Data is the secret weapon of fast-growth SaaS businesses. It anchors new business initiatives—from opening new revenue streams to improving customer satisfaction. But here’s the thing: the data you collect is only as good as your ability to use it. And with a full team and tech stack to manage (and finite hours in a day), it’s hard enough to harness the data much less take the time required to understand and act on it.

Jenny Leman, President of CareerPlug, was facing this exact challenge.

CareerPlug is dedicated to making hiring easier for companies in the U.S. and Canada. Their platform handles the heavy lifting of the hiring process, making it easy for anyone (not just HR professionals) to post and promote jobs, schedule interviews with qualified candidates, and ultimately hire the right person. Trusted by over 12,000 growing businesses including Sprint, Planet Fitness, and FastSigns, they’ve already become the preferred system for hiring and recruiting within the Franchise space. They’re well on their way to solving the next problem for all small businesses: engaging and developing their existing workforce as a full People Operating system.

The SaaS industry moves fast and changes on a dime, and like many in the SaaS industry, CareerPlug is reaching for some aggressive growth goals. In order to keep up, Jenny’s team harnesses the power of weekly data, tracking MRR movement and subscription activity to closely monitor progress and drive growth for CareerPlug. In Jenny’s estimation, this is the best way to quickly respond to revenue fluctuations.

However, gathering an up-to-date view of this data hasn’t always been easy to do. Her team used custom segmentation to review their data, which means industry-standard reporting wouldn’t work for them. In order to gather the unique insights her team needed, they spent hours every week manipulating data just to keep tabs on their most critical business metrics. While everyone on her team understood how important this task was to monitoring CareerPlug’s success, no one particularly loved spending the time to do it.

But Jenny is a proactive leader, and she made her team’s challenges known to her billing partner, Maxio. She needed a better way to quickly draw actionable insights from their subscription management data.

Enter Maxio Business Intelligence, the industry’s first self-service analytics suite powerful enough to support an entire business, but simple enough for anyone to use—no data science degree required. Since we at Maxio were aware of Jenny’s struggles gaining the real-time, segmented data she needed to keep tabs on her revenue growth, we invited her to become an early adopter of Business Intelligence. She jumped at the chance.

A few weeks after implementation, we reached out to Jenny to discuss her experience. Here’s what she had to say about the challenge of gaining weekly insights into the business, as well as the success they’ve experienced since implementing Business Intelligence.

CareerPlug was tired of the spreadsheet shuffle.

“Partnering with Maxio in 2018 solved a significant business problem for us. We [had previously] tried to build and manage our own billing system within our own database, but it lacked visibility, reporting, and everything an Operations leader like myself needed.

I felt blind. Annual planning was a nightmare—I really needed to better understand the operational metrics of my customer base and prospects in trial. Maxio solved those issues for me, which was a huge win.

Unfortunately, we quickly hit a second wall with the time and effort it took to look at weekly patterns within the business.

I think a healthy SaaS business should be looking at data week over week. Patterns tell me what my business is doing and where I can improve, so I need to be in real time when it comes to patterns. We have growth and retention goals that play a significant role in CareerPlug’s 3 to 5 year growth trajectory, so being able to analyze things like MRR movement and subscription activity on a weekly basis is incredibly important.

Getting to the patterns that gave myself and my executive team clarity as to where we should be focusing our time took between 4 and 6 hours a week. We spent a lot of time in spreadsheets doing vlookups, filtering, and slicing and dicing the data—it was a significant amount of time for my ops and finance teams to spend scrubbing data just to tell me the same story week over week.

2 dashboards + 2 hours of training = 4-6 hours reclaimed.

There are so many business problems my ops and finance teams need to be solving besides understanding what’s happening with the business, so 4-6 hours a week is way too expensive.

For us, ease of use and accuracy of the data are the two most important aspects of Business Intelligence. Imagine going from a CSV export with 180k rows that have to be filtered and manipulated to a simple click of a button… that’s what Business Intelligence was able to do for us.

Maxio Business Intelligence takes what was once a 4-6 hour project and turns it into a 10-second refresh. Getting started was actually quite simple—[the Maxio team] spent maybe 30 minutes orienting my ops and finance teams, my ops team spent maybe another hour outside of that orientation, and we had our two most critical queries and dashboards ready to go.

Less than 2 hours of time, and now my finance and ops team are free to solve issues with our CRM, integrations, and making sure that the teams across CareerPlug are fully supported.”

With Maxio Business Intelligence, CareerPlug was able to upgrade their reporting capabilities with very little effort and zero engineering support—reclaiming 4-6 hours a week for their ops and finance teams.

And this is just the beginning for CareerPlug. As they continue to partner with Maxio, CareerPlug has been able to track dozens of other metrics that are critical to their success. They’ve created 6 additional reports for their operations team (e.g. trial pipeline, conversions, dunning, refunds, and churn) and provided our team with valuable feedback along the way. It was their unique requests and use cases which led us to build additional capabilities into Maxio BI for deeper financial tracking (like providing an ability to use payment data to reconcile to cash). With manual data preparation eliminated, CareerPlug is slated to save even more time and money.

Reporting controlled by you.

Jenny is a firm believer in using data to drive business decisions, and so are we. The ability to track key business metrics and make effective use of customer and application data will be the differentiator between businesses who win and those who are left behind.

Don’t let someone else’s rigid reporting system hold you back. Maxio’s newest product transforms your untapped data into actionable insights in real time. Early adopters of this Business Intelligence have already been able to:

• Optimize their data strategy with a self-service analytics suite powerful enough to run complex custom metrics, yet simple enough for everyone to use.
• Analyze their subscription billing data alongside relevant data from across their business stack for a single source of truth.
• Build and securely share custom dashboards to keep everyone up-to-date on the business metrics that matter.

Click here to learn more about Maxio Business Intelligence, and how it can empower every team in your business with the real-time insights they need to make strategic business decisions toward your company’s unique goals.