Revenue Operations enables Revenue Intelligence - with Andy Byrne, CEO and Co-Founder Clari

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Andy Byrne, CEO and co-founder at Clari. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Andy, including revenue operations, as a function and as a platform. Revenue Intelligence, is it an extension to RevOps or a business imperative? And third, how to measure the return on investment on revenue operations and revenue intelligence investments. Andy, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Andy Byrne** (1:09)
Well, first of all, Ray, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Great to be here. Our journey has been a real fun one. I'm founder CEO of Clari. We started the company back in 2013 We're an AI based enterprise SaaS platform that helps revenue leaders create more pipeline, drive more revenue and boost the predictability and accuracy of the forecasts. Our journey started back in 2013, but before that, actually, seven years of my life was dedicated to doing machine learning and natural language processing in a previous company we had created. It was called Clearwell Systems. So we have rooted in our R&D expertise, a lot of great experience around analyzing large volumes of human activity and being able to make sense of that and predicted future outcomes. In that case, we were analyzing data to allow people to respond to litigation issues or securities investigations. So that was a great company. We sold that company to Symantec. And after that, we actually were thinking about this machine learning and machine learning in the enterprise. And we realized that there had not been a company built from the ground up to really focus on serving sales teams and helping sales teams by applying machine learning to help sales reps close deals faster, help managers drive more revenue, and help execs boost the predictability and the accuracy of their forecasts. So we took that thesis to Sequoia Capital. They loved that idea. It's our fourth company we've done with them. And we were off to the races. So fast forward to current day and why we're here with you. We've had tremendous growth over the last couple years. COVID was a real accelerant for us because people needed visibility into their pipeline and their forecast more than ever. And so we were 110% of our operating plan this year, which was amazing. We have got great companies like Adobe, Allied Bank, Perkin Elmer and Cisco using the product to help them drive more revenue, get more efficiency using our revenue operations platform. And the sky's the limit for us in terms of where we're headed with the company. So great to be here and that's how we landed here, Ray.

**Ray Rike** (3:20)
Well, Andy, congratulations to all your success.
Not only the 110% of operating plan, but a huge another investment milestone this year. Congratulations on that. But what's interesting is you started with that. Let's help sales organizations and sales leadership be more efficient and effective, especially as measured by predictability and meeting what their forecasts are going to be. However, 2021 has been a big year for the topic of revenue operations. And even, I believe, Clari has positioned itself as a revenue operations and intelligence platform. So, first of all, let's start with revenue operations. How do you define revenue operations, Andy?

**Andy Byrne** (4:00)
Yeah, I mean, our definition of revenue operations is the people, technology and processes that drive a company's end-to-end revenue engine, orchestrating marketing, sales and the post sales activity. Essentially a end-to-end software process that helps the company drive growth.

**Ray Rike** (4:20)
Okay. So you define it as both an organizational structure and a process or framework, correct?

**Andy Byrne** (4:26)
100 percent. I think that there's both instrumentation that's required to be able to actually track all of the activity that's impacting a company's ability to generate revenue. There's also, there's a cadence that people use, that a CRO uses to be able to execute keyword, execute their motion throughout the quarter.

**Ray Rike** (4:48)
Well, let me ask you this question, because over the last few years, we've seen a proliferation of revenue technology, and especially in B2B size companies. All this sales tech and marketing tech and other customer success tech. Originally, my view of revenue operations was, this is the organization structure in process to align and integrate the entire data process and platform journey from customer acquisition all the way to customer retention and expansion. Do you think, Andy, we need another platform to enable this? Or can we just do it by having a process that integrates those three different steps?