Success Story
See how Lior Solomon helped Drata cement a successful data culture that positively influences customer retention, marketing ROI, sales pipeline management, and product development.
Overview
Challenge
As a fast-growing startup, Drata needed to quickly build a cohesive and efficient data program and architecture.
Solution
Lior built stakeholder relationships and scoped data projects while relying on Data Clymer to make steady progress on his roadmap.
Data Technology Stack
Fast-Tracking a Data-Driven Culture
When Lior Solomon joined Drata as its VP of Data, he had a big job ahead. He needed to build an end-to-end data program, including a cutting-edge modern data stack and a multi-disciplinary in-house data team. On top of that, time was of the essence. The hyper-growth compliance automation company had recently acquired unicorn status and was moving at the speed of light.
But Lior was more than up for the challenge. After building a thriving data program and team at Vimeo, he knew what it took to create a successful data culture at a fast-growing SaaS company. He needed to quickly build stakeholder relationships, understand their business needs, identify data sources, and develop a short-term and long-term roadmap. Plus, he needed to simultaneously build the tech stack and his data team.
Thankfully, Drata’s leadership team was highly invested in making data actionable. Before Lior took the reins, Drata’s CTO and Co-Founder, Daniel Marashlian, had laid the groundwork by hiring Data Clymer as a data and analytics consultant. This gave Lior a running start and air coverage. He could focus on influencing the data strategy, vision, and priorities, while Data Clymer made continuous progress on the roadmap.
“Data Clymer made my life much easier. It was so helpful for me to be able to build momentum and trust with the organization while knowing I had a group of highly skilled people to support me.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
Building a Data Architecture
When Data Clymer began working with the organization, the key priorities were centered on building a data stack, integrating data across various applications, and streamlining processes within Drata’s data architecture.
Lior worked with Data Clymer to build out a modern cloud data stack with cutting-edge technologies that would seamlessly integrate with Drata’s existing systems and scale with its fast-growing business.
Drata’s new modern data stack included:
- Snowflake Cloud Data Platform
- Fivetran to extract and load the data
- dbt for data transformation
- Census for reverse ETL and data activation
- Sigma Computing for business intelligence (BI) analytics and visualizations
- Monte Carlo for data observability
The data architecture was designed to use self-managed tools that wouldn’t require extensive infrastructure management. This enabled the fast-growing startup to prioritize speed and business enablement while also maintaining a high level of data security and compliance.
Read more about Drata’s data architecture and tool decisions
“Data Clymer was an amazing solution. The team brought vast experience from multiple different industries. They helped me make immediate decisions, acted as a sounding board, and brainstormed about what actually mattered. They made it so much easier to balance everything that needed to be done.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
Empowering Stakeholders with the Data They Need
With Data Clymer helping move Drata’s data roadmap forward, Lior worked with stakeholders across the company to understand their KPIs and uncover ways that data could empower them to make better decisions.
Next, he prioritized 3 short-term projects that would make a high impact on the business.
1. Customer Engagement Dashboard
Drata has a 5-star satisfaction rating and wanted to maintain its excellent reputation throughout its growth. Lior collaborated with the Customer Success team to identify use cases and develop metrics to track areas like customer onboarding, engagement, and retention.
Data Clymer identified data sources, designed the data pipelines, and ingested the data into Snowflake. Using Sigma as its visualization tool, the team built a customer engagement dashboard that provides a visual representation of KPIs like product usage metrics, customer feedback, and customer satisfaction scores.
Since then, Drata has not only enhanced its process for customer retention, but has also utilized machine learning to develop models to drive strategic upsells and help identify when the time is right to discuss new products with customers.
“To this day, I still get CSMs thanking me because they are equipped with a very clear dashboard.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
2. Measure and Improve Marketing ROI
Lior’s next high-priority project was to dive into demand generation in order to help optimize spend and reduce customer acquisition costs.
Data Clymer connected all marketing campaign data, modeled it with dbt, and built a dashboard in Sigma. For the first time, Drata’s marketers could see valuable insights beyond overall campaign performance. For example, they could see what types of customers different campaigns acquired and how they impacted the sales pipeline. They could also measure the full sales pipeline through each stage of the sales lifecycle, from demo to lead to qualified lead to closed/won.
Now, the entire leadership team meets weekly to review the pipeline and monitor trends. They compare targets versus actuals and use the insights to make timely, informed decisions about hiring, spend, and business operations.
“The go-to-market scorecard is one of the most actionable dashboards in Sigma. Making sure we’re spending money in the right places equates to a real impact on revenue and the bottom line. You can’t ask for more than that.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
3. Show Product Impact with Measured Compliance Improvements
Drata wanted to be able to help customers see compliance improvements. To accomplish this, Data Clymer was able to help develop a model for historical compliance scores directly within Snowflake. Now, Drata can demonstrate their value to customers and prospects by showing measurable compliance improvements.
Lior also works closely with the product and engineering teams to develop unique compliance and usage-related insights to deliver back to customers. Being able to draw trends across industries and company sizes regarding key metrics like time to response and compliance failures is extremely valuable.
“It creates an aha moment when Customer Success Managers can share compliance improvements in quarterly business reviews. It’s a powerful metric to help drive retention as well as net new revenue.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
Tapping into a Breadth of Expertise
Data Clymer engaged in design decisions, documentation, data modeling, and rollout. The team did everything from drawing the data architecture and developing core data models to building continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows and deploying dbt.
Areas of focus included:
- Data Modeling. Drata has thousands of databases delivering data on a daily basis. Data Clymer had the deep dbt expertise required to optimize all those daily jobs and unify all that data in one model.
- Data Governance. Drata wanted to have a strong governance on the platform with a clear understanding of accessibility and roles. Data Clymer helped build the model so CSMs and other employees could access data in a very secure, governed way.
- Documentation. Data Clymer helped gather information and document everything so that when everyone came back to the data room, they knew what to focus on and the best way to roll it out.
Accelerating Success with a Data-Driven Culture
From initially scouting for projects and helping others understand the value of data, to delivering on several successful initiatives and building trust across the organization, the data culture at Drata has undergone a complete transformation. It has become an integral part of Drata’s business culture and operations.
Lior said, “It’s no longer just a check-the-box process of completing assigned projects. We’re now in a position of identifying trends and opportunities, and picking the most impactful projects to work on.”
“If I hadn’t hired Data Clymer, it would have tremendously impacted my timeline, hands down.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
Business Benefits of Drata’s Data-Driven Culture
- Faster insights. Dashboards for customer success, marketing, sales, product, and leadership put timely insights at Drata’s fingertips. Questions that used to take weeks to answer can now be answered in minutes.
- Informed Decisions & Problem-Solving. Lior’s team communicates weekly reports to the business. They highlight positive or negative trends that need to be addressed and work in the midst of projects to help solve problems.
- Greater efficiencies. The data team looks at data pipelines and manual workloads across the business to uncover opportunities to enable automation and use data engineering to help drive efficiency.
- Enhanced customer value. Customers receive insights about compliance performance to help them continuously improve. Data-driven experiences help enrich their engagement and maintain satisfaction.
Looking Ahead
Drata aims to further enhance its data program by developing user behavior analysis, building an audience segmentation tool, and expanding its data science practice.
And each step of the way, Data Clymer has acted as an extension of Lior’s team, providing hands-on expertise and collaboration.
“The people at Data Clymer are not like consultants; I treat them as part of my team. We had that relationship from day one, which helped me a lot down the road. Data Clymer made my life much easier and helped us reach our goals much faster. I’m very grateful.”
Lior Solomon, VP of Data
Need Help Laying the Groundwork for Data-Driven Success?
Drata’s transformation success story shows that with the right data strategies, resources, and technologies, a company can scale up quickly and efficiently.
Data Clymer played a critical role in helping Drata build a thriving data culture. The team continues to work alongside Lior and his team to help Drata reach its data goals. Contact us today to learn how we can help your organization with data strategy consulting, data architecture, data engineering, and data visualization.
