At Fivetran, we’ve always believed that centralizing your data is just the beginning. True business impact happens when that data is activated — when insights flow back into the tools where teams make decisions and take action. That’s why our data team adopted Census, now a Fivetran company, for reverse ETL (rETL) — it’s central to how our team activates data and provides value across the business.
By using Census internally, we’ve transformed how we power personalized marketing, optimize lead scoring, and scale our go-to-market operations — all while reducing operational complexity and reliance on engineering.
Activating the data that drives growth
Our warehouse is home to rich, modeled data — but moving that data into Salesforce and Marketo was once a manual, brittle process. Our data engineers initially built custom scripts to sync product usage data, but as our business grew, so did the complexity and engineering overhead.
Our original system was built to solve a very specific problem: getting platform account IDs into Salesforce in order to link CRM updates to product usage. But as use cases evolved, maintaining and extending that system required more and more engineering time to write limited, one-off jobs, and the process was error-prone — updates didn’t always process correctly, and duplicates were common. To support evolving use cases, the data team often had to pause other work to manually build brittle data jobs, creating a growing operational cost.
Census offered a more scalable path forward. With its no-code interface and purpose-built features for operational analytics, we gained a faster, more reliable way to activate warehouse data across the business.
Improving lead scoring and personalization in real time
Today, Census is a core part of our lead management engine. As soon as a user signs up for Fivetran, we enrich that record with firmographic and product engagement data. This enrichment happens in our warehouse, but with Census, we can easily push it back into Salesforce, where it's used by our go-to-market team to qualify opportunities and enable smarter XDR routing. The same data also powers personalized nurture journeys in Marketo, ensuring the right audience gets the right message, based on product usage signals.
Today, we use Census to manage lead creation, loading enriched lead records only once they’re complete and ready. That kind of control wasn’t possible with our earlier setup.
What once took days of engineering effort now happens in minutes — with rETL pipelines set up with Census and managed day-to-day by RevOps, without engineering intervention.
Giving GTM teams control of their data
Before Census, our RevOps team often had to log tickets with data engineering just to understand why lead scores weren’t updating or syncs were failing. Diagnosing issues meant digging through logs or waiting for support, slowing down execution.
Now, they have full visibility and control. RevOps now has access to dashboards that show exactly what each sync is doing, making it easy to audit performance or track changes over time. Census shows job statuses, surfaces which records were updated, and pinpoints the root cause of sync failures — whether it’s a Salesforce trigger, missing field permissions, or a mapping issue. With that clarity, RevOps can troubleshoot and resolve problems on their own and move faster.
The result is a resilient, self-serve sync pipeline with fewer issues and greater efficiency.
Using Census has helped us accelerate campaign velocity, improve data hygiene, and free up engineering resources — all while building stronger, more personalized customer journeys.
This is just one of many ways we use Census. From marketing and sales to customer success and operations, rETL powers dozens of workflows across the business. And now that Census is part of the Fivetran platform, we’re bringing these same benefits to our customers. With rETL capabilities, every business can activate their data faster, automate key workflows, and drive better outcomes using the insights they already trust.
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