Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 5)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Many people have tried to fix this issue of how to drive collaboration that matters. As you were saying, technology has changed a lot. The real impact of cloud on companies is that it makes companies real time. If I go right now to Salesforce and I look at the report, I will understand now what the status is for this specific second. This was not there before. Of course, there was CRM system.

The main reason why it’s there and it’s really accurate is because people are using the system to do their job. If you don’t deliver the simplicity that helps employees do their job, you cannot get a real time picture of where you are versus your business. This is the whole secret here. The secret is you need to do a tool that serves employees in their daily job. Once they are using it, the rest falls into place. If you try to do it in the opposite way where you have a tool, and you force the employees to use it and they hate it, this is where your tool is useless.

Sramana Mitra: Coming back to whom else is in this space, give me the ecosystem map.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: The people that are in this space, from our perspective, are really Microsoft after the acquisition of Yammer and the connection that they are building with SharePoint and Yammer. The core of the vision of this merger was exactly what I’m talking about. The unstructured conversation from Yammer are connected or are embedded within the workflows of SharePoint. At the end of the day, it’s really connecting the content and the processes and the conversations in the same space. I think that this is why Yammer was acquired at that time.

Sramana Mitra: Is the chief competitor Microsoft Yammer?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: This is one of the competitions that we see. If I could just shortly explain the way that we go to market, you will understand why we are avoiding a lot of competition right now. We sell tactically. If you go to our website, you will see that we have a few people that we serve. We are not doing, to begin with, a CEO-level sale. We are not going into a company and telling them, “Listen. We are going to solve your problem of collaboration within the company. Therefore, you’re going to run your company differently.” We are selling to project managers, IT teams, professional services, agile development teams, and marketers. You can see all the personas on our website. If you click on the professional services, you dive into a planet of professional services. You can see the stories. You can understand the benefits. We solve your professional services challenges.

Sramana Mitra: You’re selling by use case and persona, which is perfect. I think that’s great.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: We sell tactically and we expand strategically. Once those people have gained the value of using the system and it’s embedded within their professional services operation, it has built the bridges between sales and customer success, and support & R&D. Then, management sees a totally different level of visibility coming from those departments that are using Clarizen. This is how we get to be ubiquitous within our customers. We claim success with our customers when we get to be ubiquitous within their operation.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen
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