Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying of course requires a lot of integration with other systems. If you’re talking about customer interactions, then you’re talking about the CRM system. Now we’re talking about some sort of a portal that brings together all of these integration elements?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Not necessarily, although you’re raising a very good point. We do have an amazing integration, for instance, with Salesforce. Let me describe to you a use case that will clarify this. For instance with regards to CRM, think about an opportunity that is about to be closed at 80% within the Salesforce or the CRM system. We have many companies that are using it this way. Marketo and Bazaarvoice are customers. We have about 25,000 customers. The third biggest bank in the world is using Clarizen. One of the top four auditing companies is using Clarizen in order to run their audit process. Overall, we get a lot of success with the concept that I’m now describing.

Let’s go back to the use case first. Let’s suppose that this opportunity is going to 80%. Then there is an implementation project created within the professional services team automatically according to the type of product that this customer is anticipated to buy. The guy in the professional services is doing all the resource allocation and scheduling as if this project is going to happen. Let’s say that he has aggregated about 80 projects for next quarter, which have not necessarily happened but they have a high probability to happen.

For the first time, the VP of Professional Services can go to the CEO and tell him, “I’m short of five people because I have scheduled all the activities. I took into account the conversion that we had last quarter between prospects and actual deals that we got, which was 60%. Therefore, I’m short five people and I need to hire them.” He can tell the CEO, “If we’re not going to have those five people, we’re going to be missing our revenue targets and then the stock will go down.” As opposed to now where he comes to the CEO and the CEO tells him, “Listen. You are doing great and you’re an amazing guy. You did manage to do it last quarter. You will do it this quarter. I trust you.” This is one thing. Once this account is won, then the project is immediately activated and all the people know exactly what they need to do. The customer gets full visibility into the plans that he has. There is clarity on everything that needs to be done.

Additionally, there is a group created within customer. This group is shared between the client of our customer. Let’s say the client of Volks. There is a sharing area of discussion, documents, plans, and status, which gives our customers the ability to work with their customers on a platform that gives them a great way, on one hand, to work with each and every customer but on the other hand, to get the full picture from all their customers together. This is one use case. It’s closing the loop of execution with respect to the CRM because the CRM gets you up to the level where you close the account. What happens next? This is where Clarizen is playing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen
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