The company: Hightouch
Many companies rely on a data warehouse as the source of truth for their customer data, but struggle to sync that priceless intelligence to the sales, marketing, and customer success tools their business teams rely on day in and day out. Hightouch is a data activation platform that solves this “last mile” problem by helping companies shift the focus from simply understanding data to taking action on it.
Why you should pay attention
Hightouch is helping hundreds of companies do more than simply analyze data to make data-informed decisions. By putting 360-degree customer information where users can better leverage it, the platform helps businesses run more relevant marketing campaigns, better target leads using custom models, and proactively identify “at risk” customers.
Fast-growing startups like Betterment, Lucidchart, and Plaid, along with larger enterprises like AXS, AutoTrader, Imperfect Foods, and Nando’s, are driving growth and revenue with better data thanks to Hightouch. For example, one SMB digital storefront provider increased merchant sales by 42% after using Hightouch to sync financial event data from its customers to HubSpot and launching a series of lifecycle marketing campaigns that increased financial product adoption. An online comparison service reduced its cost per lead 10% and increased customer lifetime value (LTV), retention, and loyalty by getting its key customer data flowing between Snowflake and Braze via Hightouch.
The details
The Hightouch platform helps business teams bring accurate, real-time customer data into their customer-facing operational systems such as CRM, email, or support applications. This allows them to unlock valuable data models — like LTV or annual recurring revenue (ARR) — from dashboards or analytics tools and make those insights more visible across the business. As a result, teams can see customer data at the right time, quickly decide how to action it, and build automations to streamline critical processes.
How it works
Hightouch takes the ETL (extract, transform, load) process that’s been around since the 1970s and flips it around. The solution sits atop data warehouses (like Snowflake, GoogleBigquery, Amazon Redshift, Databricks, or Postgres) and feeds customer insights into fields in 80+ SaaS tools (including Amplitude, Gainsight, HubSpot, Marketo, Netsuite, Outreach, Salesforce, and Zendesk).
To get their data flowing, customers simply:
1. Select data by either writing SQL directly, using Hightouch’s Visual Audience Builder, or importing from existing tables and models in tools like Looker;
2. Choose a destination application from the Hightouch catalog;
3. Configure mappings between data warehouse queries to fields in destination app(s); and
4. Set up a schedule to begin syncing data.
Beyond object mapping, Hightouch now supports other data activation use cases, such as notifications, events, and audience synching.
Why we’re obsessed
We love Hightouch’s vision to finally deliver on the promise of data activation: turning data at rest into action. The company’s founders recognize that today, everyone in a business is a data practitioner, whether or not they have a formal data role. And to democratize data, it must be easy to access and easy to use – not just for data scientists, but for marketing, sales ops, finance, or anyone who is making decisions day-to-day. The company’s recent acquisition of RevOps workflow automation company Workbase will help take this vision even further.
Rather than forcing business users to learn a new language or adopt yet another digital tool, Hightouch brings the data to them. As a result, its customers are able to take instant action when a user is about to churn, and capitalize quickly on emerging growth opportunities. Data becomes a greater competitive advantage when it’s available to all, and can be made accessible from new apps in minutes instead of months. That’s why it’s no surprise to us that Hightouch is on track to exceed 300% growth of new sales in 2022.
Hightouch’s origin
The company was founded by early employees of Segment, Tejas Manohar and Josh Curl, along with Kashish Gupta, who found themselves trying to decide what to do next after their travel and IoT startups were shut down due to COVID. They realized a common gap in the modern data stack: getting data out of data warehouses. The three started Hightouch two years ago with a real focus on customer success. As a result, they’ve exponentially increased the number of active data syncs running through the Hightouch platform ever since.
Get involved
Hightouch is currently working to fill key roles across engineering, product, sales, marketing, and more, and expects to double its team by the end of this year. To learn more, visit its career page or if your company is interested in getting data-activated, request an introduction pam@operatorcollective.com.
