Cleo is a pioneer and global category leader in ecosystem integration with a strong supply chain focus. Cleo’s cloud-based ecosystem integration platform enables more than 4,000 customers to rapidly onboard trading partners, build, automate and manage integrations, and optimize revenue generation business processes.
While Cleo’s own platform was giving their customers visibility into the critical business flows across their ecosystems, the Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and the Director of Sales Enablement at Cleo were frustrated with their own lack of visibility into critical factors to support Cleo’s aggressive revenue growth goals – until they deployed SkyGeni.
Cleo’s RevOps tech stack included Salesforce, Gong and Highspot, and in spite of having what are considered best-in-class tools, Cleo’s leaders faced a number of challenges, broken down here by leadership role.
Ken Lyons, the Chief Revenue Officer, joined Cleo in 2016 with a charter to accelerate revenue growth and increase sales productivity. Ken’s longevity in a position where leaders on average typically last only 18 months testified to his and the company’s success. Yet four years into the job, Ken grappled with the following:
- Lack of predictability, which led to inconsistent revenue performance. This problem became especially acute after Cleo raised additional growth capital investment from a leading private equity firm.
- Lack of visibility into pipeline quality to understand clearly where bookings would land for the quarter and the year.
- Debates on the effectiveness of new pipeline creation efforts, rather than a keen focus on growth and strategy.
- Inability to quickly spot and fix hotspots in the overall sales process.
Chief Marketing Officer Tushar Patel, who joined Cleo in 2018 agreed. Patel’s challenges included:
- Inability to quickly spot pipeline churn and understand performance across different verticals, segments, product lines, and geographies.
- Lack of visibility into conversion rates across stages and timeframes.
- Inability to communicate objectively with the CEO & CFO with indisputable data.
Director of Sales Enablement Frank Kenney joined Cleo in 2017. Widely credited as the creator of the term Managed File Transfer (MFT), this former Gartner analyst from Florida joined Cleo to up-level the skills and performance of reps. But he too was hamstrung by the following:
- Inability to articulate the true impact of enablement on revenue, as he couldn’t effectively connect data from Salesforce, Gong, and Highspot, and certainly not in real time.
- Because he lacked the ability to measure impact, he couldn’t create a repeatable process that would reliably ramp new hires faster.
The SkyGeni Growth Acceleration Platform augmented and aggregated data from Salesforce, Gong, and other GTM systems at Cleo to deliver powerful, real-time insights to empower Lyons, Patel, and Kenney and their teams to make faster, more aligned growth investment decisions, thereby vastly improving revenue predictability and sales efficiency.
Ken Lyons uses SkyGeni as his personal Growth GPS to plan well and continually course-correct while executing.
SkyGeni’s Explainable AI-based pipeline calibration gives Lyons continuous and highly accurate visibility into the revenue range that the current pipeline will yield for the quarter and the year. SkyGeni’s data science team ensures that SkyGeni’s AI is continuously trained and fine-tuned to deliver +/- 10% forecast accuracy at all times.
Lyons uses SkyGeni’s time series based growth modeling to reverse engineer exactly how much pipeline will be needed, and by when, in order to meet the revenue goals from his private equity board members. This was a huge upgrade from 3x to 4x guesstimates that were the norm before. SkyGeni’s automated insights enable Lyons to identify specific combos of verticals and segments where pipeline building would be most productive, something that had been previously impossible with home-grown dashboards.
Once Lyons figures out the quantity and timing of the pipeline to build, he uses SkyGeni to set goals and measure the cadence and consistency of new qualified pipe creation by each team / AE, as well as to find and fix the root causes that prevent them from meeting these goals.
Leveraging SkyGeni’s extensive out-of-the-box cohort and trend analyses, Lyons identifies bottlenecks in Cleo’s overall sales process and invests in process improvements to fix them.
Lyons can now drive faster, more predictable, and efficient growth at Cleo, and instrument his org to receive and act on insights. SkyGeni’s extensive capabilities have powered a 20% increase in revenue per rep at Cleo.
Most importantly, Lyons uses all the insights from SkyGeni to significantly elevate the quality of his conversations with his CFO, CEO and Cleo’s investors. Instead of dreading discussions with the board, Ken now has very confident, data-driven conversations on how his execution plans are based on a solid foundation of facts, and how they are positioning Cleo to hit their aggressive growth targets.
With SkyGeni’s Demand Gen Insights, Tushar Patel has deep and continual visibility into shifts in Cleo’s competitive posture from recent win / loss data, something that was nearly impossible to do previously. Patel can now clearly see where win rates are higher and trending up versus lower and declining.
Armed with these insights, Patel’s team is able to spot trends and outliers and quickly build the right kind of pipeline that will convert at a higher rate, and faster. The Marketing team has clear calls to action on where to invest more in pipeline generation and where to slow down and research more to understand the root cause of decreased competitiveness.
SkyGeni also provides Patel and his team unparalleled visibility into all pipeline moves and conversion rates at a team and rep level. This in turn helps create optimal pairings of SDRs and AEs to maximize revenue outcomes and give each AE sufficient pipeline.
Patel is back in control. The quality vs quantity argument between sales and marketing teams morphed into a very productive, aligned collaboration based on clear mutual SLAs and shared visibility into pipeline health and outcomes. Together, Patel and Lyons drive more aligned growth conversations across the entire C-suite at Cleo.
Patel’s team has used SkyGeni to increase MQL to Closed-Won conversion rates for new customers by 45%, thereby elevating his team’s effectiveness and Cleo’s overall sales efficiency.
Frank Kenney uses SkyGeni to unify data from their CRM, Conversation Intelligence, and Learning Management System to go beyond simple content consumption metrics (that most Enablement teams rely on) and measure the precise impact of enablement on revenue outcomes for each rep. This is a huge step up from where Kenney was.
Leveraging SkyGeni’s ability to spotlight how each rep is performing at every stage and benchmark each rep against the best reps at Cleo, Kenney pinpoints blind spots at a rep level and surgically enables each rep exactly where they need help. Kenney is also able to identify, codify and replicate winning behaviors across all reps.
Using SkyGeni’s “What If” scenario modelers, Kenney can change rep behavior by showing reps the significant potential positive impact that small improvements could have, thereby encouraging reps to elevate their performance to match their potential.
Using historical ramp data from SkyGeni, Kenney discovered what a good ramp trajectory looks like and created a series of milestones for new hires to hit by specific timeframes. By tracking these leading indicators, Kenney is able to intervene sooner for reps not on track and has shrunk ramp time for new hires by three months.
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