SalesTechStar Interview with Will Patterson, Head of New Product Integration at Clari

InterviewsArtificial Intelligence (AI)Price Optimization & Revenue Management

By Paroma Sen On Apr 18, 2024

Will Patterson, Head of New Product Integration at Clari spoke to SalesTech Star about some of Clari’s latest product enhancements and what the future of RevTech is set to look like in this quick catch up:

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Hi, Will, tell us about yourself and your role at Clari.

I’m on the Product leadership team here at Clari, leading two of our product lines (Clari Copilot and Clari Align).

For the last few years I’ve been focused on expanding our product portfolio through a series of acquisitions and consolidations that are transforming RevTech. These days I’m also responsible for managing Clari’s AI strategy across all of our products. We are working at a really exciting intersection – the intersection of the most important business process (Revenue) and the most important technological advancement of this generation (AI).

We’d love to hear more about some of your latest platform enhancements…

Clari recently announced several platform enhancements to RevAI, our AI solution purpose-built to help revenue teams stop revenue leak and capture more revenue. Consider RevAI everyday AI for revenue teams, infused into their workflows and engineered to eliminate tedious, administrative work and unlock revenue teams’ potential.

The latest enhancements include:

Ask Clari– Revenue teams can now ask any questions about Clari Copilot call recordings (Copilot is our conversational intelligence solution), and RevAI will instantly generate answers based on customer and prospect conversations. For example, a revenue pro can ask if a customer mentioned competitors, or what pain points came up in conversation. The time savings are immense when compared to the “scavenger hunt” leaders have to do today.
Smart Follow Ups– These instantly generated emails based on formatted call summaries, next steps, and proposed actions are now available directly in Groove Actions. Groove, our sales engagement solution, is where reps spend most of their daily work, so adding Smart Follow Ups to Groove means reps can more easily and quickly follow up with customers and prospects. The result: accelerated conversion and close rates.
Smart Chapters– RevAI now provides visual, time-stamped representations of all major topics discussed in each call, so users can easily identify when certain topics were discussed, and extract key insights more easily, without having to play back the entire call. This makes the wealth of information contained within call recordings dramatically more accessible.
Smart Feed– RevAI now aggregates snippets from calls and meetings into a single feed, helping users quickly identify critical moments. Users can tailor this feed for their specific strategic priorities, like key deals, new initiatives, and market trends. And, Smart Feed has built-in commenting and sharing features, making collaborating across revenue-critical functions fast and easy.

How is AI changing the game for the RevTech and SalesTech segment today?

From a technology-building perspective, AI has changed what’s feasible, taking customer problems that we had previously wanted to solve for years, and now enabling us to actually solve them in a matter of weeks. For example, meeting summarization used to be a hard problem to solve. No more – we’ve been able to build and deliver this capability to customers in record time.

In terms of actual day-to-day usage for those on the front lines, AI has essentially multiplied the potential impact of sales reps and revenue leaders. Consider their daily lives without AI: No doubt, updating CRM fields was part of their core responsibilities – but one that takes time that could instead be spent on their primary job of engaging with prospects and customers. Now, AI eliminates much of what was keeping them from their primary job.

I had a conversation with a customer recently who said it best: You don’t hire sales reps based on whether they’re good at filling out fields in CRMs. You hire them based on their ability to go and build relationships. And now, with AI, you have the ability to automatically update the CRM based on what’s coming up in conversations, and your reps can just focus on asking better questions, building better relationships, and earning trust out in the field. Technology takes care of the rest.

What are some of the most unique AI-powered features in RevTech and SalesTech today that have piqued your interest and why?

I have been at Clari for seven years, and there has never been a more exciting time to be building technology for revenue teams.

Some trends and opportunities that have caught my attention include:

New AI features that are contributing to a fundamental shift around the revenue data model, moving from the traditional model of human-entered data that’s augmented by some automated insights to a model where most of your data is actually coming from automated capture of signals, with some human augmented corrections. This gives sales reps the opportunity to focus on the human aspects of selling, and provides businesses fundamentally better data that isn’t subject to all the incompleteness and inaccuracy of manually-entered data.
The democratization of enterprises building or fine-tuning their own LLMs. With announcements like DBRX from Databricks, more and more businesses are going to start building their own LLMs that are trained using proprietary data that they would never expose to a third party. This is an exciting opportunity for Clari for two reasons. First, we can enable customers to leverage revenue data from RevDB (Clari’s database purpose-built to support revenue workflows) for training their proprietary models. And second, we can plug these models into workflows that Clari supports to drive adoption and value.
The opportunity to create a whole ecosystem of AI agents that add value through proprietary expertise. OpenAI’s GPT is an early example of what this could look like, but there is still a lot of room for maturation and growth of this ecosystem. The potential is very exciting. Imagine you are a sales methodology consultant and you can build an agent that has access to your proprietary knowledge about how to do great sales coaching. This agent could then be plugged in to review, summarize, and do automated coaching for your client’s calls that are recorded via an application like Clari Copilot. We are obviously building a lot of this kind of functionality into our own product, but we are also building a platform that allows our customers to get the most out of their revenue data.

Can you highlight more on how B2B teams can better optimize the use of AI platforms to ease revenue processes and cycles?

Focus on creating habitual use of AI among your teams. Until you build an AI habit on a team, the benefits are going to vary, or not be fully realized at all. There are many principles of habit design that can make a big difference in driving value with AI. An example is thinking about how AI usage can follow “habit loops” that consist of a cue, a routine, and a reward. In the case of AI adoption, the key is getting really clear about what your cues and rewards are going to be that cement the routine.

Also, it’s important to not think technology-first (e.g. how do I incorporate this AI platform?), but instead to first lead with the business problem you’re trying to solve, and then determine how AI can help. Specifically, creating an AI strategy should center on identifying the most pressing sources of revenue leak in your business, and then determining how AI can help stop that revenue leak.

I also recommend keeping in mind the trust aspect of AI adoption. Different AI use cases are going to require teams to have different levels of trust in the technology to do what they need it to do. Consider starting with use cases that have a lower trust bar, and then as trust increases, you can add in different and more complex AI use cases to other workflows.

For example, one reason that meeting summarization has achieved so much traction is because it doesn’t require high levels of trust in AI to reap the benefits. Summaries can be 80 percent right and still deliver the intended benefit of not having to listen to an hour-long call, and to get the main point across in three sentences. In contrast, automatically updating CRM fields has a higher trust bar, as does automatically sending emails to prospects and customers.

If you had to share five predictions surrounding the future of AI, what would they be?

Augmenting sales reps’ productivity will be the first major wave of AI value for B2B revenue use cases. It won’t fully automate jobs, but it will automate the laborious and inefficient parts of jobs so humans can focus on higher-value tasks.
In 2024, the limiting factor in getting value from AI won’t be the technology. Instead, it will be businesses’ ability to embrace and adopt AI in a coordinated and scalable way.
Revenue per employee will become a canonical metric as businesses start to experience the benefits of AI for scaling more efficiently (much in the same way that net dollar retention is for SaaS businesses today).
As AI agents become a critical part of executing business workflows, CIOs will take on new responsibilities tied to creating an ecosystem/infrastructure in which those agents can perform at their best (almost like a new part of the workforce).
AI will accelerate the existing trend around consolidation because consolidated solutions have more access to relevant data and enable better opportunities to connect workflows.

As a parting thought: five fundamentals anyone in B2B Sales or RevTech should follow as a daily practice?

Start by building a daily AI habit, and figure out how to incorporate AI into your workflows. Leveraging AI to make you more effective is a skill. It will get easier as the tech landscape evolves, but until then, the benefits of AI will be unevenly distributed, and will favor those who are proactive.
Stay in touch with the voice of your customer, regardless of your role in the revenue organization. New tools and applications can assist with this, too – such as the new Smart Feed feature in Copilot that I mentioned earlier. It’s like a social media feed for your business.
Think about your meetings schedule not as a collection of individual meetings, but as moments in a cadence that all contribute to a bigger picture. Then, think about what needs to happen in that meeting to make the cadence successful. Where can you simplify or streamline the cadence to be more effective?
Be on the lookout for consolidation opportunities in the technology that you use. Have a strong POV on what you’re not willing to compromise and where you can simplify your requirements. Ask your technology providers what they can do to help you consolidate and meet your business goals.
During a phase of such great technological innovation, find ways to stay curious! Read, listen, and talk to your peers about what they are doing. Take in as much information as you can.