Clari vs Gong for Commercial Real Estate Brokerages

Clari can enforce a weekly stage-update cadence and flag deals that haven't moved in a defined period, which at least creates visibility leadership didn't have before. The catch is that a broker paid entirely on closed commission has no direct financial reason to keep a CRM current, and any governance layer built on top of voluntary data entry from unmotivated users will eventually decay.

This approach works best when leadership ties something the broker actually wants, like marketing support, listing priority, or a deal-desk resource, to keeping their pipeline current. Governance without a carrot rarely survives past the first quarter.

Gong's call analysis meets the same resistance from the same producers, since brokers routinely treat their calls, their contacts, and their negotiation tactics as personal intellectual property built over a career, not company data to be mined. Some producers will actively avoid using a company phone system or scheduling tool specifically to stay out of any recording pipeline.

If you deploy Gong anyway, expect coverage of maybe a third to half of your producer base, the ones with less territorial instinct about their book of business, and build your forecast knowing it's a partial view rather than the whole brokerage.

A brokerage's institutional deal flow, larger transactions involving investment committees, multiple stakeholders, and longer negotiation cycles, behaves much more like a standard B2B sale than the high-volume, relationship-driven deals that make up most of a producer's book. Pull that subset out and forecast it separately with real stage discipline, since the producers running those deals tend to be more senior and more willing to engage with process in exchange for deal-desk support.

This smaller, higher-value subset is also where Clari's governance earns its cost most clearly, since a handful of large institutional deals justify close tracking in a way a hundred smaller transactions don't.

No forecasting software changes the underlying incentive structure of a commission-only sales force. A producer who closes deals regardless of whether they update a CRM has no reason to change behavior just because leadership bought a new tool. If pipeline visibility is genuinely a business priority, that has to show up in how producers are evaluated and supported, not just in which software gets rolled out.

Some brokerages have had success tying CRM discipline to marketing spend allocation: producers who keep an accurate pipeline get more marketing dollars behind their listings. That's a compensation-adjacent lever software alone can't replicate.

If your producer base is largely transactional and resistant to process, start with approach three: track only the institutional deals with real stage discipline, and accept that the rest of the book will forecast off historical close rates rather than individual deal tracking. If your brokerage already has a culture of process adoption, or if leadership is willing to tie real incentives to CRM discipline, Clari's broader governance approach can work across more of the producer base. Gong is worth adding only where a meaningful share of producers are already comfortable with recorded calls, which is rarer than most leadership teams expect.

Match your brokerage to an approach with these rules:

• If producers are mostly transactional and resistant to process, start by tracking only the institutional deals with real stage discipline.
• Forecast the rest of the book from historical close rates by producer and property type, not individual deal tracking.
• If the brokerage already adopts process well, or leadership will tie real incentives to pipeline accuracy, Clari's weekly stage-update cadence becomes realistic.
• Run a pilot with process-oriented producers, including at least one skeptic, before rolling either tool out brokerage-wide.

Before rolling either tool out brokerage-wide, run a pilot with a small group of producers who are already reasonably process-oriented, ideally including at least one skeptic rather than only volunteers. Watch what happens to their data entry after the first few weeks, once the novelty wears off, since that's a far better predictor of brokerage-wide adoption than anything a vendor demo will show you. A pilot where even willing producers let stage updates lapse within a month tells you the incentive structure needs work before the tool gets blamed.