The single most important long-term requirement of our partners is change management: the ability to introduce new reports, dashboards. Software companies will naturally evolve their products, and as they add more functionality they need to make sure that their embedded analytics capabilities develop with the product. Often, the requirement to evolve the analytics functionality is accompanied with the requirement that these changes be made in less than 24 hours and with zero downtime.

Through working with our partners over the years, we have reduced the process of managing changes for their customers to three easy steps:

1. Data Model Changes

The first step to upgrading an existing analytics offering is to determine whether customers are asking for changes that require an enhanced data model. The two most common use cases here are: 1) customers want to slice their data by additional dimensions; or 2) customers need to include additional information.

We recommend our partners to leverage visual ETL tools for making enhancements to their existing data models and data loading workflows.

2. Reports and Dashboards

Our partners typically build out new visualizations and dashboards leveraging the GoodData user interface (UI). It’s important for these changes to be easily encapsulated, as they must be applied to new customers as well as all existing customers. In addition, customers should be given the option to keep the existing version of their customized dashboard or upgrade if ready.

A similar technique as the aforementioned one can be used by our partners to provide differentiated versions of analytics offering to their customers. Many of our partners have tiered business models and use analytics as a way to upsell or convert customers to paid subscriptions. They often make different reports and metrics available to different tiers. We found that the change management feature is ideal for pushing new dashboards,  reports, or metrics to these projects.

3. Deployment

After successfully enhancing the data model and visualizations within the UI, the changes are captured in a package that can be deployed to all customers in a single click. Partners can decide to apply the change set to all or some of their customers, as well as test the changes in a sandbox environment before pushing them live to production.

Even though it might be easy to update one data model and one set of visualizations, it is critical that these changes can be captured as a single entity and pushed to thousands of customers at once, without any downtime.

When evaluating which Business Intelligence platform to partner with, it is essential to anticipate the long term requirements of customers.  This will enable our partners to keep up with their customers’ demands and ever changing analytics use cases. An easy change management process allows our partners to focus and grow their core business while relying on GoodData to power customers’ analytics.

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If you’re interested in partnering with GoodData, find out more here or call us at 415.200.0186.

The post Three Easy Steps To Upgrading Embedded Analytics appeared first on GoodData.

3 Things to Look For in Your Business Partner

Partnering with another company can be an excellent way to build your own business. Whether you’re a reseller, cross-platform provider, systems integrator or other type of partner, you can grow and prosper with the right partner. At Keboola, we’ve been able to expand significantly through our partnership with GoodData.

Before launching into this partnership, however, we had to make sure some pieces were in place. Here are three ways to ensure that your prospective partner is the right one for your company.

1. Align Your Goals

Keboola started out as a small Web development and consulting shop. We knew we wanted to grow, but there were several directions we could have taken. More important than the specific industry were three considerations:

• We wanted to find a company with which we could build a cross-platform solution to add even more value for our customers

• The company must be a trustworthy and supportive long-term partner to us

• We would grow together with the company

Once we learned more about GoodData, we had a real “yes” moment. Their vision aligned with our own, and we wanted to be a part of their story and their growth. It was a real moment of clarity for us, that realization that this was our partner.

2. Promising Technology

Among other interests, we’d been dabbling in business intelligence (BI) for years. When the cloud became more commonplace, we saw how much value bringing data down to every user—the democratization of data—would provide. GoodData understood this value in the same way.

GoodData had an extremely promising technology in terms of delivering data. We continue to believe that GoodData is doing the right things in terms of developing and positioning their product as well. We could really see that their technology going places, and its potential to grow.

This is an important consideration in a partner, because then you can match your own enthusiasm with theirs. It’s easier to become a member of a company’s family, so to speak, if you see the same potential and advantages of working closely together that they do. This puts you in a position to forge long-term relationships quickly.

3. Proximity

It should be easy to collaborate with your partner, whether in person or through tools like video conferencing, text and others. You’ll need to stay in close contact with your partner always, but especially as you’re building the relationship.

We consider ourselves fortunate to always have close physical proximity with GoodData in terms of the location of our offices. We can talk to anyone in the company, from the CEO to engineers to consultants, to build our mutual vision and solidify this 3-way relationship – because at the end of the day, our customers need to be the main beneficiary.

Furthering the Relationship

The ideal scenario, once you have a solid relationship with your partner, is to expand on their offering and help further the product itself. To that end, we’ve built apps that operate on top of and alongside GoodData, and we’ve also developed the Keboola Academy, where GoodData users can learn how to gain more value out of the solution themselves, as quickly as possible.

It is a truly symbiotic relationship, and we believe that’s what you should always look for in a partner.

The post 3 Things to Look For in Your Business Partner appeared first on GoodData.

The following Powered By guest blog comes from Tony Gaughan, CTO at Marketron, the media industry’s leading provider of business software solutions and services.

How GoodData Helped Us Win New Business

When I started working with Marketron more than two years ago, we were in the process of finding a solution that would help us maximize the information that we could cull from our data. Eighty percent of the $15 billion in U.S. radio advertising spend flows through our solutions. We were sitting on a wealth of knowledge. We wanted to pull it into new services for our customer base.

A Specific Solution for Big Data

Our business model involves providing a rollup of a number of different products to each customer, customized according to their needs. Even though we provide a variety of offerings, we needed a specific kind of solution for managing our data. Our more than 7,000 clients range from small mom-and-pop radio stations to large media organizations like Cox and Univision. We wanted a single service that could address everyone’s needs, no matter the type of organization.

Our criteria for selection reflected common needs for companies looking for an analytics solution. We needed to a platform-based approach that would scale, combine different channels (including video and mobile) and traffic solutions. We also wanted to streamline and simplify our reporting, but in a service that included more capabilities than we’d had before.

A Common Thread

In searching for our own solution, I was able to devise a more general checklist that could apply to anyone looking for an analytics solution. Here are some of the things to look for:

• Apps that could scale and perform complex functions while appearing inside of a simple interface.
• Customers should have an easy way to see their data, both in aggregate and in detail.
• The software should be in a platform, so that it can rationalize information across different data sources and put that information into consistent reports.
• Services should be able to address multiple channels, including mobile content and social media. In our case, we operating in the growing space in which various media plays, such as visual and mobile, are combined with broadcast.
• Data from other traffic solutions  should be ingested into our platform and be reported in aggregate.
• An added bonus is the ability to offload reporting from an operational system into a warehouse approach.

We discovered that GoodData was pre-built with these capabilities, offering us a much wider claim to market out of the box. The types of reports, dashboards and capabilities offered by GoodData gave us the flexibility we needed to address all of our customers.

Our Insight feature, which uses GoodData, enables companies to consistently see all of their data across their entire organization. This feature alone had the unexpected benefit of winning us more business, because it filled a need that clients were hungry for.

We know that we made the right choice in selecting GoodData.

To learn more about how Marketron partnered with GoodData to drive new business, read the full case study.
To join GoodData’s partner program, find out more here.

About Tony Gaughan
As chief technology officer at Marketron, Tony Gaughan is responsible for the company’s product strategy and roadmap, including development, quality assurance and delivery and technology strategy and architecture. Gaughan brings more than 20 years of product development and executive management experience in the technology industry. Prior to joining Marketron, Gaughan founded and was chief executive officer for serenhipity, a mobile social networking company. Prior to serenhipity, Gaughan was senior vice president and chief products officer at SGI, formerly Rackable Systems. At SGI, Gaughan led the company’s overall product vision and development.

The post How GoodData Helped Marketron Win New Business appeared first on GoodData.

The following Powered by partner guest blog comes from Chris Marchak, Business Development Manager at Scup, Brazil’s leading social media monitoring and management platform.

3 Best Practices for Setting Up a Social Media Monitoring Campaign

Social media is overflowing with raw data. How do you collect data from divergent platforms, posts, pictures and comments and refine it into something that will help you make decisions?

The process isn’t as daunting as it seems. If you follow the three best practices below, you’ll set the groundwork for a social media monitoring campaign that essentially runs itself:

1. Define your goals

Before you start to organize and monitor your social media data, you need to define your goals. Setting objectives enables you to conduct a more targeted, relevant monitoring campaign. If you want to change your product, the goal could be to understand the impact and acceptance of the change. You would monitor the amount of mentions, how many of them relate to your new product and the ratio of positive versus negative mentions. On the other hand, if your goal is to grow your business into a new market, you’d want to monitor your target market, how they interact with your competitors and which pain points they’re expressing.

2. Identify your target audience

The next step is to immerse yourself in the world of the individuals you want to sell to. Building a profile of your target audience will help you refine your R&D processes, titrate your message and branding to your prospects’ needs and direct your approach to offline product testing.
Which social media hubs do they prefer? How do they express themselves within those hubs? Which trends are they following cloesely? Who are the main influencers in your target market, and how can you best reach out to them? Who are the main detractors to watch?

3. Structure your project

Establishing a project structure simplifies your life after you launch your campaign, making sure all parts are working together smoothly. Regardless of your monitoring focus, three steps can be taken to structure your project:

• List keywords
  Write down as many subject-related keywords and phrases as you can think of. In addition to your own product- and brand name, include your competitors’ names, product nicknames and jargon, including typos; event sponsors and words that are commonly associated with the product name.

• Refine and test keywords
  It’s important to continually refine and test keywords so that you don’t miss any important social media posts—and so you don’t appear in the wrong place. Sometimes undesirable words appear in search results alongside your product name. For example, if the name of your graphic design company is “Apple Pie Designs”, you don’t want to appear in the search results for apple pie recipes. To avoid this, perfect your word combinations with something like “apple pie graphic art.”

• Tagging
  Category tags cluster social media posts with similar characteristics into smaller groups. This lets you compare traffic and mentions between categories, as well as how people are cross-referencing data and which patterns appear in the content. You can use the same structure on your competitors to see where you stand.

Once you have these three steps in place, you’ll have the foundation of your social media monitoring system set up. All that’s left to do is to power through your work from posting to analysis, dramatically increasing your efficiency in the process.

About Chris Marchak
Chris joined the Scup team to kick off its international expansion. He is currently focused on bringing Scup to the U.S. and setting up its New York office. Prior to Scup, Chris acquired his taste for adventure working for a number of high growth start ups, including Groupon.

Learn more about how to monetize social media with GoodData and Scup.

Join our webinar on January 30 to hear Scup share their best practices for setting up social media campaigns. 

The post 3 Best Practices for Setting Up a Social Media Monitoring Campaign appeared first on GoodData.

How GoodData Can Cure Your Mobility Headaches

Bring your own device (BYOD) has undoubtedly liberated us from the ‘tyranny’ of company-chosen devices. However, it can feel like a dysfunctional family dinner. On a single company network, administrators have to manage a chaotic array of devices and usage patterns. People in one department might talk on their phones all day and night, exceeding their allotted minutes, while another group doesn’t talk at all, but texts all the time. It’s hard to keep your wireless spending under control with so many things going on at once.

Wireless optimization and enterprise mobility management are more complicated than ever. A big part of the solution involves organizing and customizing data coming from the network in a way that’s understandable. With the right data, presented in the right way, companies can optimize their people and processes, regaining control of their mobility.

Understanding the Big Picture

At Advantix Solutions Group, we harness GoodData to offer our users visibility into their entire wireless network and mobility system. With oversight, users can pinpoint and adjust key facets of their network, including:

• Overall trends: What do an organization’s year-over-year usage patterns look like? How about month-over-month? How much would another provider have charged over the same period of time? Are there seasonal spikes? GoodData helps our customers identify all kinds of usage trends, so that they can better understand their network’s user behavior.

• Mobility inventory: GoodData Bashes and report filters enable enterprises to drill down into device owner and device type, finding trends in their organization’s overall usage. Armed with that data, businesses can figure out which new technologies, mobile operating system or wireless carrier to use.

• Total spend: Establishing spend on just one device can be a headache. It’s one thing to look at the top page of the bill and see “Total Current Charges Due,” but it’s another thing entirely to understand the individual costs that make up that amount. (Most people have to consult a telecom expert to get a real explanation.) Now multiply that problem by thousands of devices across multiple locations and project sites. GoodData helps companies understand how much they’re spending, on aggregate, on which kinds of charges. That, in turn, helps businesses make smarter decisions in terms of contracts and carriers.

• Zero-use devices: Many companies have devices that are no longer in use, but that are still being charged a monthly recurring fee. Identifying these devices helps businesses save money, as well as establish a better inventory management process. For example, an enterprise no longer has to order new phones if they already have zero-use devices that can be deployed to an active mobile user.

Pegging Individual Problems

If a few isolated problems are driving up mobile costs, GoodData can help companies play detective and weed the issues out. Here are a few of the common things that could be behind high costs:

• Top 10 users: Who are the company’s top 10 “Hall of Fame” users, the ones who regularly cost the least in terms of texting, voice and data fees? Who’s in the “Hall of Shame”? With GoodData, enterprises can quickly identify key users across different metrics. Along with uncovering trends, companies can establish which departments are over or under-utilizing the tools provided — and why they’re doing it.

• Exception reporting: By loading your billing data into GoodData, you can pull out exceptions to your average usage, such as mobile users who are exceeding a certain threshold of roaming charges, international spending, data overages and the like over a period of time.

With the right information at hand, companies can optimize their wireless infrastructure so that they spend within budget for the features their users demand. The same approach can be used to improve case management or ticketing systems, to better understand caseload and types, peg problem users and find out whether a company is hitting its SLAs or not.

GoodData has been instrumental in helping our users optimize their resources, processes and tools. For Advantix Solutions Group, partnering with GoodData has made it easier than ever to offer solutions for untangling the administrative complications created by the consumerization of IT.

To learn more about how Advantix partnered with GoodData to gain competitive advantage, read the full case study.
To join GoodData’s partner program, find out more here.

Christina Lipton serves as the Marketing Director at Advantix Solutions Group. She has enjoyed a diverse career spanning both sales management and marketing leadership, always holding to her personal motto: “strive for excellence”. Prior to her tenure with Advantix she owned a successful boutique marketing consulting firm that focused on helping emerging companies achieve huge results.

The post How GoodData Can Cure Your Mobility Headaches appeared first on GoodData.

The following Powered By guest blog comes from John Collins, CEO at GreatVines, a leading provider of superior software solutions for producers and distributors of wine, spirits and beer.

 
 
Modernizing Sales Technology For the Beverage Industry

The beverage industry operates in a unique, multi-tiered marketplace. In order to sell their products, beverage producers must abide by different laws and distribution requirements in each state. People in Omaha and Salt Lake City might demand the same pinot grigio, for example, but that wine cannot be stocked in the same venues in each state.

Once distribution is cleared up, beverage makers still have a number of questions to address. Should the company’s pinot grigio be on wine lists, and if so, at which establishments? Where are sales slow, and what does the team need to do in order to pick them up? Which thirsty consumers in which regions is the company not addressing?

Simple Solutions to Complex Questions

Without advanced technology, it’s hard for a beverage company to have complete oversight of all of its operations. Prior to GreatVines, it took a large manual effort, often in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, to track performance across markets. Only the largest companies had the resources to measure the performance of distributors and outlets in each state.

GreatVines empowers not only large but also smaller companies to have access to advanced analytics technology that used to be available formerly to only the largest players. A small craft distillery like High West in Salt Lake City can use the same advanced analytics as the companies behind PBR, Bacardi and Jack Daniel’s use.

Full Visibility Across Markets

For the first time, companies can gain the kind of visibility into their operations that lets them answer those questions. Our customers feed data from a multitude of sources into GreatVines, from CRM systems such as Salesforce to enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools to syndicated data from Nielsen. GoodData crunches that information in a way that enables companies to assess and act upon their business results. Once companies can read their performance across the board, they can better target their products for each market, in the process helping the distributors who aren’t doing as well.

Removing the Guesswork

By gaining a fact-based oversight of their operations, companies can sell the right product in the right market at the right time. They no longer have to shoot in the dark to see where they need gain a wine list, cold box or cocktail bar placement. Companies are empowered to set intelligent goals, then gain ongoing visibility into their team’s progress towards those goals. Beverage companies can, as we like to say, truly “serve visibility by the case.”

The post Big Data, Big Distribution appeared first on GoodData.

What’s an application? The answer to this question would many times depends on who you ask.

If you asked a company that uses legacy apps, the answer would go along these lines. An app is something that you buy based on its features. You spend a long time installing it, maybe years. Once it’s up and running, you have to upgrade or patch the software every so often, another huge resource burden.

On the other hand, if you asked my teenage son what an app is, he’d give you a very different answer. For him, an app is something he pays about $1 for, downloads from the Internet or on his iPhone, uses for two weeks and then probably deletes.

Designed for the End User

My son is part of the generation that companies are hiring right now. People in his age group text and use social media apps like Facebook every single day. They’re used to mobile, intuitive apps. Cumbersome legacy apps simply won’t get used.

Enterprise software today must be designed for the end user. The new enterprise software app should be something that people are delighted to use. That user friendliness benefits the business as well, because the more people use the app, the more that app benefits productivity across the board.

We’ve found this to be the case at Coupa. Our software simplifies and streamlines every facet of the procurement cycle, from negotiating deals to managing expense reports. As a result, end users spend more responsibly and within the terms of their contract.

Coming Out of the Cloud

The new class of enterprise apps is built using mobile-friendly, lightweight languages. We like Ruby on Rails, which enables a fast development cycle. It’s easy to install and update. Moreover, instead of plunking down our product in front of customers and letting them figure out how to use it, we’re constantly improving our apps based on customer feedback.

Like many cloud-based providers, we’ve found that our customers’ needs are constantly growing and changing. That’s why we push out more than 65 different features every quarter. Our ultimate focus is on customer success. We’re judged on our ability to provide a quality service. If we don’t have 100% customer success at the end of the year, our customers won’t renew their subscriptions.

Empowered by Analytics

Another key feature of today’s cloud-based enterprise apps is that they enable users to gain visibility. Workers and customers can share information over the cloud. We use GoodData to enable our users to benchmark their workers, so that they can see who’s doing what, and compare each individual’s results.

These analytics are huge to our customers, because they enable those customers to optimize their spending, improve their operations, make better decisions and reduce costs. Rather than sitting unused, our customers can put an analytic mindset on their data and yield more results. That takes spend management from being an unstructured, onerous process to a cloud-based, analytical one. It’s absolutely huge.

Tools for the Next Generation

Enterprise apps are being redefined. They’re becoming user-friendly, analytical and responsive tools. At Coupa, we’re proud to build a cloud-based app that truly gets used, enabling the next generation of business leaders to spend responsibly.

Tony Wessels is currently the Vice President of Marketing at Coupa. Prior to joining Coupa, Tony managed a worldwide marketing team at EMC and supervised the development of all EMC corporate campaigns, including its recent cloud campaign strategy. Before EMC, Tony was the Vice President of Marketing for APTARE, a storage resource management software company. As a key member of the executive team, Tony’s marketing efforts drove revenue growth over 100% YOY. Prior to APTARE, He was the Vice President of Marketing at Stata Labs, a provider of search-based email solutions, where he led all aspects of marketing and was instrumental in the company’s acquisition by Yahoo! Inc.

Tony holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Texas at Dallas.

The post Redefining the Enterprise App appeared first on GoodData.

That’s where we come in. At GoodData, we connect and analyze these data sets to ensure your company has the proper context to make decisions. Businesses in the Subscription Economy don’t need to be told that data is important. But between marketing data from Salesforce, expense reports, spreadsheets, and MRR, businesses often lose track of the big picture.

In the Subscription Economy, it’s sometimes hard to plan investments by the year because your customers are typically paying you on different cycles (by the month, by the quarter, every two years, etc). And your typical analytics solutions usually are laced with up-front expenditures. You need a business solution that is in sync with top and bottom line. At GoodData, we offer an end-to-end service that gives you a real-time perspective of your revenue and cost structure, enabling you to grow your business profitably.

GoodData aims to bring different data sources together and create rich visualizations so that business leaders can make effective decisions. GoodData allows customers to manage data from different data sources to get a more holistic view of their business. In this way, companies can monetize their subscription services in the most efficient way.

Let’s say you are a Subscription Economy business, using Zuora. By leveraging GoodData, you’ll be able to combine the rich subscription metrics in Zuora, the data from your expense management system, and your internal usage database. This will give you powerful insights into the health of your business with the full context of your expenses and the full context of how your customers are actually using the system.

Imagine how this powerful insight would influence critical business decisions: You no longer depend on a salesperson’s hunch to decide when to up-sell customers. Instead, your data tells you what you need to know.

Join us for a webinar to learn more.

The post Why Data Matters For Subscription Economy appeared first on GoodData.

How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers

Let’s say that you exceeded your sales quota last quarter. You’re rewarded with the company car. That car happens to be a Ferrari 458 Spider.

Chances are, you’d want to take your new Ferrari out for a spin to see what it can do. You probably wouldn’t leave it sitting in the garage and ignore it. But that’s exactly what many B2B salespeople do with the technology they’re given.

Wasting Time on Tone-Deaf Tools

Social media, email campaign and marketing automation tools, to name a few, can give salespeople incredible horsepower in terms of building a quality sales funnel. Yet many companies choose to ignore the potential of their tools. Instead, they stick with tone-deaf techniques like cold calls, or one-way, impersonal email and social conversations — in other words, shooting in the dark for leads.

Email marketing and social tools are also meaningless if they don’t bring intelligence to the conversation between the sales force and leads. What good is blasting out content if your leads still don’t know who you are?

Intelligent Information Generates Better Leads

The key is to bring intelligence to the conversation by configuring each of your messages in a way that’s attractive and relevant to your individual prospects. Here are three ways to use information intelligently — and avoid being tone deaf:

1)   Have the right tools to listen.

Listening involves much more than seeing who opened an email you sent. You want to monitor how people are both finding and engaging with your website.

Which SEO and SEM techniques are working, and in which search engines? What are the main ways that people are finding your products or services? What are people saying about your brand and competitors? How are they finding you in the social sphere? Know the details of how people operate in your company’s online channels, so that you can take intelligent action on the information that you uncover.

2)   Take action on the information you find.

It’s one thing to know that someone is interested in your product. Taking action on that interest is another issue entirely.

One of the most positive things you can do is to send out your product information in a personalized way, then score each lead on their interest and responses. If a lead’s activity is compelling enough, for example they visit your service’s pricing page, forward their information to a salesperson.

Genius automates such personalized communications and the scoring of leads. When I first learned about Genius, I thought to myself “I wish I’d known about this years ago! I would have been rich.”

Coming from a traditional sales background, I’m no stranger to the pain of cold calling. Genius supplants that pain by automating personalized responses and follow-ups, so that leads are engaged on a human level. When you attach Genius to your sales database, you can send personalized messages to each lead ensuring an impactful, engaging and automated qualifying conversation.

The automated version of the salesperson will intelligently engage and respond with a lead for months, keeping them warm until they’re ready to buy, at which point the salesperson would take over communications. In other words, when the sales team does get engaged, there’s already a relationship in place, but no blood and tears have been lost in the process.

3)   Understand trends at the aggregate level, so that you can optimize the first two processes.

The more you understand the channels feeding your pipeline, the better you’ll be able to communicate with your leads. GoodData is very helpful for Genius customers in this step. GoodData can tell you any number of things, including which pieces of content people find most attractive on your website, which channels drive the highest number of clicks, longest visits to your website, and revenue contribution. You can find out what you’re doing well and where you’re lacking, and optimize the weak spots to drive greater traffic,visibility to your brand, pipeline and revenue.

Now Go Out and Drive That Ferrari

At the end of the day, people do business with people. It’s time to use the technology at your disposal to bring the human touch back into your sales funnel. With social media and marketing automation, and tools like Genius and GoodData, you have a Ferrari sitting in your sales garage. It is time to start it up and drive revenue.

Even serves as the Vice President of Revenue and Business Development for Genius.com, prior to which he served as Director of Corporate Sales. During his tenure as Vice President, the Company has grown ASP, reduced churn while expanding Genius’ footprint into five international markets.

Prior to joining Genius, Even was Vice President of Sales at Practice Fusion, Inc. Prior to Practice Fusion, he was with an Associate Managing Director with Oppenheimer & Co., where he managed over $325MM in corporate investments. Even graduated with a Bachelors in Economics from San Francisco State University, and is trained in financial, econometric and BI statistical data analysis.

The post How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers appeared first on GoodData.

Three (More) Ways to Generate Revenue from Your Data

As GoodData’s first “Powered By” partner, it was a pleasure to speak at the Dreamforce 2012 session, “How to Generate Revenue from Your Data.” Since 2010, Get Satisfaction has offered a GoodData – Powered By solution – Community Health Analytics (CHA), – which is now used by more than half of our enterprise customers to monetize their data.

Since the launch of CHA, GoodData has become a core component of our sales and customer engagement process.  Due to the fact that we are able to provide a higher value proposition to our customers, CHA has opened up new opportunities for increased business. Here are three tips on how we turned data into revenue with GoodData:

#1 Build and Sell an Analytics Product (Powered By GoodData)

Get Satisfaction powers customer communities for thousands of businesses. These communities generate a lot of customer data. The challenge becomes how to present this large amount of data to our customers to help them understand the health of their community, the marketing value of word-of-mouth customer content, the effectiveness of community managers, and finally the efficiency of peer-to-peer interaction (or, what we call self-directedness.) Since launching CHA to in 2010, our enterprise customers continue to love it, primarily because it empowers them to analyze, synthesize and transform their data into valuable business insights.

#2 Tell a Value Story in Sales

Due to its strong value proposition to our customers, CHA has become a critical part of our sales process. We use CHA on sales calls and in demos, as it enables us to tell a much stronger ROI story. In addition, CHA is a key component of the customer implementation process as it allows us to set up our new customers with out-of-the-box key success metrics – a significant differentiator in our market. Enterprise clients utilizing GoodData’s platform are not only more likely to renew, but also to grow their relationship with Get Satisfaction.

#3 Expand the Big Data Story

In 2012, we’ve been working on telling an even bigger, “Big Data” story. Here are a few initiatives: Over the summer we released our own primary research that challenged much of the conventional wisdom around social marketing. In November 2012, we plan to release a new solution in partnership with GoodData, called “CHA for Small Business.” This offering is specifically designed to meet the analytics needs of our SMB customers. In addition, we are expanding “network-wide” analytics of Get Satisfaction data to better benchmark customer engagement, satisfaction and loyalty across industries.

We unquestionably attribute our data “smarts” to working with GoodData. They were not only integral to building our product, but also in building Get Satisfaction’s analytic capability and company DNA.

Scott Hirsch is Get Satisfaction’s Vice President of Product Marketing and Business Development. He is responsible for defining Get Satisfaction’s go-to-market product strategy, as well as strategic partnership development. Prior to joining Get Satisfaction, Scott was co-founder of a boutique strategy consultancy that brought design principles to exploration of greenfield products and business models for global 1000 clients. His clients included Rodale Publishing, Telefonica, Nokia, and British Telecom.

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