Reason #381 to Love the Data Warehouse: It Makes Finance Strategic

The best part is that it all stemmed from our warehouse, reaffirming our investment in our data warehouse as the single source of truth and capitalizing on the work we had already done to empower the business with analytics. Hightouch made it so simple to sync that data back to the business teams that needed it, exactly where they were used to doing their work.

It felt like cheating. All we had to do was connect Hightouch to our warehouse and our business teams were magically empowered with actionable customer data. This thing we straight up could not do at Lightspeed was accomplished in minutes because of Hightouch.

If you’re a fellow data professional reading this post, you probably get pitched a new data product every week. I know I did (and do!). But with Hightouch, something was different. The pain point of delivering actionable data across the business in a scalable, streamlined way was a well-established organizational goal since my time at Lightspeed. And in minutes, Hightouch solved that problem with an MVP use case. In the world of B2B software, this is virtually unheard of.

Ultimately, I couldn’t unsee what I saw and knew that the Hightouch team was onto something truly special, so when the opportunity arose to join, I couldn’t pass it up.

From Early Customer to Employee

As an early Hightouch customer, I was impressed by a few things:

• Speed of iteration: This team seemingly did not stop. We’d give feedback and then it would just… appear in the app. The long-held idea that enterprise SaaS was a black box of red tape was discredited daily with Hightouch.
• Customer focus: The entire company—from customer support, to product, to marketing, and the executive team—consistently demonstrated incredible empathy for our problems and translated that into a level of support and service that I had not experienced in my career.

Being on the inside, I can now see first-hand how the company’s culture and core values are integral to how we deliver these experiences for our hundreds (and growing!) of customers.

It’s incredibly exciting to be building a “forward-deployed” finance team, and to be doing it in an organization that has centered all of its workflows off of the data warehouse. Bolstered by ready-access to customer and product data, we have the resources we need to help guide the business where it needs to go (versus being pigeonholed into analyzing our historical performance.) In addition to building out my team, we are hiring across various engineering and go-to-market roles.

If you want to share ideas about strategic finance and the modern data stack, I’d love to talk! Feel free to reach out at cherry@hightouch.com, or find me on LinkedIn.