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BI tools promised to solve the "data starved" teams, giving them access to make decisions. However, we see quite a few challenges that you should know.
That's why we dive into our experience with business intelligence.
***
That's why we dive into our experience with business intelligence.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (02:51) - The Challenges of BI Implementation
- (05:52) - The High Costs of BI Tools and Expertise
- (09:01) - The Importance of Consensus in BI Rollouts
- (10:57) - Why even go for BI?
- (13:17) - Analyzing Marketing Data
- (17:23) - The Reality of BI Tools
- (19:51) - Why BI Tools Fail Commercial Teams
- (25:48) - The Opportunity for Improvement
***
This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.
That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.
***
Connect with us
✉️ Newsletter: revenueletter.substack.com
Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein from Growblocks.
[00:00:02] You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel. In today's episode, we are discussing why BI sucks, the problem with it, and trust me, there are many, why people do get it in the first place, and what to consider instead. Enjoy.
[00:00:20] it's so wonderful, um,
[00:00:25] Mikkel: You know, the intelligent listeners, which is all of them, will have noticed that it's been a while since we've had guests on the show. We've been having a bit of a summer break, which we also need, and so have the guests, to be quite frank. So I'm happy to say that soon, they're gonna be back.
[00:00:44] Toni: Season two,
[00:00:45] Mikkel: they're gonna be back,
[00:00:46] Toni: about to
[00:00:47] Mikkel: I can already say now that a few of the ones we've had on the show, solid conversations. Wes Bush, not so long ago, solid conversation on PLG. . I think it's gonna be a really good
[00:00:57] Toni: I think it's going to be like an average season.
[00:00:59] Mikkel: I wonder what the EMDB scores. IMDB go score is gonna be.
[00:01:03] Toni: about
[00:01:04] Mikkel: Do you wanna talk about the weekend or shall I,
[00:01:06] Toni: I mean, you shall, please.
[00:01:09] Mikkel: So last time we recorded, I was basically telling you about, me being a lumberjack. I don't know if it made, made the episode or not, but me chopping
[00:01:18] Toni: you chopped some trees. It doesn't make you a
[00:01:20] Mikkel: some trees.
[00:01:21] No, that's true. I mean, I'm not going to put it on the LinkedIn just yet. Not yet. Let's see. Maybe I get an endorsement first.
[00:01:29] So my in laws invited us to Sweden to paint the entire house
[00:01:34] Toni: Oh, now you're a painter as well.
[00:01:35] Mikkel: So now I'm a painter as well.
[00:01:36] Toni: there is a way out of marketing,
[00:01:38] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly there's a clear
[00:01:39] Toni: another
[00:01:40] Mikkel: career progression That's good and I mean the thing is you figure out what you're good at and what you really suck at Yeah, and you know, especially with paint it can be very, Gratifying to see like, oh, now it looks so much better, but if you mess it up, it's also like the problem's gonna be very visible.
[00:01:56] and so that's kind of what I spent the time on. we were just painting and it was actually, I want to say seven. Yeah, let's, let's say 20 kids all under age of like six being involved with painting. So we were two parents just overseeing them not being able to paint and just basically had a section of the house, which was, that's lost.
[00:02:15] Maybe we need to just take down that part of the house and put up new wood boards or something.
[00:02:19] Toni: the funny thing about painting is, you know, you sometimes have this romantic idea of like, ah, you know, we're going to just go and maybe with some friends over beer and
[00:02:28] Mikkel: Pizza. Yeah.
[00:02:30] Toni: And then you just stand there until 10:00 PM and you grind and you look at the corner, it's like, it's the corner. Is it the same color? And you
[00:02:36] color? And you just you know, paid. You gotta get it again. It's like, no, I'm not gonna do
[00:02:41] Mikkel: That's true. So, segue.
[00:02:44] Toni: Yeah. I'm interested about that.
[00:02:45] Mikkel: That kind of sucked.
[00:02:46] No, it was good fun. honestly, but it's kind of like I said, you can really see all the mistakes.
[00:02:51] And what are we using to see mistakes at SaaS companies?
[00:02:55] Toni: Well, I don't know.
[00:02:57] Mikkel: You don't know.
[00:02:57] Toni: What is it? using?
[00:02:59] Mikkel: Well, we're using a whiteboard, So, you know, don't listen to our
[00:03:03] Toni: just using our eyes,
[00:03:04] Mikkel: Don't do what we're doing, do what we're telling you to do. That's the case here. No, for a lot of businesses. We had a spreadsheet plotting in numbers from multiple systems and then what happens when you pull numbers from three, four different tools is they don't add up anymore.
[00:03:18] You calculate out the funnel and it's like, well, this math is just broken. So, you know, that was kind of the challenge and was a catalyst to say, well, we need to get some visibility into how we're performing. and the immediate solution was like, you know what? Bi let's do bi. And, by accident, or that sheer dumb idiotic comment, we started a, multi-year project, burning a lot of cash to start that endeavor.
[00:03:42] and that's, probably what we're gonna get a bit into today. The whole BI
[00:03:46] Toni: The world divides into maybe two or three different areas. People that haven't invested yet into BI, people that are thinking about it and then people that have.
[00:03:57] Mikkel: Yeah, who will never do that.
[00:04:00] Toni: And, and just listen to the latter part here. No, but, uh, uh, we're probably going to cover kind of the perspectives on those three different areas today and going a little bit through this.
[00:04:09] I think rolled out. BI two or three times, lots of pain stuff to share. and also kind of just thinking back what's really the reason to kind of roll out BI, right? what do you really want to achieve at least from a commercial perspective, right?
[00:04:23] We're not going to cover all the other reasons. but from a commercial perspective, what do you want to achieve and kind of taking a little bit of a deep dive into this topic today?
[00:04:30] Mikkel: So maybe I can start with, the most crazy stat I've found around this subject from Gartner.
[00:04:36] So it's something like 80 to 85 percent of all BI implementations fail. just let that sink in for a moment.
[00:04:43] Toni: I was like, really difficult to roll out BI. let's just be clear about this. This is one of the massive downsides of BI, but when you think about it, we're almost talking one out of only one out of 10.
[00:04:56] You know, installations works out.
[00:04:58] know, it's not the other way.
[00:04:59] Mikkel: you know what?
[00:05:00] Toni: oh, you know, one out of 10 it doesn't work out. no, no, no. One out of 10 is the positive event, you know? Yeah.
[00:05:04] Mikkel: And you know what? I, it made me wonder, it's like, okay, did it fail because they couldn't get it to work? Or, because they just realized how massive it was and they just gave up.
[00:05:15] Toni: we should call up Gartner and ask them
[00:05:16] Mikkel: Yeah, no. So the other thing is also like, you know, this was cited in, I want to say 2018 or something. Mysteriously, it's disappeared from the Gartner website. And there's a bit of a side comment. I just wonder if they were called up by a few of, you know, vendors on the,
[00:05:33] the vendors that are paying them a lot of money
[00:05:33] yeah, in the top right corner who were leading something.
[00:05:36] And it's like, you know what? If we need to keep this engagement going, maybe take that down. Anyway, um,
[00:05:42] doesn't take away from the fact that it is a complex implementation, right? And it is super expensive. And I was hoping maybe you could just paint a picture of how expensive, what are we talking
[00:05:52] Toni: depends a little bit on, you know, what do you think is expensive? Right. But, many of us probably put it into perspective of, Hey, I'm going to buy a new tool and people have in their minds, buying a new tool in our range. So I'm not saying enterprise and up, but like up until the hundred million or so.
[00:06:09] I think they're thinking about a new tool, a new analytics tool, by the way. like 20 to 50k, something like this. and this makes, I think it makes total sense. And obviously then you have your heavy seat usage, like an outreach and so forth, kind of that, you know, obviously is a little bit more expensive than that, but that's what people think of.
[00:06:25] Well, if you think about BI,
[00:06:27] Mikkel: BI,
[00:06:28] Toni: You actually might get, a looker, Tableau, license, done in that range, the 20 to 50 K range, depends on how many users you need and bells and whistles and I don't know their pricing sheet, but it's usually in that range.
[00:06:40] Yeah. Right. what many people on the face of it are kind of missing. this is, when we bought Looker in, 2016 or 17 or something like this. Well, number one, you need Looker,
[00:06:51] Mikkel: Yeah, of course.
[00:06:52] Toni: right? And I think this was back then 36k or something like this, but you don't only need Looker, you also need a pipelining tool, Fivetran, we went for Fivetran.
[00:07:02] Fivetran is the massive winner in this whole thing. and I, you know, it depends on your use and how many, managed and active roles you need and stuff. I don't know. but you're talking 10
[00:07:13] Mikkel: 10
[00:07:13] Toni: to 15k. like for that thing on top, right? you, will need, something like dbt, which is, I think for free in most cases, actually.
[00:07:21] but I haven't actually covered the really expensive part yet. The really expensive part is, whatever you do, you will need someone that knows how to do that stuff, right? You will need a, and I'm not talking a business analyst or something like this. you know, maybe this year your RevOps can do the business analyzing.
[00:07:41] but you need kind of a, not an engineer engineer, but people refer to it now as a data engineer. Yeah. basically someone that, can write SQL. and can. stitch all of the different pieces together, right? And those folks, you know, because they need to have both very technical skills and also commercial understanding.
[00:07:59] Those folks, they're not, you know, they're pretty rare actually. They're not everywhere. and you easily pay a hundred plus K for them. And it depends on where in the world you are. But that's usually what you end up paying for those folks, right? And you could go for like an only SQL person.
[00:08:15] but then you would need to realize that, someone on the team needs to spend half their time working with that SQL person to do the defining and explaining and all of that stuff. and you'll probably end up paying more even, right? So really kind of touching what, 150K or something like that, right?
[00:08:32] And this is, the bare minimum setup cost.
[00:08:34] Mikkel: And I think the other funny thing is most companies are also opt to go for, you know what, let's speed up this project and get some consultants as well.
[00:08:41] Toni: Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. and the, so, you know, the, the, the cost can kind of balloon really quickly.
[00:08:47] I think the other side of the coin kind of in terms of the rollout piece is really, it's usually not, you know, it's not Looker, Fivetran or, the data engineer that messes this up. so people might wonder kind of why, why are those rollouts not working out?
[00:09:01] Well, the reason it's not working out is actually because, you fail to get consensus on, what metrics mean in your business. That's a big problem. so you, you know, you connect to your Salesforce your Marketo and so forth your pull data, and you have all the data, it's all there. But, for this to then be usable by a marketing leader or a sales leader or someone else, You need to make sure that what they think, you know, the, the, the dead horse that we keep beating kind of what an MQL is and how it's being defined and what that means.
[00:09:30] And it's like, it's so funny because obviously this is very much our turf also sometimes. And when we're walking into, usually the implementation, where we're kind of doing, the heaviest of lifts. You know, where this is a, instead of a one or two week project turns into a month project, which we're kind of saying, Hey, you know, it's going to take a month, is the, Oh, actually we didn't realize we didn't agree on all of those definitions actually.
[00:09:52] I kind of, that's a typical one. and then if you take this up a notch, and I'm now talking kind of a billion dollar, revenue company. With like lots of different entities, basically they're trying now for the 10th year in a row to roll out BI. and it's simply not happening because you have so many little kingdoms and fiefdoms and everyone is like, you know, wants to make it their little special way and then it cannot be changed.
[00:10:14] sometimes if you want to change a metric definition, this then might mean that comes with a change in your commission plan for someone, change in targets, change of not only tooling, but, process and stuff, like impossible.
[00:10:28] Mikkel: You know what? I was also thinking about the objection that's going to be, oh, you're going to roll out BI. That's cool. So wait, it means they can see how my entire team is performing? Can we postpone this a couple of years? We're not ready for this project yet.
[00:10:42] Toni: No, there's, I mean, you know, let's just, let's just say transparency is probably never cited as a reason, but it might sometimes actually be a
[00:10:49] Mikkel: So I think that really begs the question, why on earth are people going for
[00:10:56] Toni: Yeah.
[00:10:57] So the, you know, if you look at, you know, what McKinsey would say about this, well, it's about digital transformation, digital transformation. Moving on. and then the outcome of that is obviously data driven making
[00:11:07] that's what this Holy Grail is about. You want to be, using all the data you have to, help you make better decisions going forward.
[00:11:15] right? That's the promise. and if you don't do BI, by the way, what's the step up towards BI? it usually is kind of a dashboarding tool. and those start at $200 a month and going up to, I don't know, probably 2K a month or something like this.
[00:11:30] Then there's a large gap to the 150K all in, with BI and kind of scaling up. But that's usually what kind of people are looking for. ultimately when you really, really think about, okay, now I see all of that data stuff, I see all of these things. how is it going to make me, or the organization data driven in my decision making?
[00:11:48] Well, number one. Very disappointingly, It comes back to, well, I need a dashboard for my meeting. Right. So you want to have a meeting, either in your commercial team, in your financial, wherever you want to have a meeting and you want to pull up some numbers to be kind of created like a ground truth of what's going on. This is what this is about. You want to have a dashboarding tool that shows you some numbers. And then, number two, like, you know, there's reason number one. Yeah. Um, and this could be, recurring meetings on a weekly basis. So here we have our weekly sales meeting or weekly marketing meeting or whatever it might be.
[00:12:21] you have those pieces in there and you kind of go through those numbers. the other one could also be quarterly recurring, kind of your QBR meeting, for example. You want to have a, QBR dashboard, someone to look at with and pick and choose which ones you actually want to build a
[00:12:33] a slide
[00:12:34] Kind of, that's how this works. but really then the second reason is, you want to figure out if and when something goes wrong and, why it's going wrong, right? We sometimes call that root cause analysis. And in this case, I want to kind of to ask you when you were using Looker back then, and you saw something was going wrong, right?
[00:12:54] Yeah. First of all, talk to me how you figured out that something was going wrong. And then what did you do about it?
[00:12:59] Mikkel: Well, so I'm a weirdo, right? I will open up every conceivable report as the first thing in the morning. Still do it today.
[00:13:08] I think we've talked about it in previous episodes a while. This is the first thing I do.
[00:13:11] It's just part of my ritual to see how are we performing right now. That's important to me to know. and I've always been wired that way.
[00:13:17] So for me, it was opening up the Looker dashboard for marketing where you had a number of leads, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, closed won deals, ARR signed, right? And in there we had a, actual versus target, right?
[00:13:32] For the quarter. And, I would look at two things. I would look at the amount of leads we were passing over to sales and the amount of opportunities. You know, all the closed won and revenue, a lot of it would happen later in the quarter and you have less control. Still important. Don't get me wrong, but that was like the first, frontier, of numbers I would look at.
[00:13:53] And then we'll basically see where we're dipping too far below target. and then if we were dipping too far below, in some case, I would know, ah, okay, we have this initiative planned and I would know, no one else, by the way, would know, but I would know we have a webinar, a trade show or something coming up that's going to snap it back.
[00:14:09] In other cases, we had nothing. And I was like, well, what on earth is happening here? And I had to run through a couple of other tools I had to go to while something happening on the website is because that's where we generate a lot of those leads. paid. That's not working as it should right now. You know, things are changing all the time.
[00:14:28] did something happen on the website? Something broke maybe? Or did we get hit by a SEO update from Google? the more advanced stuff I would pursue if there was nothing there would be to look at. the composition of the leads and that's where i would run into trouble because i would have to run to nico our data guy and he was not at his desk so i had to wait or slack him and wait for him to get back to me and then this whole interaction of hey can you can you maybe break this down by segment because we don't have that filter and a couple of days passes and it's there and it's like ah actually I also need this other filter and
[00:15:05] Toni: so let me let me tell you how this played out from my perspective. You know, because I also heard the story from Nico back then complaining about marketing. number one was hey, here's something off on the demo request or whatever it might be. You go do your all year checking and then you go back like, Hmm, I don't actually know what's going on. Let's dig into the data itself.
[00:15:25] Right. And you go to Nico, ask him, Hey, can you split it by region or whatever. Yeah. because, and this is true, when you do, you know, when you have Looker and you have one of those way more expensive explore licenses, and you're trying to actually create your own look.
[00:15:40] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:41] Toni: good luck to you.
[00:15:42] Mikkel: yeah. No, it was like, I tried copy pasting some of the SQL code. I was just like, no, no, forget
[00:15:47] Toni: so I, you know, Anish and Nico and all these guys that kind of tried to teach me, right? But it just didn't work out. I couldn't, right? so basically kind of ended up taking an existing look, copying it and then trying to do something with it and hoping every time I hit enter, hoping that suddenly, A graph would appear, usually it didn't, and if you wanted to create something from scratch, I would always pick the wrong lead object.
[00:16:09] I was like, okay, find me leads. And I picked this one. And then Nico comes like, I can't use that one. Why? Why
[00:16:14] Mikkel: like,
[00:16:15] Toni: oh, you need to, you know, whatever Right. so what ends up happening is, Mikkel has go to Nico and then says, like, how can you split it by region or by market or by, you know, whatever you want to do.
[00:16:25] Nico rolls his eyes. Because he's easily triggered. he doesn't want to spend any time on the visualization piece in Looker, he wants to build more cool shit in Snowflake.
[00:16:33] Mikkel: I forgot
[00:16:34] Toni: forgot about Snowflake, by the way,
[00:16:35] Mikkel: No, but he also played the whole, hey, I want to build a long term solution for this.
[00:16:39] And it's like, cool, how long is it going to take? Probably a month. It's like, yeah, I need this now.
[00:16:43] Toni: no, but then the frustrating thing is and this is where he lost his shit
[00:16:47] was you know a week later he comes back with a solution kind of gives you the graph you like look at it for like one
[00:16:53] Mikkel: second,
[00:16:53] one second, and
[00:16:55] Toni: second and it's like ah, no that was not it now I need the other thing, right and
[00:17:04] Mikkel: also the ultimate failure where you then pursue to say, you know what? I'll just export all this stuff into a sheet and do a pivot table. And then Nico sits crying in the corner real hard and everybody looks at that license. We have the pipeline tool and all that stuff.
[00:17:18] It's like, yo, why? Why did we bother? Why, why did we bother
[00:17:21] Toni: So, this is a legitimate story.
[00:17:23] This happens in businesses all the time, right? one of the reasons why we bought Looker, I read the book from Tom Tungusz and the Looker founder on data and data driven stuff.
[00:17:35] they were talking about breadlines. a concept from, I don't know, when people were hungry in the Western world and they had to kind of stand in line to get bread. And, uh, he was comparing that to people standing in line to get data access. he was basically saying like, Hey, you know, Looker is solving that.
[00:17:49] There's no breadlines anymore. Well, FU
[00:17:52] there's a lot, there's a lot of that still
[00:17:54] Mikkel: Yeah, promise has not been delivered on.
[00:17:57] Toni: this is what you want to have, right? This is what you want to have from BI. Kind of the promise is you want to have data driven decision making. You want to have, everything in one spot, right?
[00:18:06] Kind of a follow up question could have also been like, Hey, why did you have to go to, check Your traffic numbers in Google Analytics, why isn't there an API and stuff like that, but it's like, generally speaking,
[00:18:16] Mikkel: but, and another reflection I have is like with these bread lines, when you look at, so we recently did an interview with a gentleman called Sid Kumar, which is also going to air at some point.
[00:18:25] he had shared from, a study from HubSpot and Pavilion where RevOps spends most of their time. So majority, no surprise, sales. I think that was like 80%. And then marketing was 15. And then something on office management, maybe, and CS got like 1%. So there's also a tilt in where they then spend the time informing decision making on data, which also just exasperates this whole issue, right?
[00:18:50] When you think about annual planning, where you also need data, if you spend 80 percent of your time nailing the sales plan, you're going to miss target,
[00:18:58] Toni: Yeah. So the, you know, we kind of Talked a little bit about, what's the problem if you don't have it, what's the decision making to get there and what's the promise that you're actually going to have fulfilled from this thing, right?
[00:19:10] I honestly also think, BI has lots of, lots of very positive things to it, right? it has this, Everything quote unquote data in one spot, right? But the question that we wanted to go through today is why is it still not working? Why are people still don't feel like they're suddenly data driven in their decision making.
[00:19:30] And it's not just a, Oh, my CEO doesn't believe in it and blah. I just don't, I don't believe in that crap anymore because, every C level that I talked to, they have now grown up in the last 10 years where this is obviously a thing. you're gonna use these things, right. but why does it still not work?
[00:19:45] And, you know, obviously we're going to focus this more from a commercial perspective. And, and I think this is where the.
[00:19:51] The first problem actually arrives kind of when you think about the promise, everything data in one spot to enable you to make a data driven decision making. Well, you know, for a commercial perspective, you don't need everything data in one spot.
[00:20:05] You need everything commercial
[00:20:06] Mikkel: you have to go to market.
[00:20:07] Toni: Because when, whenever I'm kind of talking with folks like, okay, your BI and stuff, you know, how does it work out? then it's like, well, okay, cool. You know, what about, what are your budget? Do you have a budget in there? It's like, no, I have a spreadsheet for
[00:20:17] Mikkel: this.
[00:20:18] Toni: what about your hiring plan? I have a spreadsheet for this. What about your OKRs? Ah, we have another tool or spreadsheet. I mean, it's
[00:20:23] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:20:23] Toni: every time. you know, when you touch just some other areas for commercial folks that are not specifically, yes, I'm pulling this from Salesforce, there's always like, I have this other spreadsheet that tries to do these things.
[00:20:36] And then it's a kind of a question. Well, if everything should be in this BI piece, but so much of the logic isn't. How can it still be the everything piece, right? and I think to a degree, this also has to do with, why it's so, difficult to use it as your decision making tool. because every time, a commercial leader has a question, one out of two things are happening.
[00:21:00] One is because of the self serve issue, they need to talk to someone to look something up for
[00:21:05] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:21:06] Toni: Which is, you know, I think 10, 20 years ago, that was kind of fine. But again, the breed of leaders and the commercial teams growing up now that they have been there. There have been those people that looked stuff
[00:21:18] Mikkel: stuff
[00:21:19] Toni: they simply cannot do it with that stuff.
[00:21:20] It's just, it's too technical for
[00:21:22] Mikkel: it's also like, you have roughly 12 weeks in a quarter, if you have to wait a week to actually get an answer to something, you lost around 8 percent of your quarter just there, like Or
[00:21:31] Toni: you just say, fuck it. I'll just,
[00:21:33] I'll just make the call
[00:21:34] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:21:34] Toni: know,
[00:21:35] Mikkel: all in.
[00:21:36] Toni: I don't care. So it's like the self serve piece is kind of really frustrating.
[00:21:40] Right. And then the other one is, you have to go. outside of the BI piece into another context, in order to get to the right understanding, right? So the next thing is also in your, in your drill down on regions. Yeah, you know, Nico now could tell you that you had 16 MQLs in the US and 75 in Europe. But is someone doing better or worse than the other?
[00:22:05] Kind of, what was the plan? What is the goal? And
[00:22:07] Mikkel: of that? Yeah.
[00:22:07] Toni: stuff, right? So these, these things are actually not part of this, right? then jumping out, trying to kind of even get into the spreadsheet where some of that data might be, questionable already. And then the other thing is those spreadsheets might not all be owned by someone on your team.
[00:22:21] So meaning, someone else, someone sitting somewhere else might be like, no, I'm not going to let you into my, or, well, I need to answer your question, but you know, I'm pretty busy, so I'll answer that question a week from now. and these things simply add up. There's so much friction.
[00:22:35] That simply adds up for people then just to a degree, I believe, giving up and being like, well, you know, since this isn't working for me, I need to call a shot here. I need to make a decision and I will have to be non data driven because I simply don't want half the data to be otherwise, right? And I think this is, this is, I think what's frustrating.
[00:22:57] what's frustrating for a bunch of people out there.
[00:22:58] Mikkel: Yeah, I think it's also like, if you're going to propose something and you don't have, you know, Get the time from the data person to supply you. You're not going to make the proposal anyway, right?
[00:23:08] And I think it will also tilt the balance in a negative way to a point where you feel like the data analyst or data scientists, they're the ones who will make the case because they have the data and you don't, right? And that's a really negative dynamic to have.
[00:23:23] Toni: No, but also when you think about Looker, Tableau, I'm not sure about Power BI, but if you think about those tools, for whom are those tools created? You know, who is the target audience really for them, right?
[00:23:36] And the target audience for them is the data guy or girl. Like that's what it is, right? They're building this stuff for them. and, that makes absolute product market fit commercial go to market fit sense because at the end of the day, there's going to be a boss somewhere. Or the board or someone's that's like, Oh, we need to be more data driven.
[00:23:52] Or you don't have your shit out of control. You need to be more data driven. You need to have BI. Um, and then who's going to make the decision to purchase. It's not going to be that person because they're like, Hey, ultimately, and this is also true, I just need, I just need that stuff visualized. I just want to see the data.
[00:24:08] Who's going to make the decision under the hood though is going to be some data person that decides between those two. I think 25, 000 BI vendors that are basically out there. So what's your best way to kind of go to market? It's like, well, you need to cater to them. They are the ones that need to buy this, which is also one of the reasons why Looker was so successful.
[00:24:25] It was for the target audience that they successfully built towards.
[00:24:28] Right.
[00:24:28] Mikkel: And I think that's also why it's, and I think we're almost back to the why it sucks part but it's like, you can build anything you want in there.. As long as you have someone to build it for you. Because no one on the go to market team who aren't in RevOps and understands SQL and all the other code and data lakes, and I don't know what frameworks they have no chance.
[00:24:48] They have no chance of doing anything in there. And I think that's kind of part of the problem. It's not like you buy a out of the box solution with everything. It just, it doesn't happen.
[00:24:57] Toni: And I think that's cool by the way. I think that all, you know, I think all of that works out, really the barriers to entry to actually kind of fulfill the promise though, from a commercial perspective, and this is also. You know, where I think tools like Datadog and PagerDuty, they're basically kind of BI for developers, right?
[00:25:14] they kind of found the path there, but for commercial, I think, the promise is still unfulfilled actually. it's still unclear how BI is really helping folks, on the commercial side to be data driven, make the right decisions. And I think one other sign that we didn't even talk about, but one other sign is.
[00:25:31] Just check how many of your, you know, if you have BI, just check who's logging in. Just check. and I can tell you, sadly, it's going to be the same people that were already data driven on the operation side, but it's not going to be the leaders that actually kind of have to, right. it's just not.
[00:25:48] And I think all of that together kind of, for me points at a, you know, you could say a sizable opportunity to kind of go in and fix that. I think. With, depending on when we air this, some of those challenges. I actually, you know, increasingly so solved by, Growblocks. So I think there's, there's something interesting that, you know, for, for all of you, it's kind of to think about, but ultimately I think the problem really with BI and why it sucks for commercial is simply, it's not self serve enough.
[00:26:16] You always need to rely on someone else. and that's just, it just makes it extremely hard. And then there's so much context that you have to go outside of the BI tool for, you know, try and pull this in, try and kind of have everything kind of merge in your brain to then get to a data driven decision, which is making it like basically impossible, for people to really use it for that.
[00:26:38] Right.
[00:26:38] Mikkel: for that. That's it. So, um, BI, don't do it. Ha!
[00:26:44] Toni: I mean, do it. There are places where you should do it, by the way. Don't get me wrong, it's like, I think we kind of had like an example with an airline business that's basically building, the backend of the whole airline on a BI solution, it's a, you know, quote unquote, no code solution for building software internally. I think that kind of makes sense, but I think for the commercial folks out there that are super pragmatic, I just need to know all the things that are important to me in my life. I think BI is a really difficult solution to work with.
[00:27:11] Mikkel: solution.
[00:27:12]
[00:27:12] Mikkel: So, um, let's take it home and say, thanks for listening.
[00:27:16] Toni: Thanks for tuning in. Um, hit the follow, subscribe, like, whatever button to kind of support the mission here and, uh, have a good one. Bye bye.