This article was co-authored by Rashmi Gopinath and Crissy Costa.

At some point over the past decade, you’ve probably seen a new role emerge in many companies. The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is changing how companies view and manage revenue pipeline and sales cycles. Historically, the marketing function generated top-of-funnel sales leads and passed them to the sales team, who would guide leads through the rest of the sales cycle along with customer success. But the explosion of go-to-market tools like CRM, spreadsheets, business intelligence, and marketing automation has led to disconnects in data flows and decision making. This holistic shift has led to the emergence of Revenue Operations (RevOps) and a push towards data-driven collaboration and full-funnel accountability.

RevOps is quickly emerging as a favored strategy for businesses to drive scalable, predictable, and efficient growth. RevOps centralizes visibility and execution across marketing, sales, and customer success teams, and has emerged as a high impact way to accelerate revenue growth and go-to-market operations efficiency through tighter alignment of these functions. New technologies coupled with increasingly sophisticated buyers have changed how companies look to acquire and retain new customers. Executives must innovate both their sales methodologies and organizational structures in order to remain agile in an increasingly competitive landscape. With RevOps, enterprises gain accountability and transparency across teams as they work together to focus on the key drivers that will accelerate top-line growth.

Implementing and adopting RevOps is a cultural transformation that requires companies to rethink team structures and related tooling. Doing so comes with powerful results: a BCG study found companies that adopted RevOps saw a 100–200% increase in digital marketing ROI, 10–20% increase in sales productivity, 10% increase in lead acceptance, 15–20% increase in customer satisfaction, and 30% reduction in go-to-market spend. Similarly, Forrester reports that public companies with RevOps teams had 71% higher stock performance, 19% faster revenue growth, and were 15% more profitable. The benefits are obvious, but without the right technology, companies will still struggle to reap all the rewards that RevOps brings.

That is why we are thrilled to announce our investment in Clari, the market leader in RevOps. Clari brings together data from disparate enterprise systems and leverages advanced AI and automation to help companies increase win rates, shorten sales cycles, and improve forecast accuracy. It does this by capturing and consolidating massive amounts of data stored in different business systems, such as CRMs, marketing software, client emails, files, and contract exchanges, to create full-funnel accountability across go-to-market teams. Clari defines the newly emerged revenue operations category by enabling companies to operationalize their go-to-market strategies across channels, product lines, and market segments. This transition allows executive leadership to cascade accountability from the boardroom to the frontline of execution, and introduces transparency and predictability into formerly siloed teams.

Clari also enables sales teams to understand where to spend their time, which is critical when businesses are growing and expanding into new markets and products. With Clari, teams gain a complete picture of every account by aggregating every touchpoint into a single yet comprehensive view. While CRM systems primarily operate as a “system of record,” Clari operates as the “system of engagement and enablement,” serving as the connective tissue to coordinate operations across the customer lifecycle and serve as the bridge between sales, marketing, finance, and customer success departments.

 

Beyond the differentiated product capability and phenomenal growth, we’ve been highly impressed with the resounding enthusiasm and excitement we’ve seen among Clari’s customer base. Industry-leading companies like Adobe, Workday, Cisco, Okta, Zoom, Datadog, Dropbox, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks are among several hundreds of customers that rely on Clari to achieve their revenue goals. Clari is listed as a leader in the sales analytics category on G2 and has received the highest customer ratings in the sector for sales forecasting accuracy, user experience, and increase in productivity. They are also included in Gartner’s hype cycle report for CRM sales technologies in 4 categories: knowledge graphs for sales, algorithmic guided selling, predictive sales forecasting, and mobile sales productivity.

Customers describe Clari as “mission critical” to their day-to-day operations to improve forecast accuracy and streamline efficient revenue growth. The majority of CROs have built Clari into their playbook, and we even heard of instances where CROs have Clari written into their employment contract. One of Clari’s customers, a Fortune 50 enterprise, first used Clari to get rid of stale Excel spreadsheets and find a solution that would allow them to build their sales pipeline and accurately forecast their quarterly and annual sales projections. Once the sales team was fully operational, the customer success teams joined the Clari platform to engage on net dollar retention metrics. Today, at this company, more than 2,200 employees across multiple teams use Clari as a connected revenue operations platform. With Clari, this enterprise customer can now aggregate all their revenue data into a cohesive platform that allows all departments to have a pulse on what revenue performance.

After meeting Clari’s team, it is no surprise to see why the company has emerged as a category leader. Clari Cofounders Andy Byrne (CEO) and Venkat Rangan (CTO) bring extensive leadership and experience in their respective roles. The two previously founded and scaled Clearwell Systems, Gartner’s highest-ranking e-Discovery company, until its acquisition by Symantec. Andy has leveraged his serial entrepreneurial successes to build a phenomenal team that brings seasoned expertise in building and scaling companies.

We believe Clari will enable enterprise customers to realize that revenue is no longer just an outcome but a process that can be optimized and streamlined and lead to scalable and efficient growth. As a global, multi-stage investment firm, we aim to partner with companies rethinking the way traditional industries have operated and deploying technologies that can scale quickly. Our partnership with BCG allows us to bring the power of Clari’s platform to BCG’s global 2000 clients across 50+ countries to help businesses maximize their revenue potential. We are excited to partner with the Clari team and look forward to building a category leader in revenue operations.