isn't creating its own objects. A “game changer,” in Greg’s words. “Night and day for me. It’s removed headaches and hours upon hours of manual cleaning and creating processes to avoid duplication. Groove never creates duplication issues because it just stays in Salesforce ... the data is way more reliable.”
Greg summarizes it nicely: “If you're using Clari without using Groove, you're only getting a portion of the value.”
Bonus: The sales teams love it. “Groove is the only sales tool I've ever rolled out that immediately had positive feedback. Usually, reps complain about new tools. They just want to close deals, and any new thing they have to learn is another hurdle.”
Groove is different. “We’ve finally reached that single source of truth where we know anything customer-facing is getting recorded. It's sitting in Salesforce. It's getting reported on and dashboarded through Clari.”
And Clari is saving time — a limited resource.
Greg estimates he saves 2-3 hours per week. But when he looks at the time savings across the team, that number jumps to 20+ hours per week since moving from manual to automated.
“Clari does such a good job of putting the data where people are already working and living. That saves us a lot of mental worrying ... knowing the data is reliable.”
As Greg looks into the crystal ball and muses over the future — the evolution of his sales organization, where it needs to go to continue having success and seeing growth — he knows Clari is “crucial to that process.”