Data Talks

This month, we learn how to maximize the return on your BI implementation by empathizing with your user. Joining us for this conversation is designer, speaker, and founder of Designing for Analytics Brian T. O'Neill, an independent consultancy that helps companies apply human-centered design to data science and analytics. We explore how to assess users’ and stakeholders’ needs, serve a variety of users with one implementation, and make sure our BI is actually facilitating decision support — not just appearing to.

This month, we’re turning our attention to the crucial role SaaS marketing teams play in the deployment of feature enhancements and major product updates. How do feature launches differ from initial product launches? How do you reposition your product when it undergoes a revolutionary change? What’s the process for going to market again? Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop, co-founders of SaaS marketing and growth consultancy Elevate, join us to relay some critical advice on making the most of your feature launch.

This month, we are rejoined by CloudKPI co-founder CEO Maeve Kneafsey for a discussion on reporting to investors for SaaS companies. Knowing which metrics to include at which stages of growth can be a challenge, as can getting at the stories behind those metrics. Kneafsey shares her expertise on the subject and explains how machine learning and predictive algorithms are helping SaaS providers surmount these reporting challenges.

This month, we get some much-needed guidance from CloudKPI co-founder Maeve Kneafsey on counting customers, measuring churn, and calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC) — it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Should you count customers by contract, for example, or by logo? Should you keep your eye on both counts, and if so, to what end? We explore these and other nuances around summarizing SaaS performance.

Data Talks is Exago's podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. When most people think of BI, they think about extracting insights from their data, not about their data. This month, George Firican explains why BI can be a surprisingly effective tool in data quality auditing — particularly for organizations looking to save money by investing in multipurpose software. Firican’s expertise is informed by his work as the University of British Columbia’s Data Governance and Business Intelligence Director as well as his passion project Lights on Data.

Data Talks is Exago's podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. This month, we talk to data visualization expert Allison Torban about preparing dashboards and their components on clients’ behalf. As a Data Visualization Designer for the American Enterprise Institute and host of the Data Viz Today podcast, Alli has extensive experience clarifying the goals and contexts around her clients’ data viz projects and working with them to build something appropriate and actionable. We learn some tricks of the trade and how they might be applied to the process of building out report and dashboard libraries for SaaS end users.

Data Talks is Exago's podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. This month, VanillaSoft CMO Darryl Praill and his decades of marketing experience joins us to talk about sales metrics and how to build a high-performing sales dashboard tailored to a spectrum of stakeholders. We also learn what metrics SaaS sales teams should pay particular attention to and what common dashboarding missteps to avoid.

Booz Allen Hamilton principal data scientist and executive advisor Kirk Borne explains “analytics-first” business strategy (not to be confused with data-first business strategy). We learn what it takes for businesses to begin doing data science and hear about companies who have found success in asking the right questions and establishing a culture of curiosity around analytics.

We disambiguate some common BI buzzwords with entrepreneur and c-suite data analyst Lillian Taylor. Together with co-host Travis McGrath, we hack through forests of jargon using a machete of specificity and nerd out over pop culture and emerging tech.

We follow data whisperer Jen Stirrup through the circles (rectangles?) of spreadsheet hell, learning how companies find their way there and what they must to do escape. Protip: put an executive in the lead if you want to make it out at all.