SendGrid, a cloud-based email delivery service for transactional email management, needed a better way to support their top organizational goal of promoting customer success. Critical information was being stored in more than 5 different systems, creating up to 8 hours a month in manual Excel labor. The team realized that it was critical to integrate these data sources in order to create a single source of truth for customer insights.

1. AT A GLANCE
Delivering Customer Success
with a Single Source of Truth
Scaling Services to a Growing Customer Base
When you’re experiencing more than 87% annual growth, you’d better have a
data-informed plan in place for ensuring customer success. That’s the challenge
SendGrid, a provider of cloud-based email delivery services for transactional
email management, faced after 3 years of explosive growth. Launched in 2009
as a TechStars graduate, today SendGrid has 180,000 customers worldwide,
including leading-edge service providers like Uber, Pandora, Pardot, Snapchat and
foursquare. SendGrid’s proven email platform relieves businesses of the cost and
complexity of maintaining custom email systems, while helping them ensure that
their email makes it into their audience’s inbox – delivering customer engagement
and sales performance.
SendGrid knew they needed a unified business intelligence strategy to support
their top organizational goal: promoting customer success. In a rapidly changing
business environment where requirements shift daily and with a full 95% of their
customers being self-service, Joe Hamlet, Senior Manager of Business Systems at
SendGrid, recognized that having a single view of the customer would help them
gain better insight and react more quickly to deliver on that promise. At the same
time, SendGrid’s Chief Financial Officer and his team were spending six to eight
hours a month on revenue reporting in Excel spreadsheets. This kind of reporting
had become a burden. Rather than spend time pulling reports manually, SendGrid
wanted to free up their finance team to focus on growing the company. With
information living in 5+ different systems, integrating all relevant data and giving the
organization tools to analyze it would be no small task.
SendGrid didn’t want “just a reporting tool.” They wanted a full-stack solution
that included data warehousing and ETL, in addition to a robust reporting and
visualization layer. It needed it to deliver scalability; extensible integrations; ease of
use and flexibility; self-service administration and maintenance; speed and agility;
and a low total cost of ownership – or as Joe put it “rainbows and unicorns.” As a
veteran analytics professional, Joe had tried the traditional BI vendors and knew that
the cloud would give SendGrid the agility and speed to value they needed.
1© 2014 GoodData Corporation. All rights reserved.
Company: Email marketing,
150+ employees
Customer Since: 2012
Solution: GoodData Platform
Use Case: Customer and
Operational Analytics
Favorite Metric: Retention Rate
Best Feature: Average daily
customer acquisition and churn
Results:
► 6 month implementation
and time to value
► 5 data sources integrated
and analyzed to date
► Advanced analytics used
daily by executives
Building a Relationship on Transparency and Results
Joe evaluated more than 5 vendors during his search. Ultimately he chose GoodData
because of the relationship and trust built early on. Unlike other vendors, GoodData
showed complete transparency, and an unfaltering commitment to the same principles
which SendGrid embraces – The Four “H’s”: Being Honest, Humble and Hungry and
Happy.“ GoodData stood head and shoulders above competitors in terms of integrity
G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D

2. “Speed to value is
my primary goal.
I don’t ever want to
live through another
ridiculously long BI
project that doesn’t
deliver value to the
customer. I think
we succeeded
with GoodData.”
Joe Hamlet
Senior Manager,
Business Systems,
SendGrid
team@gooddata.com 415-200-0186 @gooddataGet in touch.
G O O D D A T A C U S T O M E R S T O R Y | S E N D G R I D
and honesty in the sales process,” Joe said. “It was obvious that they were invested in
the relationship. My whole experience at GoodData has continued to reinforce that.”
In just six months, GoodData implemented a full-stack, cloud-based solution that
pulled together data from Zuora and internal MySQL databases into one seamless
analytics experience – later adding Salesforce, Google Analytics and Marketo.
Zendesk, Jira, Splunk and other databases are on the roadmap for integration as
SendGrid’s instance continues to evolve. “Being able to spin up a data warehouse,
analytics and reporting in less than six months was unheard of,” Joe said. “The last
data warehousing project I was on took three years.”
Focusing on finance metrics first, the implementation was soon scaled to customer
success applications – with each iterative release delivering quick wins to the
organization. Other departments began to take notice and soon sales, marketing
and other groups were using GoodData analytics to drive service improvements and
business value.
...continued
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SendGrid Free-to-Paid Conversion Dashboard.
All data has been genericized.
Delivering a Single, Trustworthy Source of Truth
Today, GoodData analytics have been adopted organization-wide, delivering a unified
view of the customer and the business, while also helping SendGrid empower its
employees with the information they need to make data-driven decisions.
SendGrid’s executives use GoodData on a daily base for executive dashboarding,
sales and marketing analytics. This allows them gain real-time visibility into
bookings, customer acquisition, top customers and more – leveraging one single,
trustworthy source of truth. SendGrid trusts the data so much that they use it to
present to their board and other companies to demonstrate business performance.
“Our CEO is our heaviest user,” says Joe Hamlet.
As SendGrid’s founder, Isaac Saldana, put it, “The path to our goals is as importance
as the goals themselves.” In GoodData, SendGrid found not just a provider of
business intelligence solutions, but a partner in their journey.
SendGrid