Sales Impact Academy Cuts Dashboard Creation Time by Over 50% with Sigma
Sales Impact Academy is the world's leading skill development provider and platform with continuous live and on demand learning and reinforcement for high-growth technology companies. The traditional education system has let B2B companies down, with a complete lack of formal, structured education in sales and go-to-market. It means 100 million+ people across the world are learning on the job, and every commercial individual contributor and leader is at constant risk of missing their targets and often do. Sales Impact Academy is solving this skills crisis by bringing together the world’s best talent to teach structured, live online courses with high learning design principles, and now supports the skills development of over 12,000 learners across 280 customers including HubSpot, Github, Gong, Klaviyo, and Rubrik.
Ryan Scheuermann
CTO & Head of Product at Sales Impact Academy
Ryan has spent two decades building products and teams in agencies and early-to-mid stage startups. He’s scaled solutions to millions of users for large-scale brands like WarnerBros, NewsCorp, MySpace, and TMZ. For the last decade, he’s led product engineering teams at B2B SaaS startups, including 4.5 years at InVision. Having also spent time in marketing, sales, revops, and CS, he has a strong affinity for GTM teams. With 15 years of experience managing teams in fully-distributed startups, Ryan now teaches and mentors on building strong people-first remote cultures.
Prior to implementing Sigma or any business intelligence (BI) tool, SIA’s Customer Success (CS) team was manually downloading data extracts and uploading data into Google Sheets. In addition to problems with the limited amount of data spreadsheets can contain, this was a slow process as they had to create and manually deliver these “static” reports to individual customers. As a result of this, the CS team was spending 50% of their time creating dashboards on a weekly basis.
A new data analyst joined my team and within 2 to 3 weeks, she was able to ship three world-class dashboards to the organization that include definition screens, combo charts, line charts, and single values.
Ryan Scheuermann
CTO & Head of Product
SIA’s first BI tool was Tableau which required technical data analysts who understood SQL to create and perform ad hoc requests on behalf of the business — most of whom didn’t know how to code in SQL. SIA also faced issues connecting Tableau to their Snowflake data cloud and accommodating the numerous licenses required for all 125 users — a costly proposition.
Ryan Scheuermann, CTO at SIA, was frustrated with Tableau’s complexity and steep learning curve. Only a few people understood how to use the tool, leading to data silos within the organization and slow turnaround time for insights. The team was unable to easily share Tableau dashboards internally and externally with customers because they needed to have advanced knowledge of SQL to use Tableau, It cost SIA extra time, money, and manpower to turn code into required insights.
With Sigma rolled out, SIA was able to significantly streamline their workflow and better manage their time when creating reports and dashboards for their customers. Rather than having data silos of knowledge on how to use Tableau and train others to use complex legacy BI tools, teams can now self-serve to get the answers they need through Sigma efficiently with no code or data modeling needed.
One of Ryan’s goals at SIA was to democratize data which he was unable to do prior to implementing Sigma. Once they established the Sigma and Snowflake connection, sharing data and generating insights became incredibly easy and inexpensive compared to Tableau. With these improvements, SIA reduced overall spend, headcount, and time wasted during a difficult global financial downturn.
Sigma's integration with Snowflake was up and running in seconds. Building our dashboards in Sigma is much more intuitive than Tableau – and it saved us money.
Ryan Scheuermann
CTO & Head of Product
It was essential for SIA to share dashboards through embedded analytics, but could not easily do so with Tableau. SIA needed to build visually appealing dashboards for their customers to connect, explore, and interact with their data hands-on.
With the reduced headcount costs and complete streamlining of their analytics, SIA finally had bandwidth to focus on strategic projects and drive the business forward with better data-driven decisions. With Sigma, SIA’s teams aligned across the entire organization through shared dashboards, quickly picking up where others left off to collaborate with ease. Everyone is able to leverage the data regardless of technical skills.
With Sigma in place, Ryan was able to understand how SIA’s customers were using their dashboards through the customer usage report on Sigma. SIA can provide insightful reports and a positive data exploration experience for their customers and help them self-serve to find insights.
SIA’s Customer Success team is now capable of automating the report and dashboard creation process with speed and efficiency, allowing a faster report turnaround time to give customers the quality experience they deserve. By using SIA’s embedded Sigma reports, customers can filter controls, view, and slice & dice the data in any way they wish.
Outside of the CS team, The Finance and Product teams at SIA are able to leverage Sigma to explore data and gain insights in minutes rather than days or weeks. They no longer have to rely on or wait for another team to get answers. With minimal training, they can self-serve and make decisions with Sigma.
With Sigma in place across the organization, Ryan’s goal to have a more data-driven and efficient culture finally became a reality. Sigma empowers users to collaborate, create, and share across the platform seamlessly with coworkers, making Sigma the default new analytics tool across every team. Now business users, data analysts, and engineers are aligned across company goals and increased transparency among departments.
Now, Ryan and the SIA team have more time and ability to leverage their data with Sigma. They are excited and eager to set new goals, increase collaboration, and adopt a north star metric to build a winning formula to directly impact KPIs.
