Clozd: Hi, I am Jeff Ouzts, Enterprise Program Manager at Clozd. Today we're speaking with Ben Chen, Senior Manager of Operations and Strategy at Clari to learn more about how Clari uses win-loss to influence their strategy. Well, Ben, I guess just start us off and tell us about yourself and your role at Clari.

Ben Chen: Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me. And congratulations on all the success. For those who are unfamiliar with Clari, we have $4 trillion of revenue under management and we help B2B companies stop revenue leak and achieve revenue precision, ultimately helping them run revenue.

I'm a senior manager on the strategy and operations team, and our team helps unlock growth for the company. For the past couple of years, we've working on some projects such as going further up market and entering new industry verticals as well as market share dominance. And a lot of these projects are uncharted territory, and so it requires a feedback loop in place to understand are we doing things right, what's working, what's not working, and that's why Clari is just so incredibly grateful to have a partnership with Clozd.

Great, and thank you so much for saying that. Win-loss can sit in a lot of different departments. It's kind of interesting that it sits in the strategy department at Clari. I guess tell us a bit more about that. Why does it sit within the strategy organization?

Yeah, we culturally value feedback a lot, Clari. And because of that we really value how win-loss analysis informs our strengths and weaknesses as a company, and we're able to capitalize on those opportunities and drive greater revenue and innovate our product.

Well, having said that, a couple years ago, this program was owned by product marketing, just overall marketing department. And thanks to your great work, very quickly, a lot of other departments got really interested and started going into the reports, going into the trends, and it very quickly became a company-wide thing. Well, I'll give you some examples.

It impacted our product roadmap, like what to build. It impacted how we do pricing and packaging. It impacted how we go to market. Marketing, sales, customer, and it no longer was a program that made sense to just stay under marketing. And now strategy and operations as a team naturally already partners and collaborates with all the departments within the company. And so over time, it just made sense for this program to shift from the marketing department to now under strategy and operations team.

You mentioned how this need to be a broader program because you had a lot of different people asking about these insights. How have you ensured that you've gotten full pipeline coverage of the insights that you're needing?

Yeah, well I'm glad we were able to do some math on this, but I would say we got to work backwards to our desired outcome, what we trying to achieve, and that starts with understanding the company's strategic initiatives. They could be, "Hey, we got to grow revenue," or, "Hey, we got to innovate our product to support these new use cases," or whatever the case may be, right? And we take it from the company level and take it notch down to the departmental level and understand what the best way to support those departments to achieve those company goals.

So for example, let's say we are, like every company, trying to grow revenue. Okay, well, how do we improve that? And let's say working in math between you and I, we figured, "Okay, let's just do a 50/50 split between our new logo business and our existing customer business," right? And the new logo obviously is pursuing new customers. And then the other 50% would be our existing customers being renewals, churn, expansion, and getting feedback on that.

Let's say another initiative is going further up market. We want to pursue those larger enterprise accounts, and so maybe we want to collect feedback on that. And so we may cherry-pick some of those really large accounts that we've won or lost and learn from those, and we'll... Well, I usually send those accounts over to you, and you go interview those.

Or maybe we're trying to innovate our product to meet new use cases. And specifically for us, we're trying to expand the revenue models that we support within companies. So let's say we've done very well with subscription revenue companies, right? SaaS, and we are trying to expand to companies that have more of a consumption business model, right? Pay-as-you-go. And so we want to collect feedback from companies with such revenue models, we can help our product team innovate our product against those use cases. And so we might cherry-pick some accounts that are doing that and we can collect information on that.

You've mentioned this a little bit already, but give us a little more detail about how have different departments or key areas really benefited from the insights that you've gotten in win-loss?

Yeah, great question. So some examples are marketing, sales, obviously, product, and pricing and packaging's another good one. Let me just start with marketing. I would say that one learning we had from the program is we learned that some of the accounts we encountered, they were not fully aware of all the products that we had in our offering in our platform suite. And obviously we have evolved along in the last two years. For one, we've innovated tremendously, just organically, pumping out a lot of new products in our platform, but we've also inorganically grown through acquisition and we have expanded our offering that way. And maybe we just had an opportunity, we haven't done the best job at informing the market of all the products we have available in our suite today. So we saw that as an opportunity and that was feedback to our marketing team.

From a sales, strategy, and enablement perspective, maybe we saw from an interview that the customer said we did not meet a particular use case. But maybe that was a surprise because we actually do. Well, in that case, maybe there is some enablement opportunities for how we do discovery, how we present our solution and propose that to the prospect or customer, and maybe there's some opportunities of improvement there.

I think, from a product perspective, one example is maybe we heard from a customer that... Okay, yeah, we were actually better because we were more enterprise grade. However, there were these two features that they thought really would've made a difference. And so there was maybe some feedback we could take to the product leadership and maybe reprioritize the roadmap a little bit.

And finally, pricing and packaging. Clari is a premium product and our price reflects that. And sometimes prospects and customers, they understand, they accept that value. However, sometimes it's not well received. And sometimes it's time to evolve our pricing packaging so that we can be more competitive in the market. So those are some examples of how there's been an impact to the various departments

And to help those different departments, tell me a bit more. How have you made sure to get those insights into their hands? What have you done to make sure those leaders are seeing that feedback?

Yeah, so I think it starts from listening. Well, we've got to understand each department's priorities and listen to what's important to them. If we're able to align the program to each department's leads and those stakeholders, we can ensure that the feedback that we are collecting that results in the types of questions that we're asking of these customers are actually collecting the right information back to these stakeholders. So I think it starts from being a good listener and understanding what's important to each stakeholder and department.

You've talked about how you've collected feedback, how you've gotten into the hands of stakeholders. Tell us a little more how have you actually changed things internally though with that feedback?

Yeah, I think two of the big shifts we've made as a company as a result of this feedback is pro-serve to self-serve. Years ago, Clari would pride itself in its premium white-glove treatment of getting a customer implemented and then servicing that customer over time. And that we've learned from interviews that the market was shifting in that customers, especially in upmarket in the enterprise, preferred more self-service rather than relying on us to do the work for them. And so we had to make a shift in our product, the way we serviced our customers, that whole model. And so we built Clari Studio, which was a customer admin panel where they can just control their own destiny, and configure themselves, and manage their instance, and we changed the way we service our customers and allowing them to be more self-serve, making information and knowledge readily available. We've created enablement in university courses so that customer admins and customer users can learn the content themselves, self-serve, and so all these initiatives were really started because of the value of feedback of having to go from pro-serve to self-serve.

The second, I would say, is how we went to market. As the market shifted, macroeconomic environment changed, a lot of companies were going from buying best of breed solutions to consolidated platform. And seeing the shift and seeing this come through in the form of the interview feedback, we changed the way we did pricing and packaging to sell as a platform and incentivate that. We changed the way we message to the market, having more of a platform messaging instead of point solution, best of breed messaging. We changed the way we innovated our product, really acquiring other products, but also organically innovating in those areas that we felt had gaps, and then integrating them and providing a multiplier effect. So the product roadmap and vision really changed as a result of that. And the way we sell, obviously in sales cycles and the way we manage our customers, how we pitch, how we demo, how we provide a solution, how we service our customers, it's all with the platform mindset now, and so this whole shift from best of breed to consolidated revenue platform really was coming from the customer feedback that coming from the interviews.

Well, Ben, you've told us a lot about how Clari has really established a strong presence with win-loss. What's a suggestion you would give to somebody else or another organization that was starting up win-loss?

Yeah, I would say company initiatives, understand what those are. I would say get started quickly. And start simple.

Why those two things? One, if you know what your company initiatives are, you can figure out the areas or the topics that we need to interview for. And then you want to start small and start simple and just jump forward because there's going to be a lot of adjustments along the way that this whole thing is a feedback loop, right? So let's get started, start with a few stakeholders, start with the most important questions or the most obvious ones, and naturally, other departments or stakeholders will want to peek in and get some insights. Eventually there will be other topics that want to be covered. And so start small, but get started, and get rolling. And then tune and innovate as you go.

Great. Well, Ben, it's been great to hear about how Clari has implemented win-loss and how you guys have benefited from it. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us today?

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of power in feedback and that feedback is... There's so many vectors to it that impact many departments. I would say that diversity drives innovation. And the diversity of various perspectives that we're able to get from different accounts, from different segments, from different geos, from different industries that have different decision factors in those interviews, going back to the various departments so that product can do their thing, pricing can do their thing, competitive can do their thing, sales and marketing can do their thing, right? It's getting such a broad range of feedback, and not just from Clozd, but also from other sources, diversity of perspectives, all these drives better innovation. So really appreciate the valuable insights that Clozd continues to provide Clari. We truly value our partnership and look forward to continuing a greater partnership in the future.

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time, Ben. It's been great chatting with you and hearing about your experience and perspective.

Jeff, thank you very much.

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