Clari vs Gong for Data Consultancies: The POC Has No Deal Owner

Only once it has a defined exit condition, and most data consultancies never write one down. A three-week POC that ends with a friendly thank-you email and no follow-up should never have been logged as an open opportunity in the first place, since nothing about it signaled real intent to buy.

Define exit criteria before the POC starts: the client requests a production timeline, asks about pricing for ongoing work, or introduces you to someone with budget authority. Any one of those is a real signal worth tracking. A POC that ends without any of them happening is a completed favor, not a stalled deal, and it should close as lost immediately rather than sit open and quietly inflate your pipeline count for months.

This distinction matters more here than in most B2B sales, because data consultancies run a meaningfully higher ratio of POCs to actual contracts than a typical software sale, and an unfiltered pipeline built from every POC ever started will always look healthier than the business actually is.

Write down exit criteria before the POC starts, such as these signals:

• The client requests a production timeline, which shows the work is moving toward a real engagement rather than a favor.
• The client asks about pricing for ongoing work, a signal worth logging as an open opportunity.
• The client introduces you to someone with budget authority, which moves the conversation toward a contract.
• None of these appears: close the POC as lost right away instead of leaving it open to inflate the pipeline.

A POC's decisive moments usually happen inside a shared screen, someone debugging a pipeline, walking through a schema, explaining why a join is slow, not inside a conversation where one side is persuading the other. Gong's analysis is built around sales conversations with a buyer and a seller, and it has comparatively little to say about an hour spent jointly troubleshooting code.

That does not make Gong useless here, but its real value shifts to the surrounding calls, the kickoff where scope gets set, the readout where results get presented, rather than the technical sessions in between. If your team runs mostly working sessions with occasional bookend calls, expect Gong's signal to come from a small fraction of your total client contact time.

For a consultancy where the technical lead running the POC is also effectively the salesperson, without ever framing it that way, Gong can still catch useful moments in the readout call specifically: whether the client's tone shifts from curious to committed once results are shown.

Once exit criteria exist, Clari's stage structure becomes genuinely useful: a POC-in-progress stage, a decision-pending stage triggered by one of your defined signals, and a contract stage. Clari's rollup then reflects real conversion rather than a raw count of every technical engagement your team has ever started.

The reconciliation Clari offers matters especially for staffing decisions: knowing how many POCs are likely to convert in the next month lets a small consultancy plan which engineers are available for new work versus committed to closing an active POC, rather than discovering the conflict after a new contract signs.

Because a meaningful share of POCs never had real buying intent to begin with, hold pipeline coverage toward the wider end of the standard 3x to 4x baseline, and treat any open POC without a scheduled follow-up call as carrying real risk of quietly going stale¹.

New-logo win rates in B2B average around 19%, and a data consultancy converting well below that on POCs it defined clear exit criteria for should look first at whether the wrong technical stakeholder, one without real budget influence, is driving the engagement².

Assign a single owner for the moment a POC's technical lead senses real buying intent and needs to loop in someone who can actually negotiate a contract, a practice lead, an account manager, a partner. Without that handoff being explicit, technical staff often keep running free working sessions well past the point where the client was ready to talk pricing, simply because nobody told them to stop and escalate.

Build a standing weekly review of every open POC specifically to ask one question: has this crossed an exit-criteria trigger, and if so, who is now driving the commercial conversation? That single review catches more stalled deals than either Clari's automated staleness flags or Gong's call analysis will on their own, since the underlying problem is usually a missed handoff, not a missing signal.