Back on October 25th, our friends at Clari announced the expansion of their Opportunity-To-Close partner ecosystem. ClearSlide joined as a key application partner, along with DocuSign an Xactly. Why am I so excited about this partnership?

B2B sales is hard. Period. Despite the investment in sales technologies and sales enablement, the average percentage of B2B salespeople making quota is at its lowest level in the last five years – now sitting at just 53% of sales reps hitting their number (CSO Insights). In addition, Forrester Research indicates that 94% of sales leaders lack confidence in their teams’ ability to forecast accurately. It gets worse… according to a recent Clari survey of 300 sales professionals, only 7% of companies can forecast within 5% of actual achievement even 2 weeks before the end of the quarter.

But there’s hope – Clari’s integration with ClearSlide gives sales teams new insights into pipeline management and forecasting using customer engagement data. This has the promise of bringing visibility and with it some peace of mind to the jobs of sales leaders and operations.

Clari’s Opportunity-to-Close platform applies AI against a range of customer engagement signals giving a sales rep visibility into the degree to which a prospect is engaging with files, documents, and presentations that have been shared during the sales cycle. Through Clari’s integration with ClearSlide, we’re jointly arming sales and marketing leaders with customer engagement intelligence so they can assess deal momentum, forecast risk, and know where to jump in and provide coaching.

All of you reading this blog have a sales process that attempts to follow a set of predefined stages with prescribed actions, and potentially gathers data to indicate getting a prospect closer to a buying decision. Some of this process is captured in your CRM. But how do you know if your rep presented the right content, or delivered the right messages, during the course of their interactions with the prospect? How do you know if your rep had a superficial, short conversation with one contact – which is likely an indicator that buyer isn’t taking your solution or rep seriously, or a deep, meaningful discussion with five members of the buying process – which likely indicates significant interest? Do you track this? In your pipeline reviews, do you have the data signals that help you determine risky opportunities not likely to close versus the ones with strong momentum?

With Clari’s integration of ClearSlide engagement data, sales managers and reps can transparently discuss the level of engagement activity for each opportunity – the engagement data is factual. For sales leaders and sales operations, they now have the ability to get leading indicators like ClearSlide total engagement time for the opportunity as well as the ability to drill into the engagement activity across the entire sales process.

Consider the type of insights reps and managers can now leverage during this inspection process – insights that can give them a huge competitive advantage:

• See total engagement time per opportunity, compared against peer deals or engagement time for closed deals at this stage.
• View engagement time by communication channels across email correspondence and meetings.
• View whether reps have met with key executives, influencers and advocates outside the primary opportunity contact.
• Drill into meetings to see who attended, what content was presented, and how much time was spent on each content item as well as each slide/page. If you offered two options in a proposal emailed to the prospect see how much time they spent viewing each option.

To learn more about how ClearSlide and Clari work together to accelerate sales, contact your ClearSlide account executive or reach out to us at partnerships@clearslide.com. We’re also holding a webinar with Clari on December 12, 2017 titled: “Unlocking VPs of Sales Secrets to Pipeline Management and Forecast Accuracy” hosted by Jeff Schmidt, ClearSlide VP Worldwide Sales, and Marc Silberstrom, Clari VP of WW Sales.