In January of 2017, I read the news that an old friend of mine was leaving HubSpot after more than nine years to join Databox as CEO.

I’d known Pete Caputa from my days of leading marketing at IMPACT, a HubSpot Partner Agency (and 2017 HubSpot Partner of the Year. Congrats team!) that was part of a community and partner channel he conceptualized and helped build to $100M+.

I remember thinking, “Wow, for Pete to leave HubSpot, this must be a really interesting opportunity for him.”

I reached out to offer my congratulations and we briefly caught up. He told me about his vision for Databox and the bigger problems they were looking to solve.

The seed was planted.

Nine months later, I’m excited to announce that I’m joining Databox as Director of Marketing, where I’ll be helping this team continue changing the way companies track and drive marketing and sales performance.

Why Databox?

Databox solves a pain that I, along with many marketers and salespeople, have had for a long time. One I didn’t necessarily even recognize as a problem.

Why? Because the way companies track performance has become so institutionalized, that it’s easy to yield to the assumption that it’s just the way things work.

Here’s the truth; very few people inside an organization actually know how it’s performing. And often times, it’s not the folks doing the actual work. That makes it harder for marketers, salespeople, and agencies to do the work that really matters.

For example, marketers track traffic, leads, open rates, search rankings, playback data, likes, retweets, bounce rate, ad clicks, referrals…..(this could go on for days) by logging into numerous different applications, each with its own learning curve, in order to track performance.

The problem? Unless all of this data is pulled from the individual silos of each tool, you’ll never see the causation, correlation, or have the context needed to get the full picture. As a result, you’ll never truly know what to do next in order to improve performance and grow.

When the data is pulled together, usually for reporting meetings, people again need to log in to all the various tools, copy and paste the data into spreadsheets, create slide decks that visualize that data in order to make sense of it, and finally, share that with necessary stakeholders. (Again, usually not the folks doing the work.)

I’ve led marketing, growth, and product teams in the past, and one of the most common frustrations among teams was that they either:

1. Didn’t have access to the data needed to excel at their job
2. Did have access, but not in a format conducive to executing on it (spreadsheets and slide decks), or
3. Had access to some of the data, and make misinformed decisions on strategy without full context.

So how does a team know how they’re doing, and what to do next, if the majority of them struggle to access and understand performance in the first place?

By ensuring real-time access to the right data, at the right time, in one place.

Making data accessible to everyone

Being data-driven is about being the steering wheel, not the gas pedal. If you wait until you’ve run into a tree to make adjustments, does it really matter? And if you’re flooring it based on what you see in monthly/weekly reporting meetings, chances are, you’re already too late.

Databox is bringing performance insights to the right people, at the right time, in order for them to make adjustments in real time rather than waiting for the standard reporting meetings that companies now rely on.

Reporting meetings can actually slow progress and have an adverse effect on growth. Here’s why:

1. Reporting meetings tend to serve a small minority of stakeholders.
2. They take days to prepare for. Those reporting on performance have to copy and paste data from many different sources, collate that together to show correlation, and then visualize in slides to present the complete picture.
3. They usually promote a shallow discussion around static metrics rather than real-time adjustments for actually improving business. This is because key stakeholders likely receive the data hours in advance, and therefore don’t have the context for deeper analysis.

Imagine instead if teams could spend less time sourcing and reporting on performance, and more time making adjustments in real-time in order to move the needle?

That’s what we’re working toward at Databox, and what has me so excited to join this great team in bringing that vision to life.

Do you know what happened today?

If we’re being truthful, the above question is a hard one to answer. And if you’re anything like me in my previous marketing, growth, and product roles, then you’d likely need some time to source the data from all the different places it lives to answer it.

But if you can’t easily answer “what happened today?”, then how will you know what to do tomorrow?

We’re helping marketers, salespeople, and agencies solve for that. Join us?