How Planhat Aligned Marketing Strategy with Revenue Growth Using HockeyStack

The Who

Planhat is a customer platform that unifies data, teams and tools so go-to-market functions – ranging from sales to services and customer success – can deliver more value, to more customers, faster. Today, almost 3 million customers are managed with the platform worldwide.

Alexander Ehrensvard is Planhat’s Head of Business Development, where he’s focused on driving new business for Planhat through partnerships, outbound sales, and data-driven marketing tactics.

‍

The Problem

Before implementing HockeyStack’s solutions, Ehrensvard’s team was reporting in Hubspot and supplementing this with data exports from various ad platforms to try and piece together the customer journey. This was time consuming and complicated, and didn’t paint a complete picture of who his various buyers were, the journeys they took, and what drove them to convert. 

“From a marketing attribution standpoint, you’re just trying to puzzle so many pieces together,” he says, adding, “It was fairly heavy — you’re essentially trying to build different buyer groups.”

They needed a simple solution that would give them visibility into the customer journeys of their buyer groups and which touchpoints were the most impactful for driving revenue so they could allocate their budget accordingly. 

‍

The Requirements

To make up for what previous tools lacked or couldn’t provide, Planhat was looking for a single platform that could:

• Connect all of their data in one place, including from Hubspot, ad platforms, G2 and website visits
• Provide a cohesive view into the entire customer journey including all the touchpoints that were required to close a deal
• Allow the team to see which marketing channels and campaigns were most impactful for generating revenue
• Accurately predict buyer intent based on all data points available at an account level

‍

The Alternatives

Since adopting HockeyStack, Ehrensvard struggles to think about another tool that would give him the same insight into marketing strategy, outcomes, buyer groups, and journeys manually from different platforms like Hubspot, G2 and Google.

“What’s the alternative, right? That’s how I think about it a lot. Are you going to go back to Hubspot and try to understand your spend with last-click attribution?” he says.

“Someone comes and asks you, ‘Hey, what’s performing? What isn’t?’ — we have a better answer to that today than we did before,” he adds.

‍

The Insights

One of the most impactful features for Planhat was using HockeyStack’s Account Intelligence to prioritize accounts for engagement based on an intent score along with a unified view of all the data points contributing to that score. 

“More than anything, trying to understand frequency of activity in an account before it becomes a deal — to some degree we could do that before with website visits [or] keywords, but piecing that together with ads engagement, especially in LinkedIn, then we can really try and understand what accounts are hot,” he says.

HockeyStack also opened up opportunities for Ehrensvard’s team to accurately measure success and make informed decisions on how to allocate budget. “HockeyStack helped us direct our budget to campaigns that actually drive revenue—this was something we couldn’t optimize on before.”

‍

The Results

Planhat’s marketing team is thrilled by how much easier it is to draw actionable insights from their data. 

“With HockeyStack now, we have all the data in one place,” Ehrensvard says. “Before, you couldn’t understand the full picture because the data was scattered.”

They’re also able to double down on the marketing efforts which drive deals. HockeyStack enables them to see all of the touchpoints in a customer journey, rather than just first or last touch, allowing them to understand the combination of touchpoints that occur in closed-won customer journeys.

“How did this account actually come in? Typically, it is a mix of everything. It’s not ‘Our Google ads account is the best thing in the world.’ It’s, ‘Well, they did this thing, they did this thing, they opened a marketing email,’” he says.

“You get a very good understanding of the journey overall,” he adds. “And when you look at that 500 times on the different inbounds you get and look at some cases of customers that you closed, you start getting somewhat of an intuition on how these things happen.”