Phorest bridges HubSpot and Salesforce data with Fivetran connectors

Phorest, an all-in-one salon software solution, provides appointment calendar management, POS, marketing strategy and CRM management to help salons increase bookings and revenue. The business is growing rapidly, with over 150 employees across its Dublin headquarters and offices in Philadelphia, the UK, Germany, Australia and Finland.

With accelerating growth, access to data has become more critical to the company’s success. With data from HubSpot and Salesforce siloed, the business lacked insight into sales and the customer journey. Jóhannes Vollertsen, Marketing Operations Specialist at Phorest, was responsible for figuring out how to best organise internal systems, including syncing, connecting and analysing data from HubSpot and Salesforce.

Connecting data sources to managed BigQuery

Phorest brought on Fivetran to centralise its data and enable proper analysis. “While HubSpot is great for making content and administering CRM, the data is in the backend and we needed something to pipe it into a usable format,” Vollertsen says. “Fivetran is very much set and forget. We refresh our data every six hours.”

While setting up Fivetran, Phorest opted for Managed BigQuery, which involves Fivetran setting up and maintaining a BigQuery warehouse for Phorest. For its BI, the business uses Periscope Data. While the tool does require users to have strong SQL knowledge, the BI team finds it quite flexible.

By centralising its data, Vollertsen learned that Phorest’s data integrity had room for improvement. Now the company can view the entirety of its data within Periscope Data to fill in the gaps, ensure consistency, and paint a more comprehensive picture of the customer journey from the beginning to the end.

Combining sales and marketing data for holistic analysis

Having data centralised has made it much more accessible for the entire organisation. It has allowed the BI team to take reports that existed in siloed applications, bring them in-house, and add extra dimensions for analysis. For instance, while the business was able to see data by region or by traffic source in HubSpot, it was unable to view it by region and by traffic source. With Fivetran, Phorest is now able to view both in a single report.

Using a new dashboard, Phorest realised that it needed to improve website function. By viewing the number of sales driven by the website versus trade shows and third-party references, it learned that the website plays a far bigger part in sales than it had previously believed. Backing its request with the data, Vollertsen’s team received the necessary resources to improve the Phorest website.

Its modern data stack has also impacted the company culture by helping to break down the silos between the sales and marketing departments. Previously, both the sales and marketing teams created goals and measured performance separately, but the two views didn’t always stack up. Having this data presented in Periscope highlighted the nuanced differences that the two teams had in calculating and reporting on figures. Once the BI team started working with the data across different views, it determined that these differences were impacting business decisions. “The fact that we can join the data between the departments has been useful for everyone. We’re getting better at bridging the divide between our sales and marketing data,” Vollertsen says.

Want to see how centralising your sales and marketing data can help you better understand your customers and business performance? Sign up for a demo of our service or get started with a free trial today.

About Fivetran: Our standardised technology delivers data into your warehouse the right way. Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology supports agile analytics, enabling data-backed decisions across organisations. After a five-minute setup, Fivetran replicates all your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance data warehouse. Our standardised cloud pipelines are fully managed and zero-maintenance.

About BigQuery: BigQuery is Google’s serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse designed to make all your data analysts productive at an unmatched price performance.

About Periscope Data: Periscope Data is a visualisation and BI platform that delivers SQL, Python and R in a single solution.