" They want their data in their primary tools—the SaaS applications where they spend their days—so they can use it to actually operate their business."
I'm obviously missing something here, but thinking in terms of "operationalizing" data that comes from some kind of analytical environment, was not the data in their operational SaaS tools in the first place?
It starts there, but then once you get into complex workflows that merge data across your product and CRMs it all moves to the warehouse first. Typical flow is a Fivetran or Stitch into the warehouse, lots of dbt models, then business models fit for consumption down stream.
Once in the warehouse, it needs to get back into those operational systems again, which is the tricky part.
I’ve done these one off integrations from the warehouse into Salesforce (creating leads, converting them, moving stages all based off product usage), and into marketing tools (customer segmentation built using SQL in the warehouse, then sent to marketing automation tools).
Being able to feed tools directly off the warehouse instead of writing one off integrations is the real value.
The Salesforce data is in Salesforce, and the HubSpot data is in HubSpot, and the Mixpanel data is in Mixpanel, but those applications don't have each others data (not to mention missing any transformations on top). E.g. As a sales rep, you can benefit from understanding product usage and marketing activity for a contact in salesforce
I'm obviously missing something here, but thinking in terms of "operationalizing" data that comes from some kind of analytical environment, was not the data in their operational SaaS tools in the first place?