Key Takeaway

As a customer data platform (CDP), CaliberMind delivers data-driven insights to its customers. To do so, it must connect to its customers’ data sources; extract, process and transform the data; run it through specially designed analytic models; and, finally, present data back to the customer as insights. CaliberMind uses Fivetran to offload the task of ingesting data from its customers’ applications. Using the Powered by Fivetran solution, CaliberMind automates the process of onboarding customer data, freeing its team to focus on delivering insights that matter to its customers.

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CaliberMind and Data

CaliberMind is a marketing analytics solution for B2B marketers that spans engagement scoring, marketing attribution, and end-to-end buyer journey reporting. CaliberMind integrates with your entire go-to-market tech stack and even fixes your data for you. Too often, companies don’t have the bandwidth or skills to transform their digital marketing data into meaningful insights. Marketers need real-time marketing analytics to supercharge their impact on pipeline and revenue.

CaliberMind customers have a variety of marketing data sources including: AdRoll, Bing, Clearbit, Eloqua, Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Hubspot, LinkedIn, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamic, Salesforce, and more.

The Challenge: Efficient, Reliable Integration of Customer Data

The starting point for any CDP is getting access to its customers’ data. From there, it begins the process of turning data into insights, which ultimately are presented back to its customers; this is where the true value of the business lies.

The average marketing department houses data in an average of two-dozen separate applications. Before Fivetran, CaliberMind used an internally developed ELT framework to extract data from its customers’ applications and load the raw data into their data warehouse.

While its custom-built ELT framework accomplished the task of extracting data from its customers’ data sources, it took considerable engineering effort. CaliberMind was continually extending the framework to accommodate new data sources as well as maintaining connections to existing sources. At the end of the day, CaliberMind didn’t want to spend time on data replication. “That time could be better spent on our core IP, creating valuable insights for our customers,” says Eric Westerkamp, CEO of CaliberMind.

Challenges to building a data pipeline internally included:

• Learning the API and writing code to extract data from a wide variety of its customers’ applications.
• Maintaining pipelines as APIs are updated or schemas change to ensure customers have accurate and up-to-date analytics.
• Being able to scale and readily extract data from new sources as customers add them to their stack.

Data Pipeline Automation Saves Engineering Time

Aware of the opportunity cost of developing and managing data pipelines, CaliberMind was eager to find an automated solution to assist with its expanding data engineering work. Of critical importance was a solution with a broad scope of pre-built connectors for the sources they (and their customers) cared about.

Criteria during the search process for an ELT solution included:

• Commercial viability, functionality, and an active focus on new connectors
• Pre-built and fully managed connectors for the majority of sources the business was already managing (CRM, MAP, Social, Data Lake)
• A pricing model that would enable solid cost of goods sold for their deployed solution
• SOC II and high levels of security compliance

Following a two-week proof of concept, CaliberMind selected Fivetran to replace the in-house ELT service. Nolan Garrido, VP of Engineering at CaliberMind, shares a few factors that led them to the decision:

Easy connector configuration, built-in data normalization, and reliable data ingestion were key criteria in our evaluation process. During our POC, Fivetran met each of those requirements.

Getting Data From Customers With Powered by Fivetran

To get access to customer data, CaliberMind embeds the Powered by Fivetran Connect Card technology into its customer-facing application. From the CaliberMind user interface, customers log in and complete the following steps:

1. Click on the application that they want to grant CaliberMind access to
2. Enter credentials for that application in the Fivetran popup that appears
3. Click “Authorize”

Once the authorization is successful, Fivetran automatically creates a connector and begins extracting raw data from the application; converting it into normalized, query-ready schemas; and loading it into CaliberMind’s platform.

In addition to using Connect Cards with paying customers, CaliberMind also leverages the technology to bring in data from prospective customers during a sales cycle – this allows CaliberMind to quickly demonstrate the value of its platform using the prospect’s data.

CaliberMind’s Secret Sauce: Insights

Marketers need real-time marketing analytics to supercharge their impact on pipeline and revenue. To empower B2B marketers with this level of visibility, CaliberMind creates a centralized definition of a customer and assigns unified IDs across all their customers’ platforms. These organizational-specific schemas lay the groundwork for complex data models. The result is a marketing analytics solution for B2B marketers that spans engagement scoring, marketing attribution, and end-to-end buyer journey reporting.

Using CaliberMind, B2B marketers can quickly visualize which campaigns and channels drive performance at each stage of the buyer journey. With pre-built reports and visualizations embedded into the user interface of the CaliberMind platform, users have a convenient way to access the insights they need to be truly data-driven marketers.

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