How Unnax Used Databox to Ditch Spreadsheets and Cut Reporting Time in Half

In recent years, many industries have moved big portions of their operations online. The banking and financial industry is a perfect example: many consumers prefer to go online to pay bills, access their bank accounts, and more. But offering those services online—with a good user experience, while protecting sensitive consumer data—is a heavy lift for many financial businesses.

That’s where Unnax comes in. The B2B SaaS company offers banking APIs, essentially creating an ‘embedded finance’ toolbox that enables their clients to build digital financial services from payments to online accounts and more.

To learn more about how the Unnax team handles internal reporting and uses data to help grow marketing and sales efforts, we talked with Sam Morris, the Director of Marketing over at Unnax.

The Challenge

As a small but growing SaaS company, data is the lifeblood of Unnax’s work. With a targeted account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, every contact has the potential to seriously impact their bottom line. So in order to grow, they needed to be able to develop a deep understanding of how their sales and marketing teams perform. 

They also needed to be able to do all that without sentencing Sam to spending hours and hours each week wrangling data. The team needed a faster and easier way to bring data from all their sources together into one reporting software.

Here are the challenges Unnax faced:

• Spend less time creating reports: After previously trying other reporting tools, Sam found they were still spending too much time on reporting, essentially back to wrangling spreadsheets even inside other solutions.

“Before we started using Databox, I looked into Klipfolio. It’s very powerful, but it’s a pain to use, especially if you’re using custom sources. You’re essentially playing around with spreadsheets within the interface.”

• Track all data in one place: Unnax uses HubSpot and, while the tool’s native reporting is useful, it can’t bring together any of their other data—from other sources like Google Analytics, for example.

“We were using HubSpot’s native reporting, but HubSpot only shows data from HubSpot. Now, we can gather data from different sources—from Analytics, from HubSpot, from custom things we have in different places.”

• Improve internal communication and reporting: Without a quick, streamlined reporting solution, internal communication suffered.

“If I hadn’t found a custom dashboard software like Databox, I’d still essentially be wrangling with spreadsheets inside the Klipfolio interface.”

The Solution

Sam tried a number of other dashboard software for reporting, including Klipfolio, Google Data Studio, and HubSpot’s native reporting—but the team never found a solution that actually reduced time and effort for their reporting.

When a team member who’d used Databox in a previous role suggested it, Sam and team jumped on board. A reporting tool that brings all their data together, allows for custom metrics, and puts it all into a visually attractive, 100% customizable business dashboard? They were in.

Sam and team connected HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, Jira, Google Sheets, Google Ads, Google Search Console

Unnax’s top integrations

Here are the solutions Unnax found with Databox:

• Spend less time creating reports: Sam started out using Databox templates and has since customized all of the team’s databoards. Now, they simply pull up a dashboard and update the date settings to see their data. That’s it!

“I used a couple of presets at first and then, after a while, we built our own databoards. The performance dashboards we build are fixed, and then we just customize the date settings so we can see how things evolve over time.”

• Track all data in one place: With all their data in one place, the team can better visualize their entire workflow and its efficacy—something they find particularly useful for tracking their ABM performance, where they’ve seen a 130% increase in contacts processed in the last 6 months.

“We built a dashboard to be able to track out ABM performance and it shows us the total number of contacts we have, how many contacts we’ve processed, what our success ratio is for these different stages of the funnel. Ultimately, it shows how much influence these people are having on the opportunities we’re generating and the deals we’re closing.”

• Improve internal communication and reporting: With quick, easy access to data, the team communicates much better—both within departments and with the executive team.

“I’m able to better communicate what we’re doing to the executives because we’re able to report things better in a way that’s more visually attractive.”

The Results

According to Sam, Databox has been a huge improvement on their previous reporting setup. With all their data connected to one central hub and a catalog of pre-built 100% custom dashboards, this business dashboard software allows Sam now spends 40-50% less time on reporting.

“We’ve been overhauling our process and optimizing it continuously over the last year or so with very good results,” Sam said. “We’ve been able to report more effectively.”

With the results they’ve seen, the team is working to expand usage of Databox, building out KPI dashboards for the sales team and automating some of their internal reporting with notifications and alerts.

Here are the results Unnax saw using Databox:

• Spend less time creating reports: Now, Sam spends about half as much time on reporting and wrangling data. That’s time Sam can redirect to actually improving their marketing strategy and growing results.

“I spend 40-50% less time doing these things because the interface is just easier. It’s simpler. It’s easy to use.”

• Track all data in one place: With all their data centralized, Sam and team can build all the custom metrics and databoard configurations they need to stay on top of the numbers that matter for them.

“My favorite Databox feature is the ability to import a lot of different custom data sources. And that it’s very configurable, that we can build anything we want, essentially.”

• Improve internal communication and reporting: Given the impact Databox has had on internal communication for the marketing team, they’re now working to build out sales dashboards and visualizations for their sales team, too.

“We want to be able to have a visualization of the efficiency and the effectiveness of the sales team. We’ll have global metrics for the entire team and have a leaderboard up on a big screen in the office.”