Clari is a predictive sales analytics and sales forecasting solution from the company of the same name headquartered in Sunnyvale.
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MS SharePoint / SQL
Score 8.0 out of 10
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MS SharePoint / SQL refers to Microsoft Sharepoint, a web-based collaborative platform, being used in tandem with Microsoft SQL Server to provide business intelligence analytics and reporting. They can provide BI content such as data connections, reports, scorecards, dashboards, and more.
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.
A simple and important scenario well suited is that you can configure alerts to notify you when the production server fails. another best feature is the report server is the central component of reporting services. For me something less appropriate is that the admin must ensure optimal performance for farm operations, they recommend that you install SQL Server on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications.
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
This was a long-term buy-in from a corporate perspective, to remain in the SharePoint space. Migration is certainly possible, which is good for planning and having options further out. At this point, the only planned migration is to eventually move the architecture up to SharePoint/SQL 2013. At that point, we will be able to leverage some greater efficiencies, some enhanced content design and management features, and some more current social features. It is well worth a full consideration in any shop looking at a new implementation of or migration to SharePoint (although you will probably be considering 2013 versions or beyond in those discussions), but the platform should be a strong competitor to any alternatives. Realizing the capability of a fully-branded and customized website was not part of the original choice for the architecture at Lincoln, but seeing it implemented and functioning now with this capacity far beyond original expectations has certainly cemented plans to continue using it.
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.
SharePoint is very complex. This makes usability somewhat difficult from an IT perspective. An IT generalist will be able to pick it up and run with basic tasks. More customized functions would require significant specialized training and therefore limit what a standard user would be able to achieve. From an end user perspective, it's pretty straightforward to use.
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
It's been fantastic in terms of Premier Support so far. If there is an issue and if you report if the product has an issue, they will act upon it immediately. In some cases, if you design/develop something using the platform, Microsoft appreciates it and... publishes it on their public website. But you have to wait for some time if it is a non-Premier Support issue as you may experience delays.
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
At the time of the two large projects, SharePoint was the enterprise solution so we were required to use that. We have since lobbied the enterprise teams to review and consider Atlassian Confluence and were successful. Confluence is cheaper than Sharepoint which is why we wanted to bring that in. The enterprise has now made Confluence an enterprise solution as an alternative to SharePoint. After using both I think SharePoint has many more add-ins than Confluence. It has much more customization ability than Confluence. SharePoint is not good for mobile readiness. Confluence is so there is a difference that might lead you to Confluence over SharePoint. I would also say that SharePoint is very document-centric and that Confluence has better KM than SharePoint does. even with the use of SQL Server. We were told that we could not use Google Drive even though it had features we liked.
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.
I've installed SharePoint in many different industries and each industry has seen greater collaboration among their teams both locally and nationally. The ability to collaborate more efficiently has reduced the need to have employees centrally located.
Companies which have used SharePoint in a end user training portal have had great ROI, since they can create the content once and share with all their users who subscribe to their training service. The web content management aspect of SharePoint is a very helpful feature.
