Rocketship Scholars: Starting with Why.
Rocketship Scholars Series: Written by Maddy Drachler
This week was all about setting up our tool stack, which was a big draw card of the SaaS Trial Rocketship program for me. I love setting up and experimenting with new technology.
I went into the exercises with gusto, but struggled quite a bit trying to put together a tracking plan. I found myself essentially trying to re-create a relational database - trying to map out all of the possible data points and how they relate to each other. I started down that path with employee leave requests, mapping out a user table and a leave request table, each with its own data points and the user ID linking them together. I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel, but I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the task at hand.
It was late in the week by the time something clicked. Segment is a CDP, which is a fundamentally different tool to a data warehouse. It can push updates to the warehouse, but the true value of Segment is in its ability to send those events to other destinations, enabling non-engineering users to leverage them to drive growth.
The basic B2B SaaS events like creating an account, adding a user and upgrading a subscription plan are important, but at the end of this SaaS Trial Rocketship program I want to be able to draw a path to supercharging our growth. I need to be able to demonstrate that by leveraging a tool like Segment and enabling the revenue operations team with a customer journey architect, we could more effectively grow annual recurring revenue and monthly active users. Showing how Segment can capture account sign up events is not going to cut it. I fell into a trap that I often find myself in, not starting with the why!
Why is Segment valuable? Why should we invest time and effort in a CDP? What challenges do we face today that could be alleviated with this tool? Once I started asking myself these questions I felt like things started to come together.
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