Clari is a predictive sales analytics and sales forecasting solution from the company of the same name headquartered in Sunnyvale.
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Infor Birst
Score 3.7 out of 10
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Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.
Clari was able to start generating advanced analytics within 3-4 hours after connecting to our Salesforce data and immediately in opportunity data. With Birst, there was some implementation needed, IT setup and configuration and some additional training for admins and advance …
Clari works well for sales and executive leadership teams that perform at a high level and collaborate well together. Everyone utilizing Clari needs to understand that it will provide the company with the information it needs to make strategic business decisions. It can not be seen as a more sophisticated way to manage SFDC information. If the company is truly dedicated to improving its forecasting capabilities, then Clari could be worth the investment. If it is just being used to capture sales leaders' forecasts, you don't need Clari. Overall, Clari is a great capability, but you need a good business case to justify the expense.
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
Sales pipeline management: Clari provides real-time visibility into the sales pipeline, enabling sales teams to track the progress of deals and make informed decisions.
Revenue forecasting: The platform integrates with existing sales and marketing tools, giving organizations a comprehensive view of their sales pipeline and enabling accurate revenue forecasting.
Advanced analytics: Clari uses machine learning and advanced analytics to provide actionable insights into sales performance and help organizations make informed decisions about their sales strategy.
Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
Forecast screen could be easier to interact with. I believe UI's that make users scroll horizontally lead to confuse and missed content since we rarely scroll horizontally on the internet. It's not as natural
Enablement; I am confident my team is underutilizing Clari and that there are many more features that we should take advantage of. For example, the Dashboard screen looks good but in our company, our practice is to use the forecast and opportunity tabs instead. Reps and managers could benefit from a 30 min or 1-hour training session quarterly
I like the opportunity score tracker but it would be great to know more of what comprises the score instead of feeling that it is just an AI. Perhaps giving the user more opportunity to validate or put their own spin to the score
We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
Clari is very good when it comes to usability as I'm accessing it on daily basis as long as I'm on my Notebook, it helps a lot having visibility on my business status and progress on achievement. I can estimate my weekly, monthly, and yearly opportunities closure and revenue. I have some saved views which are so useful to get what I want to see.
I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.
We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast
Clari is very willing to jump in and build out use cases. They will work to do anything for you. That said, their follow up is not great. We have had to reach out for follow up several times on a project, which is still not complete. I wish they taught us how to complete what we want, rather than doing it in house for us
When we have an issue that is stopping our business from proceeding, I want answers sooner than later. While Birst does have a published response time for each case level, we always wish it could be quicker. What response improvement could there be with a larger support team? In response to first question: Blackhole of issues - Birst needs to improve upon closing issues that resolution was dependent upon code fixes or enhancements, perhaps someone to add a comment on all case tickets at least every 60 days. Escalation - I always have the ability to electronically or via phone escalate a ticket. I also have my Customer Success Manager through whom I can escalate topics.
I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.
Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
Clari was selected due to the flawless integration with Salesforce, updates are made in real time. Being able to monitor everything at a scalable level has also been critical for our team. For example, we have different views established that show the rep level, manager level, director, customer segment. This eliminates unnecessary forecast/pipeline meetings
During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have a lot of demos with a significant portion of them and reviewed several of the major industry studies as well. We had representatives of both user interests/design and the technical backend on the evaluation process.
The major features we were looking for a product that we could embed inside our own SaaS application, connect to a sharded Postgres database, had multitenancy and allowed for customer generated reports/ self-reporting. Some of the minor "nice to have" features we were looking at was scheduled reports, especially if we could plug it into our own scheduling system (for CAN-SPAM compliance), internationalization, and support.
In the evaluation, Birst hit all of the must-haves and enough of the nice to haves that they made it down to our final two and the trial was the clincher to make it our final choice.
we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
We have significantly decreased the number of overdue deals in our funnel.
We stay on top of deals within the pipeline much better now, since there is more transparency and accountability. This has sped up our sales cycle and our funnel is much more clean.
Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
