CData Mobilizes CData Sync to Boost Our Product Management Processes
CData is not just leveraging CData Connect Cloud in-house — we’re also using CData Sync to improve CData Sync! The CData product team is using our own data integration tool to give us visibility into our product, sales, and marketing events and processes to improve the buyer’s journey for our prospective customers.
Our product management team regularly monitors metrics like trial downloads and activations, sales funnels, closed and lost deals, etc., to ensure a seamless buying experience with CData Sync. To dissect how marketing campaigns, product launches, and other events influence our sales pipeline over time, CData Director of Product Management Jaclyn Wands needed to pull data from dozens of data sources used by sales, marketing, and product into one source of truth.
But she was coming up against the issues many organizations do — our preferred SQL database doesn’t natively integrate with all the systems and applications needed for comprehensive reporting.
Fortunately, Jaclyn had a robust ETL/ELT solution in her arsenal. As the dedicated product manager for CData Sync, Jaclyn "ate her own dogfood” using Sync to easily collect data from Jira, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more into our storage solution.
Sync gave us a streamlined way to:
- Discover and resolve roadblocks in the customer journey
- Track how product releases and updates influence lead generation
- Visualize how marketing campaigns and product sprints align with our sales funnels over time
Jaclyn mobilized Sync in-house to explore new chances to not only improve the product development process and user experience, but also to identify new market opportunities.
Challenge: Visualizing Cross-Departmental Insights
As CData Sync product manager, Jaclyn regularly meets with our leadership team to discuss the buyer’s journey, product roadmap, and go-to-market plans. Recently, Jaclyn and the team wanted to understand how Sync’s scheduled updates and subsequent marketing pushes influence successful sales.
The problem? There was no single source of truth outlining milestone releases, version updates, etc., in relation to marketing and sales metrics. This made it difficult to derive meaningful insights on the impact of product sprints on the sales funnel.
Jaclyn’s ultimate goal was to unpack how marketing campaigns and Sync product releases work together to impact our sales processes, and if there are improvements to be made in these areas.
Solution: An In-Depth View into the Buyer’s Journey
She started by pulling marketing and sales data from Salesforce and Google Analytics into a table in our SQL database and creating a Tableau visualization of conversions over time. All that remained was to get our product data from Jira into Tableau alongside the conversion metrics.
CData Sync allowed Jaclyn to feed Salesforce, Google Analytics, Jira and other cross-departmental data into our SQL database. With this single source of truth, she then built an intuitive Tableau timeline that layers historical product events on top of marketing leads and sales pipelines to easily visualize and analyze buying trends.
“If I wasn't using CData Sync, I wouldn’t be able to track my product event changes against all our marketing and sales efforts. Now, we’re able to get near-real time insights into how product changes support market needs and how our target audience responds to our sales and marketing efforts.”
– Jaclyn Wands, CData Director of Product Management
Using Sync, our product management team can aggregate cross-functional data and generate a visual report to understand product health, market penetration, and revenue trends. Conversion metrics, for instance, are now visualized in the context of Jira’s product release date-stamps for a transparent view of how these activities affect the buying cycle.
Jaclyn can go into the Tableau dashboard to slice and dissect the data exactly as needed, and the CData leadership team gets a snapshot of Sync’s performance directly in their inboxes every month.
True Business Insights Start with Automated Data Integration
When processes cross department lines, useful insights are often blocked by siloed business applications. CData Sync enables your business (and ours!) to unite and integrate data into a relevant, up-to-date, single source of truth – on-premises or in the cloud – so you can extract deeper business insights from your organizational data.
Prepared to see what CData Sync can do for you? Let’s set up a demo today!
