How 8x8’s Marketing Team Drives Business Growth with HockeyStack

The Who

8x8 is an AI-powered customer experience platform simplifying business communications, maximizing operational efficiencies, and mitigating security risks for companies large and small.

Bruno Bertini is 8x8’s Chief Marketing Officer. He’s responsible for developing and overseeing the company’s marketing strategy for driving consistent growth and a strong global presence.

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The Problem

Since joining the company almost two years ago, Bertini has been a crucial part of reshaping 8x8’s mission. “We’ve been in the business for quite some years, but it’s a company that has been reinventing itself — and our story, which is a little bit of my story, is a story about growth, it’s a story about change, and it’s a story about moving fast,” he says. 

With this shift came the desire for a more reliable marketing analytics tool and industry partner. Their systems at the time Bertini joined, many of which were homegrown, complex, outdated, hard to maintain, and not aligned with their new aims — in short, in serious need of an overhaul.

“My main concern was a multi-touch system: How can we have something that is modern [and] easy? That goes all the way from a good backend to a good frontend,” Bertini explains.

They also needed a solution that would not only ensure their data was accurately reported but was able to produce actionable insights they could trust.

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The Requirements

If Bertini’s team and counterparts, from the head of demand gen all the way to senior leaders, had to work quickly, they also required dashboards and data software that could move just as fast, while providing clear answers and making sharing insights with other relevant stakeholders seamless. 

Not only did his team require the platform to present data accurately, they needed a solution that would allow the team to move beyond first- and last-touch attribution models, with the option to use multi-touch and custom attribution models and have the flexibility to build custom dashboards quickly.

“How could we have a platform that runs at the speed that we’re running, and that allows us to tweak things on the fly?” he says of their mindset when evaluating partners.

In their previous in-house system, it was difficult to see which marketing activities were actually driving bookings. 

“With our old platform…it was very hard for me to go full-funnel,” Bertini says. “And I’m in the business of going all the way down to bookings, all the way down to looking at renewals, which is really what grows the business.”

Lastly, they wanted a partner that was dedicated to helping them succeed beyond providing software and would help foster a culture of leading with an accountability on ROI. “To me, it was a no-brainer that if we wanted to change this company — increase our ROI and move much faster — we needed a partner that not only had the right platform, but…had the people that I could trust to support me.”

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The Alternatives

Staying the course with homemade dashboards just wouldn’t cut it for Bertini, not just because they required a lot of time and resources to upkeep (that could be better spent elsewhere), but because the data they provided lacked a lot of depth and context. As a result, Bertini’s team couldn’t as confidently make decisions or back up investments, or do so at the pace they hoped to maintain.

“It was very hard for me to have visibility of where things were getting stuck — to trace the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel, all the way back to a campaign and an ad. What was working from a campaign perspective and sales acceleration perspective. Putting all the pieces together was quite hard.” he says. 

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The Insights

“We’re doing very, very innovative things with HockeyStack,” Bertini says. For example, they often generate reports to understand the campaigns and touchpoints which accelerate deals at each stage in a customer’s journey. At a higher level, they can also look at the channels and sources directly or indirectly driving revenue to better manage budgets and efforts across the team.

The insights HockeyStack’s tools offer make both big-picture and granular planning simple and easily actionable. 

“My team has been supported at their levels, and I’ve been supported, meaning I always had someone that could understand my business and talk about, ‘What are we doing? Where are we going as a company?’” Bertini says of HockeyStack’s customer service.

“I’m very happy with the experience… it’s a story of two companies moving ahead very fast and innovating together.” he adds.

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The Results

With the help of HockeyStack, Bertini has been able to uphold marketing’s role in driving the broader objectives of the company’s growth. His team can demonstrate how their efforts drive sales and prove value to the C-suite and board, and the company as a whole can better measure performance and allocate resources to initiatives that promote quick, sustainable growth amid a crowded and fluctuating landscape.

“We’re the glue between sales, product, and growth [as a company],” he says, adding, “If you want to grow, if you want to expand categories — which is a little bit of what we’re doing, we’re moving from business communications into customer experience in a very commoditized, very fast-paced market, with AI changing everything as we speak — you need to move fast, you need to make sure that you’re transforming your team and you’re transforming marketing as fast, if not faster, than the world outside.”