Why Revenue Teams Look Beyond Clari: Reasons Buyers Give on Sales Calls

If you're looking at a Clari renewal and wondering whether your reasons for looking around are normal, they are. The RevOps leaders we talk to give the same four, often in nearly the same words:

• The product stopped moving.
• Clari Copilot and Clari Forecast don't share data.
• The forecast is locked to the role hierarchy and to professional services.
• Adoption and support decayed after the Salesloft merger.

Most of them still like Clari's top-down forecast view. What they describe is a good forecasting core with a frozen roadmap. That's a different problem from a bad product, and it calls for a different decision.

Everything below comes from our own sales calls with teams evaluating forecasting and deal reviews in Weflow. It's anonymous buyer voice, not a market statistic. One note on the vendor: since 1 September 2026, Clari sits under the Salesloft brand, so your renewal is now a Salesloft conversation.

For each reason, you'll find a quick check on whether the cause is Clari or your rollout. After that come the realistic options at renewal, including staying.

What RevOps leaders tell us when they look beyond Clari

RevOps leaders who look beyond Clari on our calls cite four root causes, and the Clari renewal audit is what turns them into an evaluation. The forecasting core itself is still valued.

These are patterns from the teams on our calls, not a measured share of every Clari customer.

Where these buyer quotes come from, and their limits

The quotes in this article come from Weflow sales calls with RevOps leaders who were evaluating forecasting at or near a Clari renewal. They show recurring patterns, not market share.

You should know how we handled them:

• Every quote is anonymized. No person or company is named.
• We don't publish a total count of calls or quotes.
• Figures from a single team, such as one team's 8% license usage, are labeled as that team's figure.
• Clari has operated under the Salesloft brand since 1 September 2026. Clari Forecast and Clari Copilot keep their names.
• Weflow is a party to every one of these calls. These buyers were talking to a potential alternative, and you should read the evidence with that in mind.

Why the Clari renewal audit starts the search

No single new failure starts the search. The renewal audit does. Someone lists what the team actually uses, prices it, and the gap is hard to defend.

The list is usually short: the roll-up, a simple pipeline view, and deal inspection. One RevOps leader summed up their audit like this:

"We mostly use Clari for roll-ups, simple pipeline analytics, and to inspect and the price point for that is crazy high."

Those three surviving features are the ones a capable RevOps team can approximate with Salesforce reports and a BI dashboard. That's what makes the invoice sting.

The renewal itself has also changed shape. It's now with Salesloft, under a retired brand, and neither clari.com nor salesloft.com publishes a seat price. Both pricing pages route you to a Talk to Sales booking page.

And the window is fixed. One buyer put it plainly:

"We have got a finite stop. We lose Clari on a day."

Most teams we talk to work backward from that date:

1. Pick a path in Q3.
2. Implement in Q4.
3. Be live before the new fiscal year starts.

Miss the window and you're locked into another year. Finance won't fund two forecasting tools in parallel, so the timeline filters out options before any demo does.

Why buyers say Clari stopped improving after the Salesloft merger

Long-term Clari users on our calls describe the same product in 2026 as in 2023, and they tie the slowdown in investment to the merger. This is the complaint we hear first and most often.

One buyer was blunt about it:

"the product we used in '23 is exactly the product we use in '26 · no improvements, no efficiencies, no growth · since Salesloft acquired Clari they're just not investing in it anymore"

Another longtime user described the tool as tired:

"The tool feels tired, and also underinvested."

The AI story comes up again and again. One team told us Clari had "promised us an AI sales agent nine months ago." A prospect's VP, relayed to us on a call, put it more sharply:

"Clari hasn't changed in three years, their product isn't evolving. They don't have anything in AI."

We can't speak to Clari's internal roadmap, and we won't. What we can tell you is what this does to a buying decision. These buyers aren't angry about what Clari does today. They're unconvinced it will do more, and at renewal that doubt has a price tag.

Why Clari Copilot and Clari Forecast don't share data

Teams that run both Clari Copilot and Clari Forecast describe paying for two products that behave as two systems. The forecast can't read what was said on calls.

"I honestly don't see the value today of having copilot and forecast with Clari because they're not talking to each other."

This is where forecasting breaks before the model ever gets involved. A forecast that can't see the conversation data runs on whatever the rep remembered to type.

Clari built its suite by acquisition, not one data model

This is a design issue, not a configuration issue. Clari assembled its suite from acquisitions, and the parts were never rebuilt onto a shared foundation:

1. 2022: Wingman became Clari Copilot.
2. 2023: Groove became Groove by Clari.
3. December 2025: Clari and Salesloft merged.
4. 1 September 2026: one brand, Salesloft.

Each piece arrived with its own data model, interface and release cycle. Consolidating onto Clari puts them on one invoice. It doesn't put them on one data layer.

The test question we'd give you for any vendor, including us: does the forecast read what the call recorder produced? Ask which object each product writes to, and whether one can filter on a field the other created.

Teams buy a second tool to write call fields into Salesforce

Buyers describe Clari Copilot as a recorder that leaves the work after the recording to them.

"Clari's conversation intelligence feels like it's more of a transcription rather than anything else."

Copilot sends a summary and call metadata to a Salesforce Task, but the full transcript doesn't reach Salesforce. Methodology fields don't fill themselves either.

So some teams pay twice. One team that keeps Copilot for external calls bought Momentum on top of it to write call outcomes into Salesforce fields, because, in their words, Copilot can't do the writing:

"We're in a sales cycle with Momentum as a tool that we would use to just populate data against Salesforce fields and write to Slack for having a human in the loop approval of changes to Salesforce records."

That works, but now you have three vendors in the chain. When a field write fails, your admin checks Salesforce, Clari and Momentum in turn to find where it broke.

How the role hierarchy and service tickets lock the Clari forecast

The Clari forecast tends to harden around the original implementation while the business reorganizes every year. This is the operator's sharpest pain, and it's the one CROs rarely see.

Clari roll-ups follow the Salesforce role hierarchy, not deal criteria

Clari roll-ups depend on the Salesforce role hierarchy, so a team can't roll up by deal criteria or build a separate forecast outside it.

"The biggest limitation we had on Clari is that it was very dependent on the Salesforce hierarchy."

Matrix orgs feel this first. One RevOps leader described a rep whose deals belong to two different managers:

"We've had a rep who owns a deal that should roll up into the EMEA sales manager, but they also own another deal that should roll up into the strategic sales manager. In Clari we've created workarounds, and it's a bit messy. It's almost like we want it to roll up based on deal criteria as opposed to opportunity owner."

Others want to compare a segment across managers and can't:

"You're stuck with the Salesforce hierarchy. I want to look at all enterprise reps globally and compare them."

A new target or column becomes a professional services ticket

Changes that should take you ten minutes go through Clari's professional services instead. Buyers named these:

• Creating a new quarter target
• Creating a new forecast call
• Changing how the roll-up works
• Adjusting the columns in a forecast view

"In the product, you want to adjust the columns here, you have to go via professional services."

This explains a split we see constantly: the operator who lives with these tickets dislikes the tool, while the CRO who bought it and only opens the forecast view is still fond of it.

RevOps rebuilds accuracy, quotas and board decks outside Clari

Workarounds pile up outside the tool, and the person maintaining them is usually you. One RevOps leader described the cycle:

"And for our executives there are ever-evolving things they want to see within their forecast, and we then just have to build it."

Two quotes capture it. On the field stack:

"A lot of the stuff that was set up originally in Clari are fields that have since been deprecated, or it is formula fields layered upon formula fields to get to a number which actually we have in the beginning anyway."

On the board deck:

"Clari is clearly not suited as a reporting tool to present to this type of stakeholders. So we're using Tableau. So we kind of are flowing the data from Clari to Tableau."

Add up the hours and you're paying for a forecasting tool that isn't the source of the only forecast leadership debates.

Why Clari adoption and support decayed after the merger

Clari usage tends to decay once the person who kept the instance configured is gone, and Clari was built for sales leadership rather than reps. This is where "Clari problem" and "our problem" blur the most.

One team found its Clari license usage at about 8%

One team's account review turned up a number that's hard to defend at renewal:

"Our Clari license usage is at about 8%. Three are deployed with regards to the activity stuff, some are syncing, some are not. When we have done the account review, a bunch of reps do not have the calendar synced."

That's one team's figure, not a benchmark. But the pattern behind it is common: reps don't submit forecasts, calendars never get connected, and the price per useful seat keeps climbing.

Part of the reason is who Clari serves. It's a tool for the people inspecting the work, and reps notice:

"None of my reps thank me for getting Clari."

Renewals and customer success forecasts were never set up in Clari

Your biggest revenue line often has no forecast process behind it. New business runs in Clari, while renewals still come straight out of Salesforce because they were always next on the list.

"Some of the teams are using Clari forecasting but when we talk to the renewals team right now it's just in Salesforce again just was never implemented."

In companies where account managers and CSMs outnumber new-logo reps, that means the largest share of revenue is the part nobody can grade.

Support turned into tickets, and outages hit live pipeline calls

After the merger, the customer success model changed. Buyers tell us the account manager changed and nobody on the other side is proactive anymore.

"Post merger, I have had very poor experience in terms of support from account management, from CSM. I think they have changed their whole model."

Others describe a support queue where "everything's a trouble ticket," and one CEO who "randomly lost access to all his forecasting." The worst moment we've heard about happened live:

"I ran a pipeline call today with my CEO, CFO and CRO all on the call and Clari just stopped working. It's not my Internet connection. Literally just in the middle of my pipeline call it stopped."

Support matters more for Clari than it sounds. The product needs ongoing configuration to stay useful, so losing your account manager often means losing the person who kept your instance current.

What buyers still rate highly in Clari

Clari's forecasting core is good, and buyers say so. Their doubt is that it will get better, not that it works today.

The top-down forecast view is the screen leaders live in

Buyers who are leaving Clari still praise its forecast view. A CRO can see each direct report's commit and best case at a glance, edit inline, and drill down.

"Clari was the one screen that I live in most in terms of the forecasting element · their forecasting is really strong, it does everything that we need"

The same buyer added that where it's lacking is conversation intelligence. That combination, a strong forecast view next to a weak call layer, is the shape of most of these conversations.

Years of Clari forecast history make leaving feel risky

The fear that holds teams back is losing years of data and starting over. It's a legitimate reason to hesitate.

"the benefit of Clari is we have a lot of historical data in there because it's been listening to our database for several years now. So having to start from scratch is a potential issue."

If you're feeling this, you're not being sentimental. Forecast history is how you judge whether this quarter's call is believable.

Buyers expect a replacement to cover about 80% of Clari

Experienced Clari buyers expect any replacement to match roughly 80% of what they have, so forecast parity alone doesn't win a switch.

"I don't see your solution being better than Clari. I see your solution being able to do at least 80% of what we had with Clari."

The missing 20% is usually the configuration you built over years: splits, dual date logic, a specific roll-up. That gap is real. The decision gets made on what the incumbent can't do at all, which is usually the layer built on call and activity data.

Is it Clari or your rollout? Check each reason

Some of these reasons are structural to Clari, some come from how it was implemented, and some are both. If you fix the rollout gaps first, you won't carry them into the next tool.

One buyer was honest about both sides at once:

"It is expensive. It's not properly set up to maximize how we needed to use it."

Buyers who have lived through a stalled rollout shop differently the second time. Here's what they told us they do now:

• They name the internal owner before the contract is signed. One team said it plainly: "we never had a proper business owner for copilot which resulted like in the situation we're at no adoption."
• They show sellers a day-in-the-life demo, not just the buying committee demo, so reps see what the tool does for them.
• They decide which legacy fields die before the new tool is connected, not after.
• They ask every vendor who owns the rollout and what happens if adoption stalls.

How to make the case to your CRO, CFO and PE sponsor

Each stakeholder hears a different reason, and the same argument rarely survives all three conversations. You'll usually carry three versions of the case.

Your CRO likes the Clari view and doesn't work in Salesforce

Your CRO is moved by the view they open and show the board, not by a CRM data-quality argument. Many CROs don't work in Salesforce at all, and Clari sells them a forecasting process built around predictability, which lands well with anyone who defends a number to a board.

So split the case. Show the CRO the replacement view next to the Clari view: commit and best case by direct report, with drill-down. Carry the data argument (call fields, roll-up flexibility, accuracy tracking) separately with RevOps and finance.

Your CFO won't pay for two forecasting tools at once

The CFO block is about a signature, not a product. One revenue leader described it this way:

"There's a trend towards consolidation, but then you're in a renewal cycle with your forecasting solution. And the CFO just blocks you because you can't have two forecasting solutions."

You have two ways around it. Start with something outside the locked forecasting line, such as activity capture or conversation intelligence, or time the forecasting move to the renewal date so there's never a period of double spend.

Your PE sponsor standardized on Clari across the portfolio

When a PE sponsor has standardized on Clari, replacement becomes a political decision, not a technical one.

"The PE firm really loves Clari. They've been using it for years. So they like the visual. I try to approach it like would you be interested in changing that? And that was kind of a non starter."

Don't spend your first year fighting this. The realistic path is to coexist: improve the activity and call data Clari reads, and revisit the forecasting tool when the political window opens.

Your realistic options at the Clari renewal

You have five realistic paths at a Clari renewal, and each fits a specific situation. None of them is right for everyone.

When staying on Clari is the right call

Staying on Clari or coexisting with it is the right call in two situations:

• Your forecasting works and price is the only issue. Renegotiate or cut seats. One team on our calls was cutting back to about 20 seats at its renewal.
• A PE sponsor has standardized on Clari. Coexist, improve the data Clari reads, and wait for the window.

Why a Claude rebuild is cheap to start and costly to keep

RevOps leaders now build a prototype before they take a vendor call. One told us exactly how:

"On my plane ride home from California last week with Claude, I rebuilt Clari how I would want it in Salesforce."

Forecast views are the easy part of that rebuild. They sit on data already in Salesforce, so it's mostly presentation.

The ongoing cost is maintenance:

• The data model, which changes every time the business reorganizes
• Pipeline snapshotting, which you need for any history
• Hierarchy roll-ups and permissions
• Integrations with your mailboxes, calendars and recorders

Capture-to-record mapping is the part internal builds underestimate most. Deciding which contact, account and opportunity each email or meeting belongs to, when an account has several open deals, is hard work at volume.

And Salesforce alone can't answer the question leadership asks every quarter:

"at day 35 of the quarter, how are we doing at day 35 of the previous quarters? Like, it's and that's a hard thing to do. Like, you obviously can't do it with Salesforce reporting, right? So you're into a data warehouse, you're snapshotting, you're looking at things."

If your prototype covers what you need and you have the people to maintain it, building is a fair choice. Price it against the maintenance, not the weekend.

Where Weflow fits if you decide to switch from Clari

Weflow is the Revenue AI Orchestration platform for sales, customer success, and RevOps teams. We built it for Salesforce teams, and we built the products in-house on one data layer rather than buying them.

That matters for the reasons in this article. Weflow answers the data-sharing and rigidity reasons structurally, it has real gaps against Clari, and we publish our price.

"With Weflow, we forecast within 7% by week 4 of the quarter."
— Tibor Stefán, Chief Revenue Officer, Zeotap

Weflow forecasts from the same data its call recorder writes

Weflow Activity & Contact Capture, Weflow Conversation Intelligence and Weflow Deal Intelligence & Forecasting share one data layer, so the forecast reads what the call recorder produced.

Weflow admins change roll-ups and columns without a ticket

In Weflow, your admin makes the changes that become professional services tickets in Clari:

• Roll-ups follow the Salesforce role hierarchy by default, and an admin can switch on a custom hierarchy and arrange which team reports into which by drag and drop.
• One person can sit in several teams, which covers the CSM who carries both an expansion and a renewal number.
• Formula fields over condition groups rebuild your calculated columns: Best Case plus Commit, net or gross dollar retention, renewals due in a period, or your own stage weighting.
• Weflow snapshots the pipeline every few hours, which powers the waterfall and the day-35 comparison against previous quarters.

What comes across from Clari to Weflow, and what you rebuild

Your Clari forecast history doesn't have to disappear, but part of your setup gets rebuilt. Here's how it breaks down:

On timing, the technical setup takes 30 to 45 minutes with your Salesforce admin and your Google Workspace or Microsoft admin. Full time to value takes 1 to 3 weeks, most of it spent on business logic: forecast types, cadences, quotas and pipeline views.

Where Weflow falls short of Clari today

Here's where Weflow falls short of Clari today:

• Clari's enterprise roll-ups at 1,000+ reps are more mature. At that scale, Clari has the edge.
• Weflow has no pipeline flow view. We match pacing and waterfall, but not flow.
• Weflow has no account-level board like Clari's account module. Our forecasting and inspection are built on opportunities.
• A submitted Weflow forecast isn't written back to a Salesforce field today. It's reachable over MCP. If your rule is that everything lands in the CRM, this is the one number that doesn't.
• Weflow does no sequencing. If you're leaving Salesloft too, that's a separate decision.

What Weflow Deal Intelligence and Forecasting costs

Weflow Deal Intelligence & Forecasting costs $39 per user per month, billed annually, and we publish that price. Clari and Salesloft publish no seat prices. Revenue AI Enterprise, which includes every Weflow product, is $79 per user per month.

All plans have a 10-user minimum, no implementation fees and no usage-based charges. There's a 14-day free trial, so you can test Weflow on your own Salesforce data.

If your CFO blocks a second forecasting tool, start outside the locked line. Land on Weflow Activity & Contact Capture ($19) and Weflow Conversation Intelligence ($39), or Revenue AI Foundation at $49 for both. Then add forecasting per user when your Clari contract ends.

Walk through the product yourself, no call required.

How to cite these Clari buyer findings

If you're quoting this in a business case, use this attribution:

Source: Weflow, "Why Revenue Teams Look Beyond Clari: Reasons Buyers Give on Sales Calls." Based on anonymous buyer quotes from Weflow sales calls with RevOps leaders evaluating Clari at or near renewal. The findings describe recurring patterns, not market share.

Citable findings:

• RevOps leaders who look beyond Clari on Weflow's sales calls say the product stopped improving after the Salesloft merger.
• Buyers on Weflow's calls report that Clari Copilot and Clari Forecast don't share data, so the forecast can't read call content.
• Buyers describe Clari roll-ups as locked to the Salesforce role hierarchy, with simple forecast changes routed through professional services.
• Buyers report that Clari adoption and account support decayed after the merger, while most still rate the top-down forecast view highly.

FAQ: Clari renewals, Salesloft and switching

Is Clari still a separate company after the Salesloft merger?

No. Clari and Salesloft merged in December 2025, and since 1 September 2026 they've operated under one brand, Salesloft. Clari Forecast and Clari Copilot keep their names as product lines. Any Clari renewal is now a commercial relationship with Salesloft.

Can we keep our Clari forecast history if we switch?

Yes, in part. Weflow imports submitted Clari forecast calls from Clari's API or a CSV, and opportunity history comes from Salesforce. Your forecast setup and calculated columns get rebuilt as Weflow forecast configurations and formulas.

How do we switch off Clari Copilot without two notetakers on calls?

Cut over cleanly instead of running both in parallel, because two bots in a customer meeting looks wrong and splits your data. Most teams switch over a weekend: Copilot off, the new tool tested without users, everyone trained on Monday. Secure your Copilot transcripts and metadata before the switch.

If we keep Salesloft for sequencing, will Salesforce get duplicate activities?

No. Weflow's compatibility mode recognizes activity Salesloft has already logged and skips it. Weflow delays its own sync by about ten seconds, checks the email for Salesloft's tracking pattern, and steps back if it finds one.

Does Clari publish its pricing for renewals?

No. Both clari.com/pricing and salesloft.com/pricing route to a Salesloft Talk to Sales booking page with no tier, seat or add-on prices. Your renewal number comes from a sales conversation.

Can we start with Weflow before our Clari contract ends?

Yes. Many teams land on Weflow Activity & Contact Capture and Weflow Conversation Intelligence first, which sit outside the forecasting line your CFO has already funded. You then add Weflow Deal Intelligence & Forecasting per user at your Clari renewal.

Does Weflow write the submitted forecast back to Salesforce?

Not today. A submitted Weflow forecast isn't written to a Salesforce field, but you can reach it over MCP and combine it with other data in an AI assistant. Everything else Weflow captures lands in native Salesforce objects.