About Chartio

Chartio provides a cloud-based Business Intelligence (BI) and data analytics product that helps businesses analyze and track their critical data through an intuitive interface. Over the past 10 years, Chartio has pioneered BI for small and mid-size businesses, allowing companies to take advantage of data exploration in a frictionless way. 

Their mission is to make data accessible to everyone. That means empowering anyone—not just data teams—to easily understand the data they need to succeed at their jobs. Because people can’t work effectively if they’re blocked from the information they rely on the most.

Chartio is a product-led organization and, as a result, they focus on building a product that is easy to set up, enjoyable to use, and quick to get answers. As Sheridan Gaenger, VP of Marketing, states, “We’re committed to delivering an experience that is remarkable-- giving people a valuable, intuitive solution to discover insights.” 

To differentiate in a crowded marketplace, they’ve created a visual version of SQL. With Visual SQL anyone can query, visualize, and analyze their data - removing the barrier to entry into BI.

The Business Challenge

As a product-led growth organization, it is imperative to have a complete view of the buyer journey and key activation points that indicate a high likelihood for a trial user to convert to a paying customer. Furthermore, like many organizations with a similar go-to-market (GTM) motion, it can be difficult for sales, marketing, and product to align on KPIs and key metrics to measure success.  

Prior to MadKudu, Chartio was tracking success amongst all demo requests and trial signups. Because they weren’t able to easily group by demographic/firmographic/behavioral data, it was often difficult to assess the quality being driven by different channels.

How MadKudu Helped

MadKudu worked with the Chartio marketing team to implement a predictive lead scoring model specific to Product-Led Growth companies. Chartio connected MadKudu with its tech stack with one click, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Segment, and Intercom. This data was coupled with MadKudu’s best-in-class enrichment capabilities to ultimately score leads and accounts in real-time based on their likelihood to buy and customer fit. 

Improving Measurement of Marketing Campaigns

With their custom-built predictive model, Chartio has now introduced a new metric and funnel stage to track: Marketing Qualified Trials (MQTs). They leverage the MadKudu Customer Fit Segment to categorize trial users that are scored as “low”. This has allowed the marketing team to assess their marketing campaigns based on the number of MQTs generated, and help them determine which programs to continue investing in and which to sunset. This also prevents marketing from filling the lead funnel with low-quality prospects that will ultimately distract sales from the higher-valued ones.

Prioritizing the Right Product Leads for Sales

With the addition of MQTs, the sales team at Chartio has been able to find efficiencies in their process. With MadKudu, the sales team is only routed highly qualified inbound leads. They’re also given a set of signals, provided in Salesforce by MadKudu, to help them identify why a particular prospect was scored as a high fit, significantly increasing their trust of the model and decreasing their own preconceived notions about who is and is not a good prospect to engage with. 

Insight Into Free Trial Buyer Journey

The product team at Chartio has found incredible insight by leveraging MQTs as part of their process as well. Instead of comparing stages of the buyer journey within the product to the overall number of trials, they are able to compare the stages to the number of MQTs. Specifically, they can look at the number of MQTs that have connected a data source or have created 10+ charts. This allows the product team to focus on the trial users that are actually engaged with the product. 

The Result

Thanks to MadKudu, Chartio uncovered three major improvements:

1. They identified that MQTs are 5x more likely to convert to a customer and bring in 1.7x more revenue than non-MQTs. 
2. By strategically scoring their leads, they were able to better forecast how they’ll end the quarter. 
3. By focusing only on high-quality leads, the marketing, sales, and product teams are able to spend their time more effectively on the leads that matter and follow the most likely acquisition indicators. Improving this workflow has catapulted their increased conversion of MQTs to Product Qualified Trials by 30% and increased the conversion of MQTs to paying customers by 40%.