Clari is a predictive sales analytics and sales forecasting solution from the company of the same name headquartered in Sunnyvale.
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
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.
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
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.
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
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
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.
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
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
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
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
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
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.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
