Generating revenue, not reports: How Clari redefines in-product analytics

Snapshot

The challenge: Faced with a build vs. buy decision, Clari needed to evolve from static, siloed analytics to a scalable, embedded analytics platform that could deliver interactive, trustworthy insights directly within its product experience. 

The solution: Sisense provided a flexible, API-first analytics platform with a unified semantic layer, embedded capabilities, and AI-powered features to enable in-context analytics for Clari’s customers. Instead of build vs. buy, Clari opted to buy and build. With the needed resources on hand, developers could build custom products faster. 

The impact: Clari delivered a self-service analytics experience that increased customer satisfaction, improved trust in data, and enabled faster decision-making.

About Clari and its product vision

Clari is the leading AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform, helping enterprises manage the entire revenue process, from pipeline creation to customer retention. By analyzing structured and unstructured data, Clari enables teams to increase win rates, prevent deal slippage, and forecast revenue with confidence.

Following its 2023 acquisition of Groove, the Clari team knew the timing was right to elevate how analytics could drive value for customers. Rather than treating analytics as a standalone feature, the team aimed to embed insights directly into the workflows of sales leaders, frontline managers, and revenue teams.

Pavan Vemuri, Head of Customer Data and Enablement at Clari, said, “We wanted to showcase the value of the product, the ROI to our customers. Analytics was the need, and it was vital that we embed those analytics within the product.”

From static dashboards to scalable, embedded analytics

As Clari scaled, its existing analytics approach began to fall short. Customers expected more than high-level dashboards. They wanted deeper, interactive insights so that their customers could make decisions in real time. 

Key challenges included:

• Stale, limited analytics experiences: Users couldn’t drill down or explore data dynamically
• Inconsistent metrics: Definitions varied across the application, reducing trust in data
• Siloed analytics: Insights lived separately from the product experience
• Scalability constraints: Existing solutions couldn’t support a growing suite of products and data sources

Vemuri said, “We were getting customer feedback that the analytics were stale. We wanted to provide a way to drill through, drill down, or explore.”

At the same time, the Clari team faced increasing pressure to innovate quickly while maintaining performance, scalability, and security. The team recognized that solving these challenges required more than incremental improvements. They needed a platform that could unify data, scale across products, and deliver seamless, embedded analytics experiences.

Why Clari chose Sisense: An embedded foundation for product innovation

After evaluating multiple options and running proofs of concept, Clari selected Sisense for its ability to serve as both a powerful analytics platform and a flexible foundation for product innovation.

Vemuri said, “We needed a platform, not just a product. Something scalable and reliable that we could build on.”

Several capabilities stood out:

A unified semantic layer for trusted data

Sisense enabled Clari to centralize metric definitions within a single data model, eliminating inconsistencies and ensuring accuracy across the application.

Deeply embedded, seamless experiences

Using Sisense APIs and Compose SDK, Clari embedded analytics directly into its product, creating a cohesive user experience. In other words, customers didn’t need to use separate tools to access analytics. 

Flexibility across modern data stacks

Sisense allowed Clari to integrate across diverse environments including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and GCP, supporting rapid growth and acquisitions.

AI-powered and conversational analytics

With natural language querying and AI-driven insights, Clari enabled its customers to interact with data more intuitively, reducing reliance on manual, static reporting.

Vemuri said, “The biggest decision point was the flexibility around having conversational analytics. We want that interaction to happen between our customers and the data.”

For Clari, embedded analytics as a product differentiator 

Clari implemented Sisense as a fully embedded analytics platform, deploying it within its own infrastructure for maximum control over performance, security, and scalability.

With Sisense, Clari transformed analytics from a supporting feature into a core product differentiator. In line with their goals, they successfully delivered a seamless, embedded experience aligned with product workflows.

Key innovations included:

Interactive, self-service analytics

Users can now drill down into metrics, explore trends, and understand performance without relying on static dashboards or external reports. 

The result: Reduced dependency on Clari teams and accelerated decision-making for customers.

Custom reporting without added overhead

By providing customers with secure access to a governed data model, Clari enables them to create their own reports and explore data independently.

The result: Reduced need for custom reporting infrastructure and additional resources.

Metric observability and trust

Clari implemented metric observability to ensure every number presented to customers is accurate, explainable, and traceable back to its source. By linking metrics to underlying queries and enabling deeper validation, teams can validate metrics at the source, quickly identify discrepancies, and ensure every insight is explainable, all of which builds confidence in the data. 

The result: Improved data trust and consistency through a unified semantic layer. Vemuri said, “A number is just a number unless it means something. It has to alert you when something is wrong or abnormal.”

AI-driven, conversational experiences

Building on one of their goals of enabling more intuitive data interaction, Clari introduced conversational analytics capabilities that allow customers to ask questions and receive insights instantly.

The result: Faster time to insight due to customer accessibility and a reduction in the need for traditional reporting workflows.

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Future focus: from insights to action

The next phase for Clari is about operationalizing analytics. The team looks forward to turning insights into immediate, data-driven actions for their customers, all within the product experience.

Vemuri said, “Turning analytics into action; that is the future. It serves a greater purpose in every product we build.” By continuing to invest in AI-powered analytics and automation, Clari is positioning itself to deliver even more proactive, decision-driven experiences for its customers.

Conclusion: Building analytics-driven products without the overhead

Clari’s journey highlights a common challenge for modern SaaS companies: analytics can no longer be static, siloed, or secondary, but how best to address that need in the product?

Instead of investing time and resources into building and maintaining analytics infrastructure from scratch, Clari leveraged Sisense to accelerate innovation, improve user experience, and unlock new product value faster.

For product and engineering leaders looking to differentiate, increase adoption, and deliver data-driven experiences at scale, Sisense provides a proven path to move from data to action with speed and confidence. To learn more about analytics solutions that will keep you competitive, schedule a demo.