How Dice Optimized Go-to-Market Strategy with a Connected Buyer Journey

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The Who

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Dice is a career platform geared toward tech professionals. The company aims to create meaningful connections between top employers in the field and skilled tech experts through branded profiles, matching software, and personalized, high-quality recruiting experiences. 

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Na’im McKee, Director of Marketing Analytics, Technology, and Operations at Dice, brings a data-driven approach to advertising, operations, and tech development and ensures budget and efforts are properly allocated and optimized across Dice’s marketing team.

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The Problems

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Before it partnered with HockeyStack, Dice was only using a last-touch attribution model for gathering insights around what marketing channels customers were engaging with and how that contributed to revenue and sales leads. This hindered its ability to drive growth in several ways:

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• Na’im and his team had to spend significant time searching for important information elsewhere—Google Analytics, Salesforce, Hubspot, to name a few places.
• Understanding campaign influence was almost impossible: For example, they could see clicks that resulted in a form fill or inbound lead, but a click from someone who was already a contact or in Salesforce might be missed.
• Only post-click impressions were being measured, so it was hard to identify impressions or customer behavior up until that point.
• There wasn’t enough data by channel to inform budgeting and maximize revenue.
• Only the marketing team had the ability and knowledge to utilize dashboards, making it harder for other key stakeholders to gather useful insights.

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The Requirements

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Na’im wanted a more holistic view of Dice’s marketing performance. “To find a really comprehensive picture of the buyer journey was very difficult” with the team’s previous BI tool, he said. 

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With this, a new model would have to provide:

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• access to the entire sales funnel and customer journey
• more detailed data around engagement, clicks, CAC, and pipeline across channels
• a clear view of campaign influence and impressions at each touchpoint
• a way to measure the success and value of media mixes
• an intuitive experience for marketers as well as leadership and executives to follow and extract the same insights

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The Alternatives

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Na’im could continue down the path he was on—parsing through multiple platforms to piece together a story that could inform his overall marketing strategy:

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• Google Analytics would offer information around audience behavior, impressions, and ad success
• Salesforce would focus on customer data
• And Dice’s BI tool would track customers’ last interactions before making a purchase

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But this is incredibly time and energy consuming, especially for marketers who need to balance a lot of priorities and hit ambitious goals, or may not come from an analytical background. Also, these data points aren’t easy to integrate without outside support, meaning he would be unable to visualize and measure performance via one simple dashboard.

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Na’im was drawn to HockeyStack because it could provide him and his team that cohesive picture they’d been lacking, and searching for, for a long time, in a tool that was easy to use and adopt. He was also impressed by HockeyStack’s customer success model, which forgoes a self-managed implementation in favor of tailoring its onboarding and services to each organization. 

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“It was going to give us a one-view, connected buyer journey that we could see, that gave us the ability to look at our data on multiple attribution models and to really make those types of budgeting decisions…at a very high level.”

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The Insights

One thing marketers often struggle with is what Na’im calls “dirty” (unreliable or messy) data that prolongs and complicates analytics implementation. HockeyStack overcame this hurdle for his team’s Salesforce data, he says, in about two weeks. “I was shocked. In a week, we had our dashboards up,” he said, adding, “We spent the second week just really honing and refining the dashboards.”

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Na’im said the insights gained from HockeyStack since then have been “invaluable”—the biggest win being that he can now actually see how his team’s work directly and indirectly impacts the entire pipeline.

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The buyer journey reports HockeyStack generates offer a view of each individual in an account and their interactions—whether they came across a website link or LinkedIn post, or filled out a form or accepted a call—enabling Na’im and his team to see at a granular level their progress and ROI of their efforts.

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Other ways he’s leveraging the platform regularly include:

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• viewing quarterly data on inbound leads, deals, and revenue and how they match up against KPIs and goals
• monitoring paid acquisition costs
• collecting data on offline spend and success, such as billboards
• breaking campaign interactions down to the journey
• filtering by individuals to see who is interacting with which marketing channels and activities
• creating useful breakdowns, tables, and charts (for example, a breakdown of which campaigns bring in SQLs)
• uncovering which channels have the most touchpoints, have the highest pre-opportunity touchpoints, and are most influential at the bottom of the funnel
• predicting closed revenue and campaign influence
• forecasting pipeline

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One of the features Na’im is most excited about is HockeyStack’s AI assistant Odin. 

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“Being able to understand these reports, to get an automated summary of all of the different dashboard visualizations [with Odin], is a really key thing.” 

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Internally, his team is also moving channels that have historically been harder to measure—outbound sales actions, for example—into the HockeyStack fold to further improve the big picture.

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The Results

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Na’im credits HockeyStack with helping his team connect various touchpoints of his go-to-market actions to discover where they can, and should, prioritize and invest, as well as allowing them to extract crucial high-level insights that were otherwise out of reach. In turn, this has enabled them to better optimize their budgets, increase ROI on spend, and proactively target their ICP.

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Most importantly, they’re able to share valuable insights across the business without technical expertise being a major variable.

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Learn more about how HockeyStack helps marketing, revenue, and sales teams surface and action insights like the ones in this template by playing with the interactive demo or booking a demo with our team.

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