Minimum Data Requirements for the Clari Projection and CRM Score
What are the minimum data requirements for the Clari Projection and CRM Score?
If we were to interpret this question super literally, then we could share the absolute minimum data required for Clari to produce any AI Projection or any CRM Scores—regardless of accuracy or confidence—but that's not necessarily useful to most Clari customers.
What you are probably interested in if you're asking this question is the minimum amount of data you should have in CRM before you can start confidently relying on the AI Projection or the CRM Score as a triangulation point, and we can certainly share some of our recommendations with you in this area. Our suggested minimum requirements are as follows:
1. Enter/update opportunities in Salesforce for at least 1 full quarter
You should be using Salesforce for the span of at least 1 entire quarter in order for Clari to understand your typical conversion rates and patterns of behavior for deals that are closed as won and lost. This isn't to say that you need to use Clari for 1 full quarter before you can begin to use the AI Projection or CRM Score; Clari will look back at your opportunities retroactively up to 2 years, so you just need to have been entering/updating opportunities in Salesforce for at least 1 entire quarter.
2. At least 1 full quarter's worth of opportunities in Salesforce
This requirement comes along naturally with the one above, but it's an important point to take into account. In terms of a minimum number of opportunities to have in Salesforce, we recommend that you have at least 1 full quarter's worth of opportunities in CRM—whatever that means for you.
Whether your organization typically works one hundred, one thousand, or five thousand deals every quarter, you should have a typical quarter's worth of opportunities in Salesforce that Clari can use to come up with weightings to apply a CRM Score to each deal.
To take an extreme example, if you only had data on 1 deal, Clari is going to apply a CRM Score to any open deal based on how similar it is to that single deal, so the score isn't going to be very statistically significant. However, once there are a few hundred or a few thousand deals, Clari can get a pretty strong sense of the pattern of how deals are won or lost.
3. History track key fields in Salesforce for at least 1 entire quarter.
In most cases, this requirement also comes along naturally with the other two, but it's another important point to make. It's critical to the CRM Score that key fields (i.e. Close Date, Deal Size/Amount, Stage, Forecast Category, etc.) are history tracked in Salesforce because Clari uses these fields to understand patterns of behavior for deals that were closed as won and lost.
That is, the CRM Score is formulated based on the behavior of the CRM fields. So you should be history-tracking key fields for the span of at least 1 full quarter in order for Clari to properly understand those patterns of behavior.
A note on highly seasonal businesses...
For some customers, your business might be highly seasonal, and Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 of your fiscal year probably aren't nearly as similar to each other as the same quarter across fiscal years (i.e. Q1 FY2019, Q1 FY2020, Q1 FY2021). In this case, you'll likely need to rely on having at least 1 fiscal year's worth of opportunity data for Clari to analyze in order to leverage the AI Projection and the CRM Score with confidence.
That's not to say that you need to use Clari for 1 full year before you can begin to use the AI Projection or CRM Score; Clari will look back at your opportunities retroactively up to 2 years, so you just need to have been entering/updating opportunities in Salesforce for at least 1 fiscal year.
