Lokki is a software solution that helps equipment rental companies streamline their equipment rental businesses and grow their revenue. Lokki’s all-in-one tool helps companies like Decathlon, Homie Boards & Suits, and Boulanger simplify their daily rental management, provide a new customer experience, and even handle administrative tasks. Growing quickly across France, we’re excited to help them scale and deliver on their KPIs through real-time data visibility!

• Lokki is connected to 10 sources via Whaly: Aircall, Days, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Lemlist, Pipedrive, Slack, Stripe
• Lokki leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Marketing, Finance, and Product use cases

Inability to combine marketing & sales data

When Guillaume Landegren, Growth Lead, joined Lokki in 2021, he noticed that there was no data foundation or platform through which he could track and measure marketing-related metrics. There was no BI tool that could reconcile data from both marketing and sales tools, which means he lacked a clear understanding of the return on investment on ad spend. It was tricky to spend money on Facebook or Google ads, and not know whether the investment was worthwhile. As 75% of Lokki’s customers come from inbound, their marketing spend across various activities and channels, along with their respective ROI, were vital to track and understand.

At his previous company, data was crucial to his role and he was always leveraging dashboards to learn how his marketing campaigns were working across different channels, and how they tied to closed revenue. For his Growth marketing role at Lokki, he knew that a data analytics platform was something that would be needed right away.

Manual calculations of SaaS finance metrics

In addition, Lokki’s SaaS finance metrics like CAC, LTV, MRR, and more, were calculated manually in spreadsheets at the time. Back then, they would have to download the data and make calculations on spreadsheets manually, whenever they needed to report these numbers. They weren’t able to keep a pulse on these metrics on a regular, routine basis, which was key to understanding company health and trajectory.

For both marketing and finance use cases, it became clear that they needed a BI platform that could combine various data sources, and display these metrics in real-time. This would save time and help Lokki make better decisions around their company finances and marketing efforts.

Once they recognized this need and demand, the main question was how to get this up and running as quickly as possible, without spending too much time or money. Hiring a technical data team would be a big cost, and it was difficult to justify as a young SaaS startup.

Whaly was implemented in 2021, with Guillaume and Benoit Prigent (Co-Founder at Lokki) leading the charge as the main builders. Neither have a data engineering background, but this was no problem. The Whaly team helped them with the implementation process, from start to finish. They helped them set up their Google BigQuery data warehouse, replicate their data into Whaly, and create the initial dashboards. The onboarding process was smooth and completed in a way that empowered anyone to be a data analyst — even without the expertise or skillset.

Within 1 month, Lokki had their first dashboards and reports built within Whaly, and a solid understanding of how they could leverage the platform in their everyday roles.

The use cases for Whaly are:

• Marketing dashboards: Using Whaly to combine various marketing sources with Pipedrive (Sales CRM). This allows them to track marketing performance and spend across channels, to better understand ROI. By tying marketing efforts to closed revenue, they could make better decisions. For Lokki, marketing doesn’t stop at acquiring leads — it’s important for the marketing team to understand how many opportunities and deals are created from the leads.
• Finance dashboards: Dashboards that display the key SaaS metrics: CAC, LTV, and MRR. These are vital for board meetings, and help convey overall company health.
• Product dashboards: Dashboards that show product usage — # of clients, which features are being used, which aren’t, and number of bookings on the bikes or other equipment for each client.

For Guillaume’s Growth role, he leverages the Marketing dashboard the most, which contains spend and performance information for Facebook Ads and Google Ads. He enjoys using Whaly’s Google Chrome extension on a daily basis, which provides him with a snapshot of the marketing results and performance of the week or month. If he has a particular question about the data in the dashboard, he enjoys using the Exploration function to dive in and run queries that will give him deeper insights.

Lokki now has roughly 6 users using the platform - almost 20% of the entire company - with more to come. They expanded from marketing and finance use cases to the product use case in early 2023, and many of the product team have adopted Whaly to understand how users interact with their platform, and their satisfaction levels. The sales team leverages Whaly mainly as viewers / consumers, and the next step will be to get them to leverage Whaly more to track certain performance metrics that Pipedrive analytics doesn’t offer. While Pipedrive makes it easy enough to visualize sales performance by rep, Whaly’s benefit lies in the ability to combine different sources and visualize the “big picture” revenue metrics.

Finally a way to monitor performance and spend

For the first time, Lokki was able to get real-time access to analytics that inform key marketing and finance decisions. The main benefit is that the founders and marketing team are able to take a quick look at the overall performance, and understand whether they missed something, or whether something needs to be improved. From the marketing dashboard, for example, Guillaume has easy visibility into all the expenses for each marketing channel per campaign. The results of the campaign are at his fingertips, and he can leverage this data to understand what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next.

Boosting adoption across new teams

After 2 years of using Whaly, they are doing a great job spreading adoption and expanding use cases to better serve the entire business with data that will help them in their daily tasks and decisions. They recently hired new product leads, who immediately jumped into Whaly and have created new product dashboards. They’ve generated plenty of new insights that will help inform the product development going forward. Lokki has been effective in sharing and educating the Product team on the benefits and how to use Whaly.

So far, everyone is very happy with Whaly, and they see it as a crucial platform that helps them make better, faster decisions that are always backed by live data.

What Lokki loves about Whaly:

• Fast implementation and time to value
• Great onboarding support and visual flow modeling capabilities, which enabled them to build dashboards without knowing SQL. No need to hire a data team.
• Whaly’s Google Chrome extension that shows a snapshot of the main dashboard without signing in or spending time finding the dashboard. This enables users to get into the habit of always relying on data for decision-making.