“We had the tool customized so much —close to 30,000 lines of code (!) — it was unusable by most. Our CRO couldn't even log in.”
Slow to innovate. Inability for CRO to log in. Unusable by most. No single source of truth.
Suffice it to say, a CRM alone was not the ideal platform for F5, a Fortune 1000 organization that helps companies better manage traffic on the internet by optimizing and securing apps and APIs.
As a large enterprise organization — selling both hardware and software — F5 was running an inefficient revenue collaboration and governance process.
It was time to look for a new platform.
Relying solely on a CRM meant his team was only able to review one deal at a time. It was impossible to see his entire pipeline health in one glance. This made it challenging to have valuable business discussions and deal reviews.
With Clari, the intuitive UI gives Andrew a “much better read on deals as we progress through the quarter.” For the first time ever, the team has confidence in calling that quarterly number.
F5 was reliant on IT to make feature changes with their CRM — selling subscriptions or SaaS or any acquisition. “It took 3-5+ months to get things done. Some things we asked for years ago, and they're still sitting as an open ticket to this day!”
With Clari, Andrew’s team has gained back control. “Working with the Clari team to make changes at a pace that is excessively fast — is something we've never experienced before. Clari makes things happen with our weekly stand-up customer success meetings. It’s been phenomenal.”
Added bonus: They no longer have to lean on their IT team.
Before, the forecast rollup was based on “meetings and activity,” — not ideal for accuracy.
With Clari, Andrew has all the data and insights to gauge quarterly forecasting accuracy — what’s happening at the account, how engaged the reps are, who they are engaged with, and conversations with the C-levels, “Clari makes everything simple.”
Forecasting and revenue management in a complex enterprise business — one that sells both hardware and software — is not easy.
Andrew loves how Clari pulls in data at the product line level.
“Much of our business is sold as one opportunity, broken out within hardware, software, and various business units. Because we pull it into Clari at the product line level and we have the mapping already completed, we're able to forecast the business units accordingly, something that we weren't able to do before.”
Frontline managers love Clari, too. They finally get real visibility into what’s happening as opposed to just relying on hearsay. With Clari, F5’s sales managers now receive real-time information about the account, the activities, and who they're engaging with, so they can spend more time coaching their team instead of hunting down information.
But Andrew and Global Sales Operations was not the only team at F5 on the hunt to improve revenue collaboration. F5’s sales team was looking to replace Salesforce Sales Engagement to consolidate, simplify, and accelerate its entire revenue process into one unified platform.
Hannah King, Director of Global Demand Response at F5, saw a big gap in the reporting and analytics in Salesforce Sales Engagement and knew there had to be a better solution out there.
There was no way to measure what was working and what wasn’t — a true blindspot as a sales leader.
Hannah and Gavin Grisham, the leader of F5’s Global Digital Sales Tools, evaluated all of the top sales engagement competitors, including Outreach and Salesloft, and ultimately went with Groove.
Why? Only Groove has their six must-haves to operate efficiently:
Gavin and Hannah found multiple limitations with Salesforce Sales Engagement: poor activity capture, a lack of visibility into what reps were doing, a lack of reporting, and a disgruntled workforce from the burden of use.
The team also was leaning in on consolidation. “We didn't want a platform that would operate on a separate database. We wanted to mitigate context switching in our reps day to day,” said Gavin. That knocked out Outreach and Salesloft immediately, which utilizes a second database often referred to as a “shadow CRM.”
And that left “the clear leader,” Groove, which “hit all cylinders from a needs and features perspective.”
"We didn't want a platform that would operate on a separate database. We wanted to mitigate context switching in our reps day to day."
Gavin Grisham
Global Digital Sales Tools
It started with the BDRs, with the goal of driving growth and efficiency across the global team.
“Groove,” said Gavin, “has made my day-to-day a lot easier (selfishly). But for the team, Clari just works. It’s easy to use and works within the flow of BDRs day.”
On top of making “the workforce much happier,” Groove has solved several other pain points:
But the biggest time saver and error reducer Groove has provided? Much less context switching and one single source of truth.
From Hannah’s perspective, Groove has significantly improved the ease of reps workflows, which are now much more organized and structured. Bonus: a happier, more engaged workforce!
Before Groove, F5 reps were shooting messages out and hoping something stuck. However, without real visibility into what was working, Hannah and Gavin could not figure out which messages were driving success and therefore could not standardize.
“With Groove, we went from 600 or more different messages into a few high-quality messages and templates with proven high response rates.”
Groove has completely changed the type of conversation we have with BDRs. Now, we can finally be data-driven and strategic, and less ‘here's the buttons you need to click to send an email’”
And that leads to the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, the [insert your idiom here].
Andrew, Gavin, and Hannah could not be happier with the Clari platform. All three highlighted consolidation (one unified platform) and phenomenal customer success as the biggest wins.
Gavin was not the only one excited about consolidation (note: we wrote about consolidation here).
Andrew shared, “Clari’s forecast capabilities have taken 4 existing tools and combined them into one. The power is real. And I can only imagine what's going to happen as additional acquisitions and platform evolutions occur.”
“Clari's customer success model has been phenomenal,” shared Andrew. “We envy it here.”
The weekly standups to “get things done and drive usage” have been instrumental to driving success on his team.
“We've actually shared some of those documents internally to see if we can change how we have our own customer success team operate.”
Hannah and her team will be leveraging Groove Spaces as a way to collaborate on live Salesforce account lists and opportunities to accelerate deal cycles and close more revenue. They anticipate a lot of great coaching conversations from a management perspective with all of the new reporting and benchmarking Groove has enabled.
“Helping BDRs think more strategically about how they're approaching their territory through Spaces is a big initiative. We are also excited to leverage Groove for our overall go-to-market priorities,” shared Hannah.
Thanks to Groove, F5 has been able to empower its sellers and increase workplace happiness.