Heap

Taylor Udell runs Marketing Operations and Analytics for Heap, a company that provides a data infrastructure and behavioral analytics platform that automatically captures user behavior across websites and mobile apps. She's responsible for all analysis and reporting on the user acquisition process part of the company's marketing and sales efforts.

"We have a lean operations/reporting team and we need to move quickly," Udell says. "Our business needs shift quickly, so we need to be able to customize the data we are ETLing to Amazon Redshift." That meant Heap didn't have the time or the resources to build out data pipelines for all of the data sources it uses, including Salesforce, Google AdWords, and Facebook Ads.

"We ended up choosing Stitch because we needed flexibility in which columns and tables we were syncing. We love the transparency Stitch provides, and especially the access to the logs. Stitch provided an organizational layer and gave us the control we needed to sync what we needed. It might have saved us a hire or two!"

Once their data is in Redshift, Udell says Heap uses BI tools Mode for ad hoc reporting and Tableau for dashboarding. "We primarily report on our go-to-market function. We do a lot of reporting on productivity of our sales reps and conversion rates across stages, joining our Salesforce data with Heap data so we can get a better sense of the ROI on our ad spend. We work on determining the cost of a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and a qualified op.

"Our sales managers use some of our dashboards to provide better one-to-one coaching on the effectiveness of their activities, or determine where in the sales cycle we need to focus our resources. We also make dashboards for our account management team. We combine Heap and Salesforce data to look at things like active engagement and key team members so that our account management team can be more valuable to our customers and more proactive and targeted."

Udell says, "Thanks to Stitch we get the granular insight we need into our data. Having our Salesforce and internal data in one place was a key factor in helping us scale out our new business function, focusing on our inbound and outbound channels. For example, we determined that our Facebook Ads spend was not converting into closed-won revenue, so we were able to decrease our spend there.

"When you work at a startup you need tools that are reliable and can adapt to the fast pace of your business. Stitch empowered our Operations and Analytics team with the data we needed in Redshift to give us actionable insights into our sales pipeline, without us having to dedicate resources for maintenance or developing a data pipeline on our own."