For those in the back: Four thousand, six hundred, and seventy percent.
That’s what Claude told me an enterprise ClearFactr customer might expect from using the platform at scale. It shocked even me. But there’s more...
We’ve all heard it: “Sell the benefits, not the features.” ClearFactr certainly has plenty of features, and they’re there because they produce great benefits. Precisely quantifying them has always been a bit fuzzy, beyond the “Dude! We did with ClearFactr in three months what otherwise would have taken a year.”
A while back I wrapped up the entire story into what I now call our Big Picture deck: just two slides, basically your firm’s spreadsheet-riddled-life before and after ClearFactr. Those slides became a series of blog posts. I fed the slides into Claude and said (paraphrasing): “Make me a financial model that computes an ROI from these two slides, where all the problems depicted on the first slide turn into the benefits depicted on the second slide.”
Five minutes later or so, I had my Excel file. Of course, I immediately uploaded it into ClearFactr. In a very meta way, I wanted to have ClearFactr explain the benefits of ClearFactr to me. Claude produced a nicely organized model across three tabs, one for inputs, one for various computational details and one for a summary. Super impressively, it quantified all the nuances of the Big Picture.
The Table of Contents tool quickly told me the overall computational lay of the land..
Between that and the “root cell” indicator, ClearFactr told me that the number of spreadsheets in the example company, 500, wasn’t actually wired into anything.
Yes, a design bug in the model!
I went back to Claude and pointed this out. Here’s some of what it said back:
Another thing popped out at me: pricing, a necessary component for any ROI calculation. I hadn’t given Claude any guidance on that. I went back to Claude and asked it to justify it, and it did so on numerous measures. Suffice to say, maybe ClearFactr, Inc. is leaving money on the table… or, you can cut the pricing assumption in the model and the ROI just goes up further.
I won’t spend more words on the particulars of the model here. I’ll likely do that in subsequent posts. Suffice it say, there are a lot of inputs corresponding to all the potential pitfalls of spreadsheets at scale, and not everything may apply to your situation. This is precisely where scenario analysis is required, and that’s just one of ClearFactr’s strong suits.
But the model’s math is both deterministic and sound. As my friend Brian Laung Aoaeh, CFA told me two days ago, if it’s only 25% applicable, you’re still potentially looking at a four-digit ROI.
Reply in the comments and I’ll send you the Excel file. Better yet, ask to see it via ClearFactr where you can compare the two experiences side by side.