delivering customer success with a single source of truth - a sendgrid case study

AT A GLANCE

Delivering Customer Success with a Single Source of TruthScaling Services to a Growing Customer BaseWhen you’re experiencing more than 87% annual growth, you’d better have a

data-informed plan in place for ensuring customer success. That’s the challenge

SendGrid, a provider of cloud-based email delivery services for transactional

email management, faced after 3 years of explosive growth. Launched in 2009

as a TechStars graduate, today SendGrid has 180,000 customers worldwide,

including leading-edge service providers like Uber, Pandora, Pardot, Snapchat and

foursquare. SendGrid’s proven email platform relieves businesses of the cost and

complexity of maintaining custom email systems, while helping them ensure that

their email makes it into their audience’s inbox – delivering customer engagement

and sales performance.

SendGrid knew they needed a unified business intelligence strategy to support

their top organizational goal: promoting customer success. In a rapidly changing

business environment where requirements shift daily and with a full 95% of their

customers being self-service, Joe Hamlet, Senior Manager of Business Systems at

SendGrid, recognized that having a single view of the customer would help them

gain better insight and react more quickly to deliver on that promise. At the same

time, SendGrid’s Chief Financial Officer and his team were spending six to eight

hours a month on revenue reporting in Excel spreadsheets. This kind of reporting

had become a burden. Rather than spend time pulling reports manually, SendGrid

wanted to free up their finance team to focus on growing the company. With

information living in 5+ different systems, integrating all relevant data and giving the

organization tools to analyze it would be no small task.

SendGrid didn’t want “just a reporting tool.” They wanted a full-stack solution

that included data warehousing and ETL, in addition to a robust reporting and

visualization layer. It needed it to deliver scalability; extensible integrations; ease of

use and flexibility; self-service administration and maintenance; speed and agility;

and a low total cost of ownership – or as Joe put it “rainbows and unicorns.” As a

veteran analytics professional, Joe had tried the traditional BI vendors and knew that

the cloud would give SendGrid the agility and speed to value they needed.

1© 2014 GoodData Corporation. All rights reserved.

Company: Email marketing, 150+ employees

Customer Since: 2012

Solution: GoodData Platform

Use Case: Customer and Operational Analytics

Favorite Metric: Retention Rate

Best Feature: Average daily customer acquisition and churn

Results: ► 6 month implementation and time to value

► 5 data sources integrated and analyzed to date

► Advanced analytics used daily by executives

Building a Relationship on Transparency and ResultsJoe evaluated more than 5 vendors during his search. Ultimately he chose GoodData

because of the relationship and trust built early on. Unlike other vendors, GoodData

showed complete transparency, and an unfaltering commitment to the same principles

which SendGrid embraces – The Four “H’s”: Being Honest, Humble and Hungry and

Happy.“ GoodData stood head and shoulders above competitors in terms of integrity

G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D

“Speed to value is my primary goal. I don’t ever want to live through another ridiculously long BI project that doesn’t deliver value to the customer. I think we succeeded with GoodData.”

Joe HamletSenior Manager, Business Systems,SendGrid

team@gooddata.com 415-200-0186 @gooddataGet in touch.

G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D

and honesty in the sales process,” Joe said. “It was obvious that they were invested in

the relationship. My whole experience at GoodData has continued to reinforce that.”

In just six months, GoodData implemented a full-stack, cloud-based solution that

pulled together data from Zuora and internal MySQL databases into one seamless

analytics experience – later adding Salesforce, Google Analytics and Marketo.

Zendesk, Jira, Splunk and other databases are on the roadmap for integration as

SendGrid’s instance continues to evolve. “Being able to spin up a data warehouse,

analytics and reporting in less than six months was unheard of,” Joe said. “The last

data warehousing project I was on took three years.”

Focusing on finance metrics first, the implementation was soon scaled to customer

success applications – with each iterative release delivering quick wins to the

organization. Other departments began to take notice and soon sales, marketing

and other groups were using GoodData analytics to drive service improvements and

business value.

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gooddata.com

SendGrid Free-to-Paid Conversion Dashboard.All data has been genericized.

Delivering a Single, Trustworthy Source of TruthToday, GoodData analytics have been adopted organization-wide, delivering a unified

view of the customer and the business, while also helping SendGrid empower its

employees with the information they need to make data-driven decisions.

SendGrid’s executives use GoodData on a daily base for executive dashboarding,

sales and marketing analytics. This allows them gain real-time visibility into

bookings, customer acquisition, top customers and more – leveraging one single,

trustworthy source of truth. SendGrid trusts the data so much that they use it to

present to their board and other companies to demonstrate business performance.

“Our CEO is our heaviest user,” says Joe Hamlet.

As SendGrid’s founder, Isaac Saldana, put it, “The path to our goals is as importance

as the goals themselves.” In GoodData, SendGrid found not just a provider of

business intelligence solutions, but a partner in their journey.

SendGrid