Contact Management with Capture

Overview

Capture puts contact management in your CRM on autopilot with automated contact creation, opportunity association, and lead conversion.
 

In this article, you'll learn about:
 

• Extracting Contact Information from Sales Activities
• Further Contact Enrichment with Capture
• Syncing Account Contacts to CRM
• Adding Opportunity Contact Roles
• Converting Existing Leads to Contacts

Extracting Contact Information from Sales Activities

Once external emails and meeting invitations are captured in the Clari database, all external participants can be extracted and checked against existing contacts in your CRM database. We are able to extract contacts from both sales meetings and email exchanges. Contacts extracted from meetings must be listed as an attendee on the meeting, and contacts extracted from emails can be limited to either the sender only or all external recipients depending on your configuration.

Sales activities can be analyzed for external contacts on both a retroactive and ongoing basis. From the time of connecting your org’s email and calendar to Clari, we are able to analyze up to 12 months of historical data which allows you to realize immediate benefits to your customer contact database. On an ongoing basis, new activities are analyzed for external contacts periodically (every 24 hours by default).

For each external contact identified, we capture the following attributes from sales activity metadata: 
 

• Email address
• First name
• Last name

Further Contact Enrichment with Capture

As a Clari Capture customer, you get access to Clearbit enrichment services for all new contacts captured from sales activity data. Clearbit’s Enrichment product sources data from over 250 public and private sources, and constantly refreshes it to ensure that you get the most up-to-date information possible.

With Clearbit for Clari, we provide the following pieces of critical information for contacts captured in sales meetings/emails:
 

• Name (if not available from metadata)
• Title (e.g. VP of Sales)
• Function (e.g. Sales)
• Seniority (e.g. VP)

Clearbit for Clari is included with your Capture subscription. If you are already a Clearbit customer, you can provide your API key so Clari utilizes your existing subscription instead of Clearbit for Clari.

Note: Clearbit for Clari begins enriching contacts at the time when the new contact is created by Capture. If you are interested in enriching the rest of your contact database, we will refer you to the Clearbit team to discuss their full Enrichment product. 

Note: Clari Capture also integrates with other 3rd party data providers to bring in additional data points (i.e. title, phone number, etc.) for new contacts created.
 

Syncing Account Contacts to CRM

All external contacts captured from sales activity data by Clari are checked against existing contacts in CRM. In our analysis across millions of activity records, we’ve found that on average nearly 70% of the people that sales reps meet with do not get added as a contact in CRM. Automating contact creation can have a huge impact on customer database completeness and quality. 

The first step of this process is establishing a match between that contact and an account from your CRM environment. There are two criteria used in matching, which together can reliably associate contacts with accounts and avoid syncing personal contacts that may be included in sales activity data:
 

1. Find accounts that have one or more existing contacts with a matching email domain. For example if joe@acme.com is listed as an attendee on a sales rep meeting, we will look for accounts that have other contacts with @acme.com email addresses.
2. Find accounts that can be associated with at least one of the internal participants in the activity from a CRM-ownership perspective. For example, joe@acme.com would only be matched with the Acme account if the Acme account owner or the owner of an opportunity on the Acme account was also present in the meeting.

Once the account match is established, we check to see if that contact matches an existing contact based on email address. If there is a contact with a matching email address, Clari detects this and will not create a duplicate.

If there is no contact on the matched account that has a matching email address, Clari will automatically create a new contact and populate the relevant fields. We will also update a custom field that can be used to identify the contact as one that was created by Clari Capture.

To avoid permissions issues, all contacts are synced on behalf of an integration user. 
 

Adding Opportunity Contact Roles 

If desired, all contacts captured by Clari can also be associated with relevant opportunities as opportunity contact roles. Good opportunity-level contact data is critical for knowing which individuals were part of the buying team on that deal. If you don’t have full visibility into the buying team, it is very challenging to do accurate marketing attribution or know who to re-engage with when managing a renewal or trying to expand within the account.

Contacts are matched with opportunities by applying the above criteria for account association, then finding opportunities owned by one of the internal participants in the activity. You can configure Capture to associate contacts with open opportunities only, or both open and closed opportunities. If there are multiple matching opportunities based on these criteria, the contact will be added to all matching opportunities.

When adding an opportunity contact role, the primary value delivered by Clari is the association of that contact with the opportunity. We do not have sufficient information to reliably determine what that person’s role should be, so by default we take a neutral stance and do not set a specific role. Once the contact has been associated with the opportunity automatically, the role can be updated by the rep who has sufficient information to make that determination.
 

Converting Existing Leads to Contacts

In some cases, a person captured from sales activity data may not match an existing contact in CRM but match an existing lead. A common problem in B2B selling use cases is that only the initial lead on the deal is properly converted to a contact and associated with the opportunity — this is especially true of B2B selling with longer sales cycles and larger buying teams.

This leaves other people that get involved in the deal as leads in the system, which provides an inaccurate picture of that person’s engagement status, and makes it challenging for Marketing to focus on reaching the right people and measure their influence.

If a contact captured by Clari does not match an existing CRM contact, we can also look for an existing lead record with a matching email address. If a matching lead is found, you have the option to automatically convert that matched lead to a contact and associate them with the correct account and opportunity.

If you are using a 3rd party vendor to do lead to account matching, we have the ability to respect the account already specified for the lead. If not, we will apply the account matching criteria listed in the section above.