How Much ROI Does Business Intelligence Give You | With Expert Zandra Moore

Why would you say, you know, like using business intelligence reporting analytics is, you know, important for SaaS founders? At what stage should they be considering using it, and how can they truly leverage the potential themselves? You know, kind of, if you give kind of tactics, if I'm a SaaS founder looking at this, how can I really start using this and driving my company?

Yeah, we sort of deal with a number of different stages of sort of SaaS growth. So very early stage, whether sort of new entrants or maybe challenger SaaS technologies, we can be used as a way to differentiate from the incumbent SaaS players. So having things like prediction or machine learning as a differentiator can really help them to stand apart. Sometimes it's less about helping existing customers drive value, but actually about differentiating their propositions. So we often find with those earlier stage companies, it's about their proposition, it's about their go-to-market kind of differentiation. Are we an extra crown jewel for them, right? If they're a little bit more mature and they've got a lot of customers, it often is about those key customers that they may be at risk of losing. So it becomes a retention strategy to enable them to get better access to their data quickly, easily for themselves without being frustrated that it's kind of locked away within that SaaS platform. So it can be as much to do with retention. And also at that stage, because you can license it to be able to give customers a different experience, you can start to create expansion revenue opportunities by unlocking self-service capabilities or advanced analytic capabilities that you can then create upside revenues from and expansion revenues. So it depends on what the compelling reasons are for the SaaS vendor. Sometimes retention, sometimes it's expansion, sometimes it's both, and sometimes it's all 3, right? Competitive differentiation on top of that. There can be all sorts of drivers. And it's not, you know, it's easy for us to help people at whatever stage they're at. You know, the technology has been designed that it's a usage-based model. So if you're small, you're paying for the value you drive from it. It doesn't, you know, we've got a framework of pricing that really enables SaaS vendors to align to their unit metrics, and we just sit and fit with those, which helps us sort of scale with them in a way that they can completely forecast model out and feel is directly attributed to the value, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. So you have all kind of SaaS founders that can use this, early stage, mid-market, enterprise, or do you have a kind of focus that you see that gets kind of the highest ROI from using it?

Yeah, so I would say that SaaS vendors that are in that kind of series A to B phase probably drive the greatest value because they're able to create some competitive differentiation as part of that next stage of growth, but also they've got enough customers that they can use it for both expansion and retention. You know that point where you've probably had enough customers with you, you may start to— there's a focus on retention, but at the same time, you know, there's also a real need to drive expansion. That can be quite a really useful point, especially when people are moving between between phases of fundraising. You know, by enabling this technology, we can, you know, have an impact on retention and expansion rate.

Sure.

And show value for that. So I would say that's a good phase for us. But then, yeah, we have people at all stages. But yeah, I would say that kind of Series A to B to C, maybe, probably never. Very different here in the UK. You know, Series A is very different to a Series A in the US and in other territories. So it's a very gross generalization, at least.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, I mean, if you, let's speak about that kind of market that, that you mentioned, let's say Series A+. If I start leveraging, let's say I'm not using business intelligence and I don't know if you guys track this with your users or your customers, do you track, you know, what kind of typical ROI or expansion revenue you can start to see if you start leveraging tools and software within what their systems?

Yeah, I think it's a brilliant question and I wish I had a really clear answer to that. I think this is an area that we don't always have a lot of exposure to because they're not necessarily passing that through to us entirely. So we will give them a cost per unit based on whatever their unit metric is, whether it's a sensor, a customer, a user, or a site, it doesn't matter. And they know what that cost is. What they then pass on to their customer, whether they choose to or not, is within their control. And frankly, we don't have visibility or ask for visibility of So, you know, they could have 200% or 500% uplift on whatever the unit metric is to us. We just define that unit. So I don't know. That's not a very great answer, is it? I probably need a better answer to that. I don't know.

That's fine.

But certainly, you know, the point is that they have control over that, which is great, right? They can decide whether they give it away or they generate an expansion revenue stream from it.

Very cool. So I want to talk about kind of the growth story of how you guys got to where you are today, right? You and the founding team, you guys grew the company now to, I think, 50+ employees. You have over 200,000 users. Can you share what are some growth opportunities and strategies you could share that, you know, maybe for other founders who are trying to scale their business and what has worked best for you?

Yeah, so we've always been an indirect business model. What I mean by that is we've always been white-labeled and embedded. Embedded. We've never sold directly really to end users. We've had a few, but they've been more by chance or by relationship than by intention and design. So we're always white label and embedded. And there's a bit of a challenge with that because our competition are big name brands like Looker or Sisense and people like that. So people don't often know that we're the engine inside the tool. But as a scalable growth strategy, it's been a really powerful one for leveraging ecosystems and networks. It's part of the reason I set up No-Code Lab is that we get the benefit of actually the customer has already invested in technology that we become an embedded part of. You know, we're able to give, you know, a huge amount of value at a price point, but we get the benefit of actually that user expansion quickly within their base of customers. So, you know, we all know that one of the sort of golden areas for SaaS is its usage and building that usage out rapidly. For us, you know, our strategy enables us to do that by leveraging the you know, the relationships that these customers have already— these SaaS vendors have already created within their own base, right?

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, outside of that, we're working more and more alongside technologies. So partnerships with people like ETL providers such as Matillion and Panoply, database providers like Snowflake, Firebolt, Redshift, we're on the AWS Marketplace, or even data consultancies that are building out kind of data warehouse environment. So, you know, that kind of ecosystem where we're all part of a data story, having those relationships helps us to kind of add broader value than just the embedded technology that we are. So we can drive a lot of value and enable that through other partnerships or relationships that we have as well.

Cool.

So that works really well for us. Like I say, an ecosystem focus in our go-to-market strategy.

No, it makes sense. I mean, yeah, but channel relationships and integrations, I think that works fantastic, right? Leveraging bigger people's kind of traffic and user base. Have you tried any kind of growth experience? Maybe, I think it's equally important to see, you know, what hasn't worked, what's failed, and you hope that would've.

So marketplaces.

Okay.

I think, interestingly, you know, I'm saying one thing and then another, but it's the truth, right? I think marketplaces, you know, just building something, putting on a marketplace and hope they will come, definitely doesn't happen. Strategic partnerships where you're driving kind of content campaigns and initiatives together and talking to the market in a much more kind of conversational way or in a community way do. But certainly, you know, spending a lot of time and then putting it onto a marketplace and not doing the other part of it really, really doesn't work. So Yeah, we, you know, we did that early days with Salesforce, Sage, where we sort of, you know, put the energy into getting kind of live on the marketplace, but we hadn't done enough of the work around it from, like I say, marketing and community engagement and content and building community relationships. Now we do. But yeah, marketplaces need a lot of work around it, if that makes sense.

Interesting. So you guys did list on Salesforce Marketplace and you said you didn't get as much kind of results as you hoped. Was it just because You know, you didn't really push to drive it, or, you know, would you—

We didn't. We never got on the marketplace because we realized, yeah, we realized it wasn't gonna work for us. We did on the Sage marketplace. We still are on the Sage marketplace, but they don't— it was a noisy marketplace. So the amount of work you need to do to get kind of noticed for us felt like we were in the wrong place. And actually, that's not our go-to-market strategy, being a kind of marketplace. add-on. We're embedded within the likes of a Salesforce as opposed to in their marketplace, because that's the right kind of strategic partnership for us. We were— it was just a learning very, very early on that that wasn't the type of strategic partnership would work for our go-to-market strategy. But yeah, it works for a lot of people, right? And that's not a criticism if anyone chooses to go to market that way.

I hope you don't hear it that way. that way.

For us, it was not the model that would enable us to scale because we weren't really committed to having to work those ecosystems independently. You have to put a lot into that. You have to do an awful lot of work in that ecosystem and be really kind of invested in that partner, that one partner. And that's the reality. You've got to be really part of that sales force. committed to that Salesforce ecosystem, and they have to see you very committed to them. Otherwise, you don't get the profile, and you don't get the kind of visibility, and therefore you don't get the traction, right? So you've got to be very, very committed to marketplaces and almost dedicated to start with if you're quite small, I think.