What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
RevOps Reimagined: Stop Interrogating and Start Coaching Your Sales Team
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Tired of inaccurate sales forecasts and revenue surprises? You're not alone. Revenue Operations has emerged as the science behind modern selling, and it's transforming how leading companies predict and deliver their numbers.
Kevin Knieriem of Clari takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of RevOps, explaining why it's become one of the fastest-growing job categories on LinkedIn. "Selling is really the only discipline within an organization that didn't have defined processes, that didn't have automation the way that accounts payable or supply chain might," he explains, highlighting why companies struggled with reliable forecasting for decades.
The conversation explores how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing revenue management without replacing the human element. From helping sales reps focus on the right accounts to enabling managers to oversee larger teams effectively, AI serves as an amplifier rather than a replacement. Kevin shares concrete benefits seen by Clari's customers: reduced deal slippage, increased win rates, and dramatically improved forecast accuracy across all levels of the organization.
Perhaps most compelling is how proper RevOps transforms the dreaded sales review from an interrogation into a coaching opportunity. "We can go from interrogation to coaching. We know exactly where we need to focus," Kevin explains. By creating a shared view of revenue data and establishing consistent processes, teams spend less time debating reality and more time taking action to improve results.
Looking ahead, Kevin envisions every sales professional having access to a "virtual CRO" that answers questions about territory management and suggests which accounts deserve immediate attention. The future belongs to revenue teams that embrace both technology and human expertise to drive predictable growth.
Catch more insights on business technology on our new TV show, Tech Impact TV, now available on Bloomberg and Fox Business.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone. Another fascinating discussion today about RevOps and how Clary is helping change the way companies manage revenue forecasting and beyond. Kevin, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great, Evan. Thanks for having me on the show today, Well thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:I know it's your end of quarter and that's the usual challenge. Most companies have all the usual 35 years in sales, all the usual challenges around end of quarter. Before that, maybe just share with the audience how Clary got started, what was a problem you were originally trying to solve and how has that sort of evolved over time?
Speaker 2:Well, so it's been quite a journey. So in the early days, clary was really just making it easier for sales reps to interface with the CRM. So think of it as tackling things from a mobile standpoint, and what we quickly found out is reps actually love that. But there was a conversation that was happening between the sales rep and the sales manager, right, and a conversation about how they were running the territory and producing revenue. The next thing we knew is the head of revenue operations, then called sales operations came into the conversation, and so our platform grew.
Speaker 2:From there. We built the bi-directional real-time integration into the CRM and we started to build workflows out On top of that to tackle at the time some of the biggest challenges that companies had in managing their growth, which was the ability to drive repeatable revenue, the ability to forecast, which was the most important input into the operating plan of the company. And from there we've really grown into helping companies manage their critical revenue processes, all of their critical revenue employees and, at the end of the day, now are they going to meet, beat or miss on the revenue number.
Speaker 1:Sounds so simple and yet behind the scenes it's a little bit more complicated. Why is RevOps as a category, as a term of art, become so important? Obviously, sales are important, revenue is important, but the category has just exploded and you've been leading it. What's been the?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of it right is selling. Buying, transacting is digital in nature To selling is really the only discipline within an organization that didn't have defined processes, that didn't have automation the way that like accounts payable might or supply chain might, and it was really always the art of selling. Well, there's a science to it as well, right, and there's a science of driving repeatable, consistent outcomes that, if you bring data, which is critical to the conversation, define processes and the ability to have insights that help you know are you going in the right direction or not, and so I think those critical factors coming together is why you've seen the rise of revenue. Operations Quantity is one of the fastest growing jobs on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't know that. That's interesting, and forecasting is still hard. What do you think specifically makes it so tricky for most companies?
Speaker 2:Well, it's really been subjective, and so everyone used different metrics, different inputs, different outputs, to say were they going to hit their number or not, right? So you had to rely on what the sales rep was telling you. You had to rely on the experience of the manager, the manager's manager, you know all the way up. And so there was a reason most companies weren't great, very accurate at forecasting and two, the things that they forecasted weren't necessarily the things that closed. And if you take a look at the last 10 years, there's been a real focus on growth, and to hit growth you have to have repeatable process. You have to know if things are working or not, you need to know where to put your resources, and the other component that's really come in more recently is efficiency. Right, and companies need growth, but they also need it in an efficient manner, and so you can't just deploy a team number of revenue resources. You need them to be productive and you need to know that they're creating the yield that you want at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Got it. So Enter AI. The last couple of years has been extraordinary, to say the least. And how are you kind of practically using AI to make forecasting and pipeline management easier?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think one of the things Clary always did well from the early days was help the human using our AI to predict the outcome of the quarter and the following quarter. We call it Pulse. So we've been doing that level of predictive AI since the beginning.
Speaker 2:There's all new flavors of AI that are coming forward, those that we're releasing through our platform, and really so, from a clarity standpoint, what we're trying to do, we're helping the seller be more productive. We're helping the seller know where to focus and spend their time. We're helping the manager be able to manage more resources and really again help those sellers focus their time and attention in the right places. And it's showing up in all areas of the business. The other areas that we're using it, maybe outside of our own platform, are, you know well, maybe I'll rewind there a bit. Evan Selling and all the roles in selling are changing rapidly. Maybe you know more so than any place else. Think about the role of the SDR right.
Speaker 2:Today, a lot of what or maybe yesterday, a lot of what an SDR did was busy work for a sales rep right, tell me. Find the prospects, find the contacts, get their phone numbers and tell me a little bit about the account. Well, that's all automated today. Get their phone numbers and tell me a little bit about the account. Well, that's all automated today, right. And then the next part of their job was doing outbound Right, or or responding to inbound. Well, now, a lot of that can be sequenced, and the next best actions can happen after that. So what we're finding is SERs are becoming less about busy work and more about super focused in actually driving pipeline, and those things that they did before you know are now at the fingertips of everyone.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And how do you help your customers manage the kind of data problem?
Speaker 2:the messy silo, yeah this is, I think, the biggest problem that there is is everybody wants to deploy AI, and when you're deploying AI for revenue, you actually have to have what we call revenue context.
Speaker 2:For revenue, you actually have to have what we call revenue context, and so what Clary does is we bring in and integrate with all of those revenue critical systems. So think about your top of funnel systems that help you produce pipeline, your conversational intelligence data, the phone calls like this that we're recording what's happening with your post-sale conversations, what's happening in the CRM system, what's happening with data that's completely outside of systems, that might be in Snowflake but has all of your bookings and information. So this whole 360 going on around you. What we're doing is we're bringing all that data together and we snapshot it. So why do we snapshot it? Snapshotting allows us to do time series and so, now that you've got this full picture of a company's revenue data, you have a snapshot so you can understand. Based on what's happened in the past, you can compare it to what's happening now and predict the future. So, on top of that revenue database, with now revenue context, you can start to deploy AI.
Speaker 1:Brilliant and is Clary, mainly for sales, or are you seeing other functions finance, marketing, et cetera coming?
Speaker 2:on board? Great question. We kind of like to group all those go-to-market people into what we would call revenue critical employees. So finance, now CRO and CFO can have a real conversation around the health of the business, right? What does our renewals business look like? Four quarters out? Do we have enough coverage to hit our rolling four quarters of pipeline to be able to deliver for each of the territories? So all that, you now are on the same page to have a much more efficient conversation about the business. And the same goes for marketing, right, Marketing right. Sales is the customer of marketing. Marketing is there to help sales produce pipeline right, Bring it through the system, help them drive pipeline out of the install base. And so if you now have shared KPIs and you have a same conversation on the data and you can see that the inputs are producing output, it becomes critical. Same goes for the customer success teams that are servicing the customer, those that are responsible for mitigating churn or doing renewals. It really brings all of them together through one view of the business.
Speaker 1:Got it. I want to quote you on that Sales is the customer of marketing. I wish that was true more often, but I digress. What are some of the mistakes that you see when companies are implementing or managing workflows with revenue workflows, revenue processes within the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it still starts with. So who, ultimately, is responsible for the number in a company? It's typically a president or CRO, right, their job is to deliver against the plan, and we see in our install base those CROs. They're hands-on, they're data-driven, that think about producing revenue as a process, love our product and are super successful because we give them command and control over their revenue cadences and we allow them to going from leading the business quarter to quarter to guiding the business year over year, and so, in a role that the typical tenure is 18 months, we provide longevity and we make them a strategic advisor at the board level, and so I'd say those that look at the job that way are super successful with us.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And how do you generally get everyone on the same page when it comes to RevOps? Beyond just more meetings, which we all hate to have for the sake of meetings, what do you see that works?
Speaker 2:Well, I think about how I run things internally, clary, I hate internal meetings that are just for meeting sake, and so what I started to do when I got here I said is okay, we're enterprise, b2b, the way we sell, and there's four quarters in a year.
Speaker 2:Every quarter is made up of three months and there's 13 weeks in each quarter, and in our business what you do in week one is different than what you do in week four.
Speaker 2:It's different than what you do in week 12. And so I started writing down on the spreadsheet at that point what are all the critical meetings that have to happen for me to drive my process and from there moved them to calendar and then from there I actually instrumented them our product. So I know that on week two of the quarter, right, we're doing a cross-functional pipeline call with marketing and sales, and on week three, we're not just doing an in-quarter forecast but we're one-on-one forecast call, that they're having the same conversation in Europe that they're having in the Northeast, that they're having in the Southwest, by segment, and they're looking at the same data, the same way I am, and so that allows me to drive consistent process. My team knows what's expected of them. But here's what's most important. Evan right, we've all been sellers, the rep, manager, interrogation goes away and now everybody's having a realistic conversation on the reality of the business and we can go from interrogation to coaching. We know exactly where we need to focus.
Speaker 1:I love that. You probably get this asked all the time by customers. But what are the biggest benefits? Rois? The qualitative, quantitative benefits of adopting things they hate to do like updating the CRM.
Speaker 2:So things get automatically updated and automatically moved. Their deals are always represented accurately so they can have a much more efficient non-interrogation conversation with their manager we provide that CRO ultimate visibility into are going to meet, beat or miss their number. So when they go to the board meeting, it's not just showing up with hope, it's going hey, I can actually see that we're going to overachieve this quarter. I'd like to invest more and hire faster, or hey, guess what? I see the headwinds coming, I'm going to tamp back on on hiring and, hey, we might miss the number, but I'm telling you now versus at the end of the quarter. So you build credibility in that scenario.
Speaker 2:And so what are the benefits we start to see? We reduce slip deals drastically. We increase time to close, so win rates go up. And you know there's a reason for that one. It's we focus on the blind spots that might be there. Okay. So what are the things that are still open, items that we need to knock down? Is this an opportunity? We should even be working on right um and spending our time on um. So we see conversions um. We see slip deals go down. We see forecast accuracy go way up, and not just for the CRO, but for all members of the revenue hierarchy, and so there's always that one or two people that are really good at forecasting. When we start with a new customer, what we find is gradually, over a quarter to everybody becomes a better forecaster.
Speaker 1:What we find is gradually over a quarter to everybody becomes a better forecaster Brilliant, and so as tools like yours adopt more intelligence, more AI, more learning, where do you see yourself going in a couple, three years? And it's going to be an exciting solution in so many more ways.
Speaker 2:I'm super excited about where we're going. I'm already starting to see these things show up on my end, but I think every sales rep is going to have like a virtual CRO that's there with them looking at their business, so they might be able to go. Ok, I've got 25 accounts in my territory. Which one should I focus on this quarter, right? Which one should I go and do pipeline inspection? Where do I have blind spots across all of mine I get really excited about?
Speaker 2:For me, instead of having to maybe navigate dashboards and insights, I can just ask the machine questions, right? Ask Clary, hey, I've got three weeks left in the quarter. Which deals that are in commit to close? Should I spend my time on? Which ones haven't we gotten to security yet on? Instead of me navigating that, I can just ask the machine these questions. And so there's a lot of. You know AI can come and do deal prioritization right. Where should we invest? Ai can go look at outcourt or churn and go hey, these are the ones you need to tackle now. So it's really going to show up at all parts of the revenue process.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. I can't wait for, you know, whisper agents to help me mid-call, in-call and all kinds of things. So a couple more controversial topics maybe, which you can incline or not, but you are seeing many layers of middle management being taken out of a lot of big tech companies. It seems to be the trend this year doing more with less. Do you see AI replacing those sales managers, maybe even sales leaders, when it comes to forecasting and management day to day?
Speaker 2:I don't think it will replace, but I do think you'll see managers who are now managing more sales reps than they have in the past. So maybe if the average was eight today, it becomes 12 in the future, right, because some of the the busy work can get automated. A lot of enablement and coaching can now happen you know in real time, you know with AI, et cetera happen in real time with AI, et cetera. So I do think you'll see a span of control change for managers and I also think you'll see the same for sellers, right? Maybe they can now do more than they were able to do in the past because we're automating the mundane work Well, yeah, it's a positive view.
Speaker 1:I would agree there.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, it's a positive view. I would agree there. And what do you think happens to the traditional CRMs? We call them legacy, but they're out there. They still run the databases from the database companies too. So those things are still behind the CRMs.
Speaker 2:I think the CRMs that exist today have a lot of entanglement and tentacles, integration points from them, but we are starting to see critical data that is now not going through the CRMs, and I think you're also seeing a lot of companies that want to come in and, you know, come up with a different flavor of CRM that's less. That causes companies to maybe not have to continue to invest so much in a heavy infrastructure that they have to constantly update and change. I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you what we're doing on our end is traditionally very dependent on one CRM as our primary data source, where we've really invested now in the ability to bring in all data sources into our product and have the product work from there, versus against just one of the CRMs. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
Speaker 1:It's going to be fascinating. Always enjoy chatting with you. You have such a wealth of insight into this industry and where it's going, and congratulations onwards and upwards.
Speaker 2:Thank you, evan. It's a fun role I get to have, where I spend all my day engaging with other revenue leaders, and it's a privilege to get to learn from them.
Speaker 1:I bet. Thanks so much for joining and thanks everyone for listening and be sure to check out the new TV show, techimpacttv now on Bloomberg and Fox Business.
Speaker 2:Thanks everyone, thanks, kevin.
Speaker 1:Thanks again, Evan.