"Fivetran has been a core part of allowing us to scale and a force multiplier in our data-driven processes across the organization. We would have spent six figures on other tooling and resources to achieve the same single source of truth for customer data that Fivetran enables."
- Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, Paylocity
Key Results
- Cut customer acquisition costs by 20%
- Reduced pipeline development time by 90% from weeks to days
- Accelerated data migration from Microsoft Dynamics to Salesforce migration by 92%
Paylocity data stack
- Pipeline: Fivetran
- Destination: Google BigQuery
- Transformations: dbt Cloud
- Orchestrations: Airflow
- Data sources: Google Analytics and Ads, Google Cloud Storage, Salesforce, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, Netsuite
- Business intelligence: Tableau, PowerBI
Trusted by more than 33,000 companies, Paylocity is a fast-growing provider of cutting-edge human capital management (HCM) and payroll software.
Over the past four years, Paylocity has grown into an enterprise organization with more than 5,000 employees. Reaching this scale required a focus on making data accessible across the business to drive greater transparency, elevate operational efficiency and improve customer outcomes.
When Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, joined the company in 2019, he was a data team of one. He was initially tasked with understanding and measuring marketing and sales performance to help the business make better decisions on spend and optimize campaign effectiveness. His goal was to build a data foundation that generated real-time insights and helped marketing and sales better understand customer segments and the messages that resonated with them.
Delivering better customer experiences with an agile data strategy
Paylocity’s marketing team wanted to take a human-centric approach to marketing, delivering the right prospect, with the right message, at the right time. This, initially, wasn’t easy, as the marketing team was scaling but didn’t have the data-centric processes to scale with them. Frustrated by spreadsheet-based processes and having to build custom integrations to get CRM and ad platform data, Wahl quickly realized he had to automate data ingestion if he wanted to save time and money.
To build a 360 view of customers, he chose Fivetran to automate data pipelines from its marketing and sales platforms, including Google Analytics, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads and Microsoft Dynamics 365. It took him minutes — not months — to bring data for each platform and centralize it into BigQuery for analysis.
“Fivetran was six or seven times less expensive than hiring someone to manage all the data pipelines we wanted.”
- Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, Paylocity
Wahl gained insights into MQLs, SQLs and attribution, providing visibility to the marketing leadership team on the effectiveness of campaigns and the performance of ad spending across channels.
The suite of comprehensive connectors from Fivetran gave Wahl the ability to deliver near-real-time data that helped inform and answer questions such as:
- How much to allocate budget and optimize the funnel to improve conversions
- How to calculate the cost of customer acquisition and reduce it
- How many leads, prospects and opportunities are in the funnel right now
- How much time these individuals are spending in each of these stages
- How many are dropping off at each stage
The marketing team is now confident that they are delivering the right messages to their target audience. They can even tie customer product and billing data to marketing, allowing them to offer the best promotional campaigns, a big win for the marketing team.
“When we saw that our cost of customer acquisition had been going up, for example, we moved resources and dropped it down by 20 percent.”
- Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, Paylocity
Salesforce migration in under a month, saving six figures on the way
Wahl also spearheaded the CRM migration from Microsoft Dynamics to Salesforce. Fivetran saved him at least six months of work by automatically replicating the sales reporting infrastructure he had in Microsoft Dynamics.
Using Fivetran, syncing Salesforce data was instantaneous and scalable from the onset. Whenever the sales team needed new Salesforce Objects synced, Wahl delivered it in minutes. When Wahl was setting up a new sales analytics team, he used Fivetran as the standard platform for data integration to prepare the data the team needed to get up and running right away.
The sales team’s new reporting framework offers a level of transparency and insight it never had before. All go-to-market stakeholders now understand the sales funnel and can identify which customer relationships need to be nurtured.
“CRM migrations are incredibly complex projects and often take longer than a year, even with a whole team of data engineers. With Fivetran, I was able to migrate to Salesforce by myself in under a month.”
- Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, Paylocity
Fivetran is Paylocity’s data strategy force multiplier
Wahl has been so successful with his data initiatives that his team has grown to a total of 15 people. They’re taking on more corporate data projects in addition to go-to-market, such as creating a single source of truth for all finance and billing data.
Currently, Wahl is working with the Finance and Product Analytics teams about different data sources they can leverage with Fivetran, paving the way for data governance and expanded back-office work to become top priorities.
Wahl attributes Paylocity’s rapid adoption of a data-driven culture to Fivetran and says he’s happy that he doesn’t have to manage pipelines or worry about data engineering processes. “That would be the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of my workload,” he says.
With Fivetran working in the background to automate data integration across the enterprise, Wahl and his team can spend their time strategically leveraging data to sustain Paylocity’s growth and increase its competitive advantage.
“The strategic management of data is the path forward at Paylocity. Fivetran is leading the way.”
- Andrew Wahl, Director of Marketing Analytics and Operations, Paylocity
Download this IDC report to learn how Fivetran drives millions in financial impact and enables new business initiatives for enterprises.
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