Fivetran enables a centralized analytics model at Braze

The Challenge: Enabling Centralized Analytics

When Braze decided to move to a centralized analytics model, it needed a quick and easy solution to efficiently bring together data from multiple applications used across the business. At the time, the business had one data engineer working on Salesforce extraction and Terence Knorr, Senior Manager of BI, knew this couldn’t scale. With Fivetran, Knorr was able to easily bring on new data sources to grow its analytics at scale:

“The schema wireframes in the documentation were fantastic and implementing Fivetran was very straightforward. Once we turned it on we were amazed by how quickly our data was in our warehouse.”

With the Marketo connector set up, Braze was able to quickly understand issues with the Marketing team’s instance, discovering that one table had over 2,000 columns. The BI team can now better help the marketing team understand leads, planning, and stages with accurate data and effectively communicate that information with operations and sales. Presenting the data in Looker has opened up conversations across teams and significantly improved transparency.

Adding the Salesforce Connector

After seeing how easily and quickly Fivetran brought in Marketo and Mavenlink data, Braze replaced its existing internal ETL solution for Salesforce with the Fivetran connector, which has helped Knorr scale analytics support:

“With the Fivetran connector for Salesforce, we can scale and support our revenue operations team. The team is made up of a lot of former Salesforce employees and they were super excited when they saw how quickly Fivetran centralized all of the data they needed.”

Using Salesforce data that it previously did not have access to, the BI team has started building out revenue operations and sales analytics reports. Knorr is responsible for a sales performance tool focused on individual sales reps and their general performance, including accounts, revenue, targets, commits, opportunities and even classes that they’re taking in Highspot. Another BI team member generates a sales forecast for the Head of Sales which is critical as the business considers growth, funding and future opportunities. Others on the BI team focus on renewal, pipeline generation and breadth and depth reports. Braze no longer suffers from tables or views breaking. As soon as a new column gets created in Salesforce, a new column appears within Fivetran, ensuring accurate, up-to-date data within the dashboards and reports.

Saving Engineering and Reporting Time

Engineers who previously maintained the Salesforce connection have instead been able to focus on setting up an effective core data warehouse, ensuring it is operational and stable. If Braze were to maintain its Salesforce connection internally and build and maintain Marketo and Mavenlink connections, Knorr estimates he would need to hire at least one additional engineer.

Reporting time has decreased significantly. In the past, generating the renewal report involved an employee spending an hour downloading spreadsheets from Salesforce and modifying the data to produce a stale report. Now, the information is automatically updated every few minutes in a dashboard. As soon as a new field appears within Snowflake, it triggers an update that automatically adds it into Looker, ensuring updated fields and accurate data.

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Increasing BI Users & Fostering a Data-Driven Culture

Since introducing the centralized analytics model to the business, Braze has seen about a 650% increase in the number of teams it supports, a 40% increase in BI users in the past year and an increase in BI projects from three to 107. As Knorr explains, the emphasis on analytics is only growing:

“At our monthly town halls, analytics and BI are consulted or referenced consistently and measurable KPIs are becoming more critical. It has completely started to change the culture here and we have a line of people wanting us to do more for them. It is a lot but it is extremely exciting.”

To learn how Fivetran can enable your analytics team, sign up for a personalized demo or start your free trial today.

About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.

About Snowflake: Snowflake is the leading data warehouse built for the cloud. Its unique architecture delivers proven breakthroughs in performance, concurrency and simplicity. For the first time, multiple groups can access petabytes of data at the same time, up to 200 times faster and 10 times less expensive than solutions not built for the cloud. Snowflake is a fully managed service with a pay-as-you-go-model that works on structured and semi-structured data.

About Looker: Looker is a modern platform for data that offers data analytics and business insights to every department at scale, and easily integrates into applications to deliver data directly into the decision-making process.