Driving Revenue from Within: How Product Leaders Are Taking the Lead in GTM Insights

In this session, Aseem Chandra, CEO of Immersa and Niran Kundapur, VP of Product at Skill Jar discussed the crucial role of data and insights in driving customer and business outcomes. Typically, GTM teams request data and insights from the product and engineering teams, but in Nirans case, product took the initiative to provide this information first. Here are some of the key takeaways from the session.

The Power of Data and Insights for Business Performance

Niran Kundapur emphasized the need for product teams to measure and drive customer and business outcomes. In his experience, most companies have a recurring problem of obtaining product usage data across organizations in the business. Combining account-level growth data with user-level product usage data to gain a comprehensive view of business performance is critical. However, integrating data from different systems poses a challenge.
To support customer success and go-to-market teams, Niran introduced the concept of a customer health score, comprising product usage and relationship data. Skill Jar sends information in Salesforce, the primary platform for CS teams, and offers comprehensive insights through their system built on QuickSight and Redshift. This combination of tools enables CS teams to access key information in Salesforce and gain detailed reports in QuickSight.

Building a Data-Driven Infrastructure for Actionable Insights

Niran shared SkillJar’s technology infrastructure and their approach to utilizing product data. Skill Jar’s product is instrumented in various areas to track usage by human and API users. Real-time data stores and analytics data stores capture the information, which is then processed through data pipelines and stored in a data warehouse. Additionally, tracking tools like Segment are employed to collect product usage data from their website.

Skill Jar’s product team uses this data to prioritize features, predict customer outcomes, and assess the success criteria post-release. However, they encountered challenges in merging account data with product usage data, setting up infrastructure and data pipelines, and visualizing data for different users. Overcoming these challenges required a partnership-oriented culture within the customer success team, iterative expansion of insights based on user needs, and organizing data to create templates, health scores, and strategic insights.

Investment Considerations and Future Opportunities

Data projects can be big. They require resources and the ROI isn’t often clear. Niran provided some investment considerations when building a new system or platform. There are three key areas: people, technology infrastructure, and other systems. Allocating capacity to measure outcomes and enhance customer and business outcomes is essential alongside core product innovations. In his case, the team composition includes product analytics, data engineers, and data analysts.
In terms of technology infrastructure, Skill Jar utilizes AWS QuickSight, which is considered as a single unit within the engineering budget, along with other systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zen. Niran advised those embarking on this journey to paint a vision of the value the system can provide to gain stakeholder buy-in. It can be easy to tackle too much at once, so start small, consider buying a system like Immersa rather than using resources to build a custom solution, and iterate.

If you would like to follow up with any questions, you can find Niran on Linkedin. As you build out the infrastructure for GTM insights, make sure to include our team in the process. Even if you don’t use Immersa, our people are ready and willing to share insights they’ve learned from working with companies to find the most important revenue signals.

Interested? Book a time with our team here.