How Shifting from Bizible to HockeyStack changed Planful's marketing team

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Overview

“HockeyStack gave us the best of both worlds” - Rowan Tonkin, CMO of Planful

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Planful faced significant challenges with its previous attribution platform, Bizible. The platform lacked visibility, was cumbersome to use, and was primarily utilized by a few teams. As a result, the platform's full potential remained untapped. To address these issues and enhance marketing performance, Planful sought a more robust attribution and analytics solution.

Company Background

Employee Size: 201-500

Industry: Finance SaaS

Headquarters: San Francisco

Planful is a leading provider of cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software, designed to streamline budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and other financial operations for businesses of all sizes. With a focus on delivering real-time insights and empowering finance teams, Planful helps organizations drive strategic decision-making and operational excellence. The platform is known for its user-friendly interface, robust analytics capabilities, and seamless integration with various ERP and business intelligence systems.

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Their Challenges with Bizible

Prior to adopting HockeyStack, Planful relied on Bizible for attribution. However, Bizible presented several limitations that hindered the company's marketing efforts:

• Limited Visibility: The platform lacked comprehensive reporting capabilities, making it difficult to track the impact of marketing campaigns across different channels and touchpoints.
• Cumbersome User Experience: Building custom reports and visualizations was time-consuming and required technical expertise, limiting platform adoption. Furthermore, these reports needed to be constantly updated manually
• Restricted User Base: Bizible was primarily used by the operations and demand generation teams, hindering collaboration and data-driven decision-making across the entire marketing department

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Solution: HockeyStack

To overcome these challenges, Planful implemented HockeyStack as its new attribution platform. HockeyStack offered a comprehensive solution that addressed Planful's specific needs:

• Enhanced Visibility: HockeyStack provided Planful with a clear and holistic view of customer journeys, enabling the marketing team to identify high-performing channels and campaigns.
• User-Friendly Interface: The platform's intuitive interface allowed marketing teams to easily create custom reports and dashboards, empowering data-driven decision-making.
• Broader Adoption: HockeyStack's accessibility and ease of use encouraged adoption across the entire marketing department, fostering collaboration and data sharing.

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Benefits of HockeyStack

Before implementing HockeyStack, Planful had researched several platforms in both the attribution and analytics categories.

After implementing HockeyStack, Planful achieved significant improvements in marketing performance:

• Improved Visibility: HockeyStack provided Planful with a comprehensive understanding of customer interactions across multiple channels, enabling the company to optimize marketing spend and allocate resources effectively.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: With access to actionable insights, Planful's marketing team could make informed decisions about campaign optimization, content creation, and channel allocation.
• Enhanced Collaboration: HockeyStack facilitated collaboration among different marketing teams by providing a shared platform for data analysis and reporting; Hockeystack is not just used by the operations and demand generation teams, but it’s also used by event, product, and content marketing teams. 
• Increased Efficiency: The platform's user-friendly interface streamlined reporting processes, saving time and resources.

Furthermore, Rowan mentions he isn’t sure if Bizible would be able to create any reports to understand the impact of their new product launches. However, his team was able to build the same report with HockeyStack in just 10 minutes.

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What other dashboards is the team using right now?

One of the most important things Rowan highlights is that everyone at Planful uses HockeyStack for different use cases. Rowan has his own CMO dashboard where he tracks the key metrics from a high-level view; other teams have their own dashboards where they track all stages of the funnel. For example, the field marketing team uses HockeyStack to understand the long-term performance of events.

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How would you summarize working with the HockeyStack support team?

“Ultimately, the support has been fantastic.”

One of the biggest drives he had when making a change was that he wanted the team to really adopt and embed whatever platform they chose through their weekly cadences, not just during a QBR. With HockeyStack, he’s seen behavioral changes across departments, not just in operations or in demand generation. And that was the win he was looking for when he chose HockeyStack.

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Conclusion

Planful's transition from Bizible to HockeyStack marked a significant enhancement in their marketing analytics capabilities. By switching to HockeyStack, Planful overcame the challenges of limited visibility, cumbersome user experience, and restricted user base that were present with Bizible. 

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HockeyStack's intuitive interface, comprehensive visibility, and broad adoption across various marketing teams have not only improved the efficiency and collaboration within the department but also enabled data-driven decision making at all levels. The quick ability to generate actionable reports—such as assessing the impact of new product launches—underscores HockeyStack's superiority in flexibility and user-friendliness. 

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The strong support from HockeyStack’s team further facilitated this successful integration, fostering widespread adoption and significant behavioral changes across departments. Overall, HockeyStack has proven to be a robust solution that aligns perfectly with Planful’s goals, driving enhanced marketing outcomes and operational efficiency.

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