Tired of wasting valuable hours juggling platforms for data, Sam Morris went searching for a faster and more streamlined solution. The outcome? A centralized hub for all of his marketing data and a more efficient reporting process.
In recent years, many industries have shifted their operations online, and the banking and financial sector is no exception. Many consumers prefer to handle tasks like paying bills, accessing bank accounts, making transfers, and more through online platforms. But offering these online services – with a good user experience, while protecting sensitive customer data – is a heavy lift for many financial businesses.
That’s where Unnax comes in. The B2B SaaS company offers banking APIs, allowing clients to easily develop secure financial services. And leading Unnax’s marketing strategy is Sam Morris, the Director of Marketing. Sam oversees all aspects of marketing and communications and ensures the marketing efforts align with the needs of the sales teams.
As a small but growing SaaS company, data is the lifeblood of Unnax’s work. With an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, each contact has the potential to significantly impact their bottom line. So to grow, they need to be able to understand how their marketing efforts translate to sales opportunities.
Before Databox, the team relied on HubSpot’s native reporting tool to gain insights into their performance. And while it was useful, it also had some limitations – it couldn’t pull data from other sources like Google Analytics. Sam explains, “We were using HubSpot’s native reporting, but HubSpot only shows data from HubSpot.” This resulted in Sam spending hours each week wrangling data from different sources, attempting to piece together a comprehensive view of their efforts.
The team quickly realized they needed a faster and easier way to bring data from all their sources together into one place.
During his search, Sam tried several other analytics tools, including Klipfolio and Looker Studio – but the team never found a solution that reduced the time and effort of their reporting tasks. Sam explained, “Before we started using Databox, one of the tools I had looked into was Klipfolio… it’s very powerful, but it’s a little bit of a pain to use… You have to build API queries and play around with spreadsheets within the interface. I just hated the usability of it.”
When a team member who’d used Databox in a previous role suggested it, Sam and the team jumped on board. An analytics tool that brings all their data together, allows for custom metrics, and puts it all into a visually attractive, 100% customizable dashboard? They were in.
With the help of his team, Sam integrated HubSpot and other marketing platforms into Databox. He then used Dashboard Templates to better understand the data he could pull and the visuals he could use. Reflecting on the process, Sam states, “I first connected our HubSpot account, then used a couple of preset templates to get an idea of the data we could pull and what it looked like.”
Gradually, Sam shifted his focus to building more custom dashboards to closely monitor their team’s efforts. Sam elaborates, “We built a dashboard to be able to track our ABM performance. It shows us the total number of contacts we have, how many contacts we’ve processed, and 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… and then we also have the typical website performance [dashboard], campaign performance [dashboard], and stuff like that.”
With his new dashboards, Sam was able to simplify the process of reviewing and monitoring data. He highlights, “The dashboards that we build are fixed, so we can just customize the date settings on them to see how things evolve.” This centralized approach allows him to efficiently check how he’s progressing every day, gaining quick insights into the team’s performance.
Recognizing the positive impact on internal communication within the marketing team, Unnax leadership also decided to extend Databox to the sales teams. Sam explains the goal, saying “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.”
According to Sam, Databox has significantly improved Unnax’s reporting setup. With all of their data connected to one central hub and a catalog of custom dashboards, Sam now spends 40-50% less time on reporting every week. He states, “We’ve been overhauling our process and optimizing it continuously over the last year or so with very good results. We’ve been able to report more effectively, so I spend 40-50% less time doing these things. The interface is also just easier to use and simpler.”
The centralization of their data also greatly impacted internal communication. Sam asserts, “I’m able to better communicate what we’re doing to the executives because we’re able to report things in a better way that’s more visually attractive.”