Frontify gains data trust, literacy, and insights with ThoughtSpot self-service

What do brand leaders as diverse as Nationwide Building Society, Lufthansa, and Vodafone share in common? They know that consistency is the key to providing a positive, trusted brand experience that raises brand value. That’s also why they work with Frontify, whose cloud software platform ensures that all the people and teams that access, share, publish, and maintain brand-related assets are always collaborating on the correct and most current versions.

Challenge

After its last funding round, Frontify sought to extend its ‘single source of truth’ ethos to every part of the business behind its software: finance, sales, marketing, customer success, and product. The company set out to empower its people with self-service analytics on a single, shared data warehouse. The goal: to give their company timely insights for everyday decision-making to positively impact business outcomes.

To drive usage and adoption, Frontify’s data team, headed up by Sibel Atasoy Wuersch, first needed to find out what type of insights each teams’ users needed from analytics. Each had different goals: sales and marketing wanted to optimize their resources and get a better return on investment on lead generation; finance needed up-to-date visibility of key metrics like recurring revenues and churn rates; customer success and product teams needed insights on product usage and user actions.

Sibel’s team decided to transform its data ecosystem in three ways. First, it would modernize its data infrastructure to minimize latency, ensure data veracity, and allow current and future technology integrations. Second, it would introduce a self-service analytics platform that non-technical people could learn to use confidently. Third, it would provide a range of support resources and services to not only drive adoption but ‘power usage’.

At the outset of this transformation, there were just three people on the data analytics team and no stable data infrastructure. All 200 people in the business relied on this small team to pull data from business applications into a MySQL database using custom Python scripts, and then analyze it in Tableau. Even so, it could take up to a month to produce reports and dashboards, by which time the underlying data was often obsolete.

It was a real pain point. We were stuck in a loop of constantly updating reports.

Sibel Atasoy WuerschData LeadFrontify

Modern data stack

Frontify’s data team started by evaluating complementary technologies to transition from its legacy data infrastructure to a modern data stack. It chose Snowflake as the cloud data platform for its main sources - including its CRM, subscription and customer communication tools Hubspot, Zuora, Intercom and Recurly. At the same time, it selected Fivetran to streamline and automate the ELT (extract, transform, load) process. See case study here.

Once these technologies were implemented, Frontify evaluated self-service analytics solutions. In the final stage, it selected ThoughtSpot over Looker due to its considerable edge in providing self-service, search-driven analytics in the cloud. ThoughtSpot also had the advantage of very straightforward integration with Snowflake.

Bringing ThoughtSpot into Frontify’s modern data stack was a fast and ‘click and go’ process. This meant the data team could turn its attention to the critical work of building the data marts and delivering the data for high priority business use cases to ThoughtSpot.

Finally, the data team put goals, strategies, and tactics in place to drive user adoption of self-service analytics with ThoughtSpot. This included building a knowledge base, doing training, continuous delivery of targeted data enablement to core business end-users, and identifying and cultivating ‘power users’.

As Sibel explains, “We work tirelessly, not only to promote ThoughtSpot adoption, but to cultivate data literacy and usage across the business. We’ve produced several videos and materials about each data source for our knowledge center so that people will gain a better idea of what kind of insights are possible. Our goal is to have 20 power users who can mentor and inspire colleagues to get the most out of our data ecosystem.”

Solution

The new modern data stack with ThoughtSpot is rapidly transforming how everyone across Frontify’s business works and makes decisions. Instead of relying on analysts who needed a month to generate reports, business users can create their own ThoughtSpot ‘Liveboards,’ which act like interactive dashboards, in a matter of minutes.

In just five months, the data team has built nine worksheets delivering data for priority use cases in sales, marketing, finance and product teams, and onboarded and trained a core group of business users from these departments. There are currently 75 monthly active users, representing 40% of the whole business, including seven power users.

Finance, followed by the revenue teams (sales, marketing, and customer success) are so far the most active ThoughtSpot users to date. ThoughtSpot has made it easy for them to present key business metrics at weekly revenue meetings, including ARR (annual recurring revenues), and onboarding wins. They can also drill down into aspects of the deal pipeline, show year-on-year growth splits by market, and average deal values. In the future, Frontify is aiming to embed Live Analytics from ThoughtSpot directly into company update presentations and other internal tools like the company Wiki pages.

So far, users and analysts are giving ThoughtSpot the kind of rave reviews that Frontify itself gets on peer review sites. These are just a few:

“It’s a super tool for us to be able to visualize our data, KPIs, our overall funnel, and make smarter decisions” (Kevin Ailloud, Head of Demand Generation)

“It’s almost like Google: easy to use and have always have access to it” (Kevin Eggel, Finance Analyst)

“I never thought I could get excited by data but it’s amazing what you can do with ThoughtSpot” (Stephanie McSwiney, VP Sales EMEA)

Thanks to an internal push within the team to unlock the value of Frontify’s product data, the product team and the company also stand to benefit considerably from ThoughtSpot. As Michal Lapinski, Data Infrastructure Lead within the team, explained, “Though not our initial focus area, I could see the potential for the huge amounts of product usage data our software generates, and have been loading it into Snowflake. We are currently growing our product management and data science team. As soon as they’re ready, we’ll be able to equip them with ThoughtSpot to tap into this valuable data and gain valuable insights to benefit our product roadmap.”

A big win for Sibel has been a change in how her team works. Crucially, Sibel’s team no longer has to run a ‘report factory’. It can now focus on more valuable activities like data and analytics engineering, improving data quality, and raising analytics adoption and power usage.

Frontify is also making great strides in enabling all its native data sources to be analyzed. That means that when this journey is complete Frontify’s business users will gain the same key benefit as it provides to its customers: a single, trusted source of truth.

“We are focusing on making sure every single person in our company has their data available for them to use,” said Atasoy Wuersch. “That's our goal.”