Our Customers’ Top Use Cases

This spring, we kicked off QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) with our customers. Our awesome customer team conducted a dozen QBRs over the past couple months, which were highly valuable, productive, and insightful for both sides. Not only did these QBR sessions help us better align with our customers and get their feedback, they also helped us get a deeper understanding of how Whaly is used and valued within their respective organizations.

As a BI platform, there are so many ways our product can be used, and all sorts of data and use case possibilities. What metrics are our customers tracking? Why are they tracking them? In what format? How does it benefit them? The QBR sessions were a great way to get a holistic understanding of how our customers are using Whaly to best serve their business needs.

With a gold mine of notes and learnings from these sessions, we thought we’d turn it into a blog article that showcases the use cases that Whaly is commonly used for. Let’s explore each:

Fundraising

Our startup customers often put together an “Investor Data Room” using Whaly when they’re in a fundraising round. To achieve this, they create and package a set of dashboards that they share with their investors to communicate key metrics.

Why is this important?

• Having ongoing visibility into the key metrics that investors care about helps them save time. No need to build out new reporting or crunch numbers on a weekly basis, they can always refer to the same dashboards that are tracking data in real-time
• Data has become so important to growth, and to proving growth. Having a single BI platform (Whaly) in place has helped our customers show their investors that they’re on top of their data, and are actively reporting on key metrics

Partnerships

Whaly customers that benefit from a partnerships network (influencers, software companies, consulting partners), create bespoke Portals for each partner using our Partner Portals capability. These portals contain dashboards and charts that are specific to that partner. If it’s a reseller partnership in which revenue is shared, for example, dashboards can be set up that show # of shared leads, their status in the pipeline, and the $ amounts attributed to each deal and the entire partnership. For referral partnerships, it can also show the amount that’s owed to the partner for referring opportunities that close. These Portals are fully customizable with the partners’ brand logos, essentially providing each partner with a special data experience that streamlines the partnership.

Why is this important?

• Great partnerships are built on trust. Sharing this information helps strengthen the partnership, and helps everyone get up to speed on how the partnership is progressing
• Saves time by removing the need for manual extracts by the Partner Managers

Sales

The "Holy Grail" Sales Dashboards for the Weekly Sales Review

Dashboards are crucial for Sales Managers and Revenue Leaders. A dashboard that many of our customers have in common is the Sales Performance dashboard, listing out deals by Sales rep, amount per deal, and stage. These dashboards are usually reviewed on a weekly basis. The weekly Sales Review is a key moment for the team to share common goals, current progress, and talk about what’s happening across their deals. These weekly review meetings tend to revolve around the dashboard - that’s their central focal point that they use to structure their conversations. Our customers find it easier to communicate around their deals and keep everyone engaged by referring to the dashboard.

Pipeline Conversion Rate

Most customers track their conversion rate per stage to be sure that the deals are progressing in the right direction. As Pipeline performance is always changing (due to new marketing budgets, angles, new go-to-market approaches, new employees), bottlenecks can be created very quickly. The faster the corrective actions are taken (sales coaching, change of angle, adjustment to sales process, new hires, etc.), the better the overall pipeline performance will be. Monitoring the pipeline conversion rate helps Sales Managers make adjustments and pivot on time according to the reality that’s happening on the field.

Why is this important?

• Customers have told us that they can identify issues in under a week using their Whaly dashboards. Before Whaly, it would have taken them months. That’s what we love to hear!

Pipeline Health Monitoring

We all love seeing large booking volumes in our pipeline stages, but the reality is that only a handful of them close. It’s common for opportunities to slip away because of inaction - reps forgetting about them or not engaging them enough when it matters most. As a result, they go stale and the moment slips. Our customers are monitoring the Deal Age of their deals in order to prevent them from “going bad” and as reminders to act more quickly.

Why is this important?

• These insights bring in more revenue, because reps are reminded which deals need more action and attention
  

Marketing

Tracking the deliverables of external agencies

Leveraging an external marketing agency is a great way to delegate some operational work (campaign management, landing page design, etc.), however, it can come with many challenges. The Marketing lead managing the agency essentially enters a Project Management role, in which they have to understand what the agency is doing and the outputs they deliver, and when. Usually, the only available information is what the agency actively decided to reveal to you. It’s tough to know the real truth or get a real pulse on what’s going on.

Our customers have taken matters into their own hands and have built a “Supervision Dashboard” that helps them track and ensure that the agency is doing the work they’ve committed to, and can raise alerts whenever something is not on track.

Why is this important?

• Helps build trust in your relationship with your external marketing agency through greater control over successful delivery of your projects
• Develop an understanding of which marketing initiatives are working and what can be improved

Connecting campaigns to bottom of funnel, to identify what's actually impactful to revenue

Standard marketing reports that everyone tracks are always helpful, but they tend to be focused on the top of the funnel. This means that the “conversion” metric that’s tracked tends to be things like: “a form was completed” or a “sales call was booked”. This is especially true for companies with longer sales cycles.

However, it’s rare to get an understanding of whether a marketing activity actually brings in revenue with a closed deal. Just because a marketing campaign is great at feeding the top of the funnel doesn’t mean it will bring in a lot more revenue at the end.

Customers are using Whaly to “close the loop” on their understanding of marketing campaigns by connecting the dots with the bottom of the funnel (closed deal/revenue). Through these dashboards, they’ve realized that some marketing channels have very low conversion rate in their sales funnel, and bring only a small amount of revenue.

Why is this important?

• Customers that have identified which marketing actions do not bring in actual revenue have been able to give proper feedback to their marketing team and re-orient their strategies to favor more impactful ones for revenue.

Customer Acquisition Cost per channel for budgeting purposes

When planning the budget for the upcoming year, Whaly customers are finding it really useful to analyze last year’s performance, understand the channels to focus on, and the associated customer acquisition cost of each channel. Not only does this help them reach their growth objectives, but it helps them predict how much marketing budget they will need to achieve their goals.

Why is this important?

• Gives them better control over their budget planning, resulting in better accuracy and sufficient budget for the upcoming year
• Greater efficiencies, with the ability to learn from what they have already built, rather than relying on single-usage spreadsheets

Overall Strategy

Customer Segmentation Analysis

Whaly customers are segmenting their customer base into different tiers (VIP / Regular / Low Tier), and then getting a pulse on all the key metrics per segment.

• LTV
• Acquisition cost
• Current portion of the revenue

Why is this important?

• This strategic analysis is a great way to prioritize customers. It provides great insight into which segments/customers to focus on (high-potential, higher tier customers) as well as the customers to de-prioritize/drop, as they bring low revenue for high cost of acquisition/maintaining.

MRR Report & Cohort View for SaaS Companies

Our SaaS companies have found that building their MRR report gives them a better view into their most important metric, one that is tied to revenue and valuation. Having a cohort view allows Whaly users to check that they know how to “expand” into existing customers which is a key element of their growth.

Why is this important?

• MRR is the key superstar metric for revenue growth, that investors are most interested in
• Unlock expansion growth

Product

Churn Analysis

It’s never a good feeling when customers decide to stop using your product, however, if it’s going to happen - the key is to always make sure that you learn something. That’s why Whaly users are tracking their Churn:

• Revenue churn rate
• Logo churn rate
• The most common reasons for churn

It’s important to try to prevent churn before it happens. If the churn rate goes up, it’s key to raise alerts or to give feedback to all revenue teams about what they could have done better to prevent the customer from churning.

Why is this important?

• Monitoring churn helps to prevent it
• From product feedback to customer success improvements, there is always something to learn from a customer churn. Using Whaly is a great way to ensure that learnings are tracked.

Product Margin Analysis for Marketplace Businesses

For businesses that are buying and reselling goods or services from multiple vendors (also known as “Marketplace”), it’s important to analyze the margin at the item level to understand which offer is the most profitable.

Why is this important?

• Based on this information, the highest-margin products can be given a better place in the Marketplace listing to boost their sales.
• For Marketplaces in which the customer can negotiate deals, it’s also important to check that the level of margin stays around a certain rate, which is not trivial when there are a lot of proposed goods and services in the Marketplace.

Tracking Satisfaction Score

Our customers are tracking their users’ satisfaction scores to ensure that the overall satisfaction is high, broken down by product / feature.

Why is this important?

• Keep a pulse on customer satisfaction and happiness with the product
• When our customers scale, they understand what to improve and prioritize in their upcoming product roadmaps.

Feature Usage

Whaly users are building tools to understand the deployment of each feature to their customers, and check its usage rate to see how it’s going.

When getting product feedback, it’s useful to weigh them against the actual usage of the feature, in order to prioritize the feedback.

When building the roadmap, it’s also critical to check if the feature is being as used as you were expecting. If not, you may need to think of other ways to present or package the feature, or make it self-discoverable, in order to make it a success.

Why is this important?

• A new feature is much more than the development + shipping - it doesn’t stop there. It’s important to ensure that it’s properly communicated, and the value is understood. There’s no point in building features if you can’t nail the final steps around adoption.

Billing/Invoicing

Shared Dashboard to External Accountant

Some of our customers use an external accountant to generate invoices. In this case, many of them like to use a Whaly dashboard to communicate which invoices need to be created.

Why is this important?

• This way, the communication with the external accountant is automatic and the information is always live. There’s no longer a need to have long email threads that are manually written to ask for invoice creations. A lot of time is saved!

Matching Invoices between Billing System & CRM

When invoices are generated manually, there are several human errors and common factors that cause them to slip away or get forgotten (people forget, holidays, people are swamped with work and invoices aren’t a priority in their day-to-day tasks, etc.)

However, when sending the invoices late, the risk of never getting the money goes up by a lot. It’s also hard for the customer when they are billed later than expected, as they oftentimes don’t foresee the cash need in advance, and it can get tricky, especially with smaller companies.

That’s why Whaly customers are doing a reconciliation between their CRM (what SHOULD be billed) and their invoicing system (what actually HAS BEEN billed) to identify the discrepancies and alert the proper team members to ask them to issue the invoice as soon as possible.

Why is this important?

• More professional, trustworthy relationships with customers that are respectful to their processes and deadlines
• No more manual follow-ups and checking to see the status of invoices

Customer Success

Dashboards to Add Value to Customer Reviews

Customer Success teams are using Whaly to build a dashboards that showcase their customers’ metrics and are using those to drive the regular “Customer review meetings”.

Creating dashboards that illustrate the customer usage of your product, and sharing it with the respective customer, is a great way to structure the discussions and ensure that there’s no topic that’s left behind. It also ensures that your conversations are always based on real metrics, as opposed to gut feeling.

Why is this important?

• Customers have a greater awareness into their current usage
• Customer sucess teams have a reliable tool to ask deeper questions around how the product is being used, why, and how to boost its usage.
• Having a dashboard is a great way to add credibility to your product/services. When your customers have this dashboard that they can showcase to their teams and superiors, it will be easier to justify why they should keep using your product

Fraud Detection

There may be suspicious people out there! When you start onboarding a lot of users to your product, you will always find that some try to profit from your company. They may try to find a hole in your system for money, or something else.

That’s why Whaly customers have a “suspicious activity” dashboard to be able to identify any customer misbehavior and investigate into them. Perhaps it’s totally OK, or perhaps the user account needs to be suspended/blocked.

Why is this important?

• Fraud can be dangerous. The sooner the Customer Success team can identify those troublemakers, the safer your organization will be.

Not sure how to get started with data or what to create in your dashboards? We hope these use cases served as helpful inspiration!

If you need any help getting started, we'd be happy to help! To speak to one of our experts, reach out here.