sales-forecasting
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The Robots Fighting Over Your Sales Forecast
Clari and Aviso both promise to tell you what your quarter will close at. The real split is over who does the work - your reps clicking through a CRM, or software that acts on its own.
BoostUp Is Beating Clari By Being Cheaper, Not Better
The revenue-intelligence fight was supposed to be won on features. Instead, mid-market buyers keep picking the vendor that costs less and goes live in weeks.
The Forecasting Engines Betting Against Your Sales Team
Clari, BoostUp and Aviso all promise a clearer revenue number. Under the hood, they make very different bets about pipeline history, deal behavior and the value of human judgment.
Gong Hears the Deal. Clari Calls the Quarter.
Gong starts with the buyer’s words. Clari starts with the revenue team’s number. Their suites now overlap, but the right choice still depends on which blind spot costs you more.
Scratchpad
Scratchpad is an AI workspace for sales that sits between reps and Salesforce, automating CRM updates, transcribing calls, monitoring data hygiene, and enforcing sales methodologies so sellers spend less time on admin and more time closing. Founded in 2019 by repeat founders Pouyan Salehi and Cyrus Karbassiyoon, the company has raised roughly $49.6M, including a $33M Series B led by Craft Ventures, and is used by thousands of revenue teams at companies like Brex, Vercel, Clio and Crunchbase.
Oliv AI
Oliv AI is a San Francisco software company building a team of AI agents for revenue organizations. Instead of asking sales reps to log calls, update the CRM, and prep for meetings, Oliv's agents capture deal intelligence automatically from every meeting, call, and email, then keep Salesforce and HubSpot accurate, score deals against methodologies like MEDDICC and BANT, forecast pipeline, and coach reps. The pitch is blunt: grow revenue without growing headcount by letting agents own responsibilities end-to-end, not just complete one-off tasks.
Outreach
Outreach is a Seattle-based sales execution platform that helps revenue teams find, close, and grow deals. Founded in 2014, it pioneered the 'sales engagement' category - automating outbound sequences across email, phone, and social - and has since expanded into deal management, conversation intelligence (Kaia), forecasting, and a growing roster of agentic AI tools. It serves enterprise sellers at companies like Zoom, Snowflake, Okta, and ServiceNow, reaching roughly $4.4B in valuation on the strength of a 2021 Series G.
Akoonu
Akoonu is a Salesforce-native revenue intelligence company that helps B2B sales teams inspect their pipeline and build trustworthy forecasts without sending data to an external platform. Its RevWorks suite - covering pipeline reviews, forecasting, deal reviews, quota management, scenario modeling and an AI assistant called Oonu - runs 100% inside Salesforce, installs in under an hour, and positions itself as enterprise-grade forecasting without the enterprise price tag. Founded by serial entrepreneur Jeff Freund and based in Livingston, Montana, the company raised an $8M Series A in 2017 and counts enterprises like Honeywell, Thales and Avery Dennison among its customers.
Jeff Freund
Jeff Freund is the founder and CEO of Akoonu, a Salesforce-native software company that helps B2B sales teams run pipeline reviews and forecasts. A Stanford-trained engineer who studied environmental fluid mechanics, he previously spent more than a decade running Clickability, a web content management company he led from 1999 until its 2011 acquisition by Limelight Networks. He started Akoonu in 2014 around the idea that sales should be grounded in how buyers actually buy, raising an $8M Series A from Shasta Ventures in 2017 and steering the product toward AI-driven forecasting and revenue tools.
Xactly Corp
Xactly Corp is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds an AI-powered Intelligent Revenue Platform for sales performance and incentive compensation management. Founded in 2005, it helps Revenue Operations and Finance teams plan territories and quotas, automate sales commissions, forecast pipeline, and motivate sellers using two decades of accumulated pay-and-performance data. Now owned by Vista Equity Partners, Xactly serves enterprise customers worldwide and is widely regarded as a category leader in sales compensation software.
Revenue Grid
Revenue Grid is a Salesforce-native revenue intelligence and sales engagement platform that captures activity data automatically, surfaces deal risks, and guides sales teams step by step toward closing. Founded in 2005 as InvisibleCRM and rebranded in 2020, it combines AI-driven Guided Selling, forecasting, and pipeline visibility to help B2B revenue teams sell on their own terms.
Vivun
Vivun is an AI-powered presales platform that helps enterprise B2B companies scale their sales engineering teams through structured intelligence. Founded in 2019 by two married couples with 25+ years of combined presales experience, Vivun builds AI agents that reason through expert knowledge rather than simply generating language - grounding every deal recommendation, demo, and forecast in the structured expertise of elite practitioners. With $131M raised and customers like Snowflake, Okta, Zoom, and CrowdStrike, Vivun has become the operating system for technical sales.