Background
Ignition Program & Whaly Summary
- Ignition Program has connected 5 sources within Whaly: Airtable, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Pennylane, PostgreSQL
- Ignition Program leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Recruitment, Key Account Management (Sales), Marketing, Product, and Finance use cases
The Challenge
No internal data reporting set-up = blind business decisions
Before Ignition Program started using Whaly, there was no data stack or platform in place for internal reporting, which meant a lack of understanding around team performance, what was working, and what wasn’t. Business decisions were made mainly based on gut feeling, business experiences, and intuition, rather than facts and figures. In fact, due to this lack of visibility, some performance figures were even going down. At the time, it was difficult to troubleshoot why this was the case, and how to turn things back around.
Inability to combine different data sources
Ignition Program uses HubSpot as their CRM, which offers some built-in basic analysis of the data that lives within the CRM. They were using Pennylane as their accounting tool, in which they could extract some numbers and perform light analysis. Lastly, they had their own internal tool that matched job opportunities with candidates. From this tool, they had no choice but to perform manual, time-consuming calculations.
While they had data collected within these three separate tools, the issue was that there was no way to efficiently combine the data sources together to perform more complex analyses. They were not able to link finance and accounting data with CRM data, for example, which meant there were limitations to their ability to derive valuable insights.
In early 2023, data became an urgent topic for them. They knew they needed to put something in place to help guide decision-making, and to better monitor performance and metrics around their business and revenue — and to ensure that the figures were going up, not down!
The Solution
Ignition Program knew that they had to implement a data strategy at their organization, and put a data stack in place. They appointed Aude de Fornel, now Data Analyst at Ignition Program, to lead this important initiative. She had started out at the company 5 years prior in sales, moved into operations, and with the help of a data analysis boot camp, was eventually put in charge of all things data and change management at Ignition Program.
Upon completion of her boot camp, she enlisted the help of freelance data consultants to help scope out what their data stack should look like. They put their Google BigQuery data warehouse in place, and then did a lot of research around business intelligence tools, benchmarking them against each other. That’s when they begin their Proof of Concept (POC) with Whaly.
They started implementing basic internal dashboards that monitored sales performance and recruitment processes. Despite the team not having a deep data background, the dashboards were easy to set up, and quick to provide value. Plus, they realized that leveraging Whaly’s ETL connectors meant that they could save lots of money and headache on bespoke ETL solutions, like Fivetran. The Whaly team also closely assisted Ignition Program during the POC, which really solidified the partnership and showed the value of the solution.
Now, Ignition Program uses Whaly for the following use cases:
- Recruitment: Helps the recruitment team monitor their process and performance around finding candidates. They can better understand candidate admission and conversion rates across stages. They also set up individual performance tracking for each recruiter, which helps each rep improve.
- Key Account Management (Sales): Helps sales teams grow revenue and boost efficiencies by monitoring the process of finding clients with job opportunities that need to be filled by candidates. Through Whaly dashboards, they can see a “snapshot” of the volume of opportunities across each step of the journey, conversion rates, and how long each opportunity has remained in each stage.
- Product: Dashboards have been created from product data that’s pulled from Ignition Program’s internal tool (from Postgres).
- Overall Finance & Revenue: Dashboards that are helpful for the board, showing a high-level snapshot of company health and performance
Since data was never properly set up at Ignition Program before Whaly, they also had to overcome the challenge of re-building trust and confidence around data. By evangelizing the importance of data and spreading the use of data and Whaly across to 5 different teams, Ignition Program is surely becoming a more data-driven company. Now, 70% of their company is an active user of Whaly, while overall adoption has hit 90%.
The Results
Ignition Program continues to get a lot of value out of every dashboard that has been created. When they went through a re-org during the summer of 2023, however, they needed to adapt their existing dashboards to match the new team structure and strategy. Whaly was able to flex to their new needs and demands, without wasting any time.
“Staffing dashboard” that adapted to their new re-org, better matching candidates with opportunities
When the re-org happened and sales became a separate function from the recruitment function, they needed a way to better “match” the client job opportunities with the recruitment search for candidates. With Whaly, they were able to quickly implement a “Staffing dashboard” right away, which displayed the types of roles (Product vs. Sales or Marketing) that were open and in demand (by volume and percentage open), helping to inform the Recruitment team what types of roles they should search for. This way, if the Product roles were mostly fully staffed already, the recruiters wouldn’t spend time focusing on these profiles.
Boosting adoption across new teams
After a little over a year using Whaly, Ignition Program has been doing a fantastic job spreading adoption and expanding to new use cases with Whaly - 70% of Ignition Program is considered an active user, and 90% of the company has logged into Whaly. That’s impressive! This is critical because it empowers various teams to complete their daily tasks and make key decisions based around factual numbers, trends, and insights derived from data. No more intuition-based decisions, it’s now all about data! They have also successfully reversed the initial feeling of lack of trust and confidence around data. It’s incredibly impressive what Aude, as the solo Data Analyst at Ignition Program, has been able to achieve in a short time!
Data Champions Program
Whaly’s intuitive and easy-to-use platform enabled the birth of the “Data Champions Program” at Ignition Program, spearheaded by Aude. She identified 5 people across different business teams, who are naturally inclined and interested in data. With training sessions, regular check-ins and roadmap meetings with these champions and key stakeholders, Aude has been able to effectively transfer her knowledge and help spread the data culture across the organization. Whaly’s self-service capabilities make it possible for business users to feel empowered and autonomous in their data access and analysis.
Next step: External data experiences for their clients
What’s next? Their upcoming data goal is to provide relevant recruitment data to specific clients, most likely embedded into the client’s existing tooling. Whaly offers this as part of their capabilities, alongside a Partner Portals functionality, that allows for customized, packaged data experiences for each client in a standalone portal.
What Ignition Program loves about Whaly:
- Whaly’s responsive and hands-on customer support makes it feel like a trusting partnership. Whaly is very open to feedback and have developed new features to enhance the platform according to our needs.
- This level of support was particularly helpful during the Proof of Concept (POC) period, making implementation and onboarding very smooth and less daunting. Whaly came out as the clear winner on top of other platforms we tried, such as Metabase and Looker Studio.
- Ignition Program’s business users are saying that Whaly is saving them in their jobs!