Few saw this coming, but the announced merger of Clari and Salesloft, set to close in early Q4, has shaken up the usually quiet August news cycle. Combining two leaders in Revenue Orchestration Platforms (ROP), the deal promises a comprehensive platform spanning engagement (Salesloft) through forecasting and orchestration (Clari). While it positions the new entity more favourably for potential IPO further down the road and signals investor confidence, it’s undeniably a high-risk, high-reward gambit requiring exceptional leadership to navigate product and commercial challenges.

Product Strategy: Overlaps, Questions, and AI Potential

From a product standpoint, to me the merger raises more questions than answers at this point. Both platforms have overlapping functionalities—Clari dominates forecasting, while Salesloft added forecasting in recent years. Salesloft offers leading engagement capabilities, though Clari already acquired Groove (a well respected engagement vendor) for sales engagement in 2023. Neither closes the gap to Gong in conversation intelligence, and no major new AI capabilities emerge from the deal.

However, the expanded data corpus presents a longer-term opportunity for innovative AI-driven insights, setting the stage for significant differentiation. ROP platforms help B2B firms more easily adopt AI within familiar environments, but the merger’s success hinges on balancing integration efforts with AI innovation. Startups are rapidly advancing sales tech, and established players like Clari and Salesloft must ensure they remain competitive by experimenting and evolving to meet changing enterprise demands across a broad range sales use cases for AI.

Integration Challenges and User Experience Risks

Integrating these two overlapping platforms would appear to be potentially a lengthy, iterative process, requiring tough decisions on technology consolidation while keeping customers satisfied. Maintaining UX advantages—critical to ROP’s value proposition over CRM vendors and for continued frontline adoption—will be paramount, especially as Salesloft’s ease of use contrasts with Clari’s ongoing efforts to integrate existing sales engagement tools. This merger brings the continuation of those Groove integration efforts into question. In the near term, a bifurcated approach may emerge, with Salesloft serving frontline users and Clari supporting management insights. It’s a fascinating product strategy challenge to be resolved.

Commercial Logic: Scale and Momentum

While product strategy challenges are real, the merger’s business rationale is clear. Together, Clari and Salesloft boast over 5,000 customers, a combined ARR of ~$450 million, and soon the largest go-to-market organization in the ROP category. This deal is fundamentally about scale—accelerating growth, closing earnings to valuation ratio gaps, and paving the way for eventual IPO. Organic growth to this level would have taken years, a luxury neither company likely has. This merger shortcuts that process and changes the investment dynamics, allowing the new organization to set a new narrative and leverage its combined commercial strengths (and significant potential cost synergies) to grow their market share.

The Stakes: Redefining Revenue AI Platforms

This merger is a bold attempt to define the next wave of “Revenue AI,” combining data, insights, and AI augmented execution into one system. The potential is immense—but success hinges on meaningful, swift integration. High risk, high reward indeed.