Learn how Chris Wilkie centralized key metrics and made them more accessible across teams. The result? Faster reporting, better alignment, and a more transparent data-informed culture.
Chris Wilkie, Head of Marketing at Stampede, believes that data without context is like words without a story. At Stampede, a hospitality technology company, Chris leads growth initiatives spanning lead generation to brand awareness. Their guest engagement platform helps bars, restaurants, and hotels create better customer experiences through digital touchpoints like guest WiFi, websites, email marketing, and loyalty programs.
Like many growing companies, Stampede was drowning in data that was spread across multiple platforms. They had CRM data, revenue metrics, customer metrics, advertising systems, sales performance data, and website analytics—all living in different places with their separate reporting processes.
“We had a lot of questions around how Platform A influences Platform B, and what metrics we could create by combining data from different sources,” Chris explains. “We needed something more dynamic than a whiteboard to make our key metrics visible to everyone.”
This fragmentation wasn’t just inconvenient—it was affecting the entire organization:
“Not everybody knew what was driving our key factors,” Chris recalls. “We should be explaining to them how the business is doing and what factors they are responsible for.”
Chris first discovered Databox at Turing Fest, a conference in Edinburgh, where a speaker from Unbounce demonstrated how they used it to solve similar challenges. The presentation resonated with Chris’s situation, showing him there was a better way to manage their key metrics.
While Chris admits there was initially a risk of being overloaded with data, the implementation was surprisingly smooth. The key to successful implementation was starting with the end in mind.
“Think about what the end goal is rather than how to get there,” Chris advises. “Write down something really basic that says, ‘I want to know this thing over [this] period of time, and how best should I show that off.'”
Since implementing Databox, the team at Stampede has transformed how they handle metrics and reporting:
“For us, the transparency and awareness, the alignment with the team has been really accelerated,” Chris shares. “We had the ability for everyone to gather around and agree on what metrics are the ones that matter to us that everyone should know and everyone should be focusing on.”
“Data is the words, but it takes an author to create the novel. You need to think about the story that the data can tell—on its own, it’s not much use. You’ve got to look for the context.”