We’re excited to announce our partnership with Hightouch, recent recipient of a $12 million Series A led by Amplify Partners (read more at Forbes and Venture Beat). While Fivetran loads data from 180+ popular tools into your warehouse, the next question is: What do you do with that data in your warehouse? Until now, the data warehouse has been used exclusively for analytics. What if you could use that data to power key business workflows?

That’s where Hightouch comes in. You can think of Hightouch like a reverse Fivetran: Hightouch sends data from your warehouse or lakehouse to the tools that your business teams rely on, through a process called reverse ETL. Combined, Fivetran and Hightouch activate your data and power the modern data stack.

Reverse ETL: activating your data

You might be wondering: Why would I move data out of the warehouse? Didn’t I just transfer all my data into the data warehouse using Fivetran?

Reverse ETL is necessary because your data warehouse — the platform you bought to eliminate data silos — has become a data silo in itself. Without reverse ETL, your business’s core definitions only live in the warehouse. With reverse ETL, the data you've synced to the warehouse with Fivetran can be activated in all of the tools where that data can be useful. All of your product usage data from the warehouse can be synced into tools like Intercom and Salesforce to help personalize onboarding and equip sellers with relevant context.

You are already building key definitions in SQL on top of your data warehouse. Think lifetime value, product qualified lead (PQL) and marketing qualified lead (MQL), propensity score, customer health, ARR/MRR, funnel stages, and more. You can easily create reports and visualizations using this data in BI tools or SQL, but these insights are much more powerful if they drive the everyday operations of your business teams across sales, marketing, finance and more in their native tools.

With Fivetran loading data from tools like sales, marketing, support, and success into the data warehouse, Hightouch can be used to sync those records and objects to business tools. The idea is similar to getting Zendesk data into Salesforce or Salesforce data into Intercom, but the difference is that the data has been massaged by analysts into models that are actionable by business users.

These calculated metrics and definitions are typically locked up in the warehouse, and unable to be synced between tools via point-to-point integrations. Using the data warehouse not just as an analytics layer, but as a modeling layer that sits at the center of your data stack allows any team to keep their tools synced. We believe this is the key to building incredible experiences for customers.

Here are some ways companies are activating their data with Hightouch today:

• Retool increased their reply rate by over 32% by sending product usage data to Hubspot and Salesforce for personalized outreach
• Zeplin improved sales productivity by sending product usage data to Salesforce for prioritizing leads

You can learn more about how reverse ETL works in our Fivetran reverse ETL blog post.

Tim Jenkins, Senior Director of Strategy and Analytics at Lucid, describes using Hightouch this way:

We have so much valuable data in our data warehouse. Before using Hightouch, getting that data into other tools was painful and time-consuming. With Hightouch, we can put data to use so quickly and easily. Hightouch has opened up all kinds of use cases - sending real-time notifications of new opportunities to Slack, sending custom audience lists to ad platforms such as Adwords and Bing to enable targeted advertising, and sending product activity data into Marketo for personalized email campaigns are just a few examples, and we’re just scratching the surface!

Built for data engineers

Hightouch is built for data teams, with unique features no other reverse ETL provider has, like a live debugger for identifying errors as well as version control via Git. Hightouch also integrates natively with the rest of the modern data stack, including tools like dbt and Airflow.

Reverse ETL vs. off-the-shelf CDPs

You might also be wondering: how is reverse ETL different from an off-the-shelf customer data platform (CDP)? Don’t CDPs also send data to business tools? The fundamental difference is that reverse ETL is built on top of your warehouse, which is your source of truth and where all your data already is. With an off-the-shelf CDP, your data becomes trapped in yet another tool with a rigid data model, rather than the flexible data models that your analysts have built. Instead, we believe you should use reverse ETL to turn your warehouse into a CDP: you can learn more about why in our shared article here!

Case study: How Blend meets banking needs using warehouse data

At Blend, velocity is vital. Founded in 2012, the fintech startup has undergone a rise to prominence in the banking software space, announcing their IPO in July of 2021. In the last year alone, Blend enabled financial services firms to process nearly $1.4 trillion in loan applications, handling an average of more than $5 billion in transactions every day.

William Tsu, Customer Success Operations at Blend, describes the value of Hightouch and Fivetran this way:

The value of Fivetran isn't any one individual connector – the value is being able to pull in Salesforce, Marketo, Asana, NetSuite and Lever, and blend the data from historically separate departments together for analysis. With Hightouch we can then push it out to make sure that everyone's looking at the same metrics.  

To learn more about how Blend uses Fivetran and Hightouch, read our joint case study here. Want to try reverse ETL? Try Hightouch for free now, or schedule a demo.