Transforming Data-Driven Decisions into Success - with Allan Wille, Founder and CEO Klipfolio

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Allan Willie, founder and CEO of Klipfolio. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Allan. First, the challenge with data overload in the SaaS industry today. Second, presenting complex data in a simple manner. And third, how to use metrics to drive decisions, both for the executive team members and also the board of directors. Allan, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Allan Wille** (1:13)
Thanks, Ray. Super happy to be here. And thanks for the intro. So my name is Allan Willie. As Ray mentioned, I'm the co-founder and CEO at Klipfolio. It's been a long data driven journey for us. We've always been in the dashboarding space. And I think because of that, we have spoken to thousands, if not probably tens of thousands of customers about data, about metrics. I mean, we've seen ups and downs in our own data history as well. And we've got a very much a data culture as well, one that encourages transparency and criticism. So I think there's a lot that Ray and I have in common, and hopefully we can contribute here.

**Ray Rike** (1:55)
I'm looking forward to digging deep into the whole world of data driven and kind of metrics-informed decision making to benefit the customer and add to their success. And with thousands and thousands of these conversations and insights, I'm going to start at a summary level. How would you characterize the current data driven cultures in the SaaS industry?

**Allan Wille** (2:17)
Yeah, it's changed a lot over the past 10, 20 years. This is the time frame that I've been involved in, in sort of the BI and the data industry.
And I would definitely say that most folks are much more aware that data is the true gold. Data is the new oil. And certainly there is tons and tons of it, almost too much data. And I think even though there is that understanding and that wants to be data informed and data driven, and I see, you know, cultures, management cultures using things like OKRs, I think there's still a huge swath of the industry, huge swath of the management that isn't really understanding what they should be monitoring, what's driving action. So I think in general, it is moving in the right direction. And I have seen this clear and clear. But wow, there is still so much stuff that I think we can dig into and educate and help each other with.

**Ray Rike** (3:11)
Yeah. And you're right. It's a real journey. We as an industry, when I say the industry, I mean, the B2B size of cloud industry, we're still in the early days of maturation where we're really making kind of metrics informed decisions. But let's first focus on some of those smaller companies, because I talked to a lot of founders and CEOs and CFOs, less than 5 million ARR. And they're like, what metrics should I track? And I'm like, well, what are some of the challenges that you're facing today? But what are the challenges for early stage executives to use data metrics? What do you see out there?

**Allan Wille** (3:44)
So I think the biggest challenge starts with having good data. And that actually doesn't go away. If you're a small company or if you're a big company, it almost makes it worse if you're a big company in some degree. But good data, starting with a good understanding of what is the raw data that you have? How much of it do you have? Can you segment it? Do you have sufficient data as well so that you can actually draw some correlations and some statistical significance? So I think having a maturity in your data systems is probably the fundamental thing that people struggle with. Now, moving beyond that, and I'm sure we're going to get into it, once you have data, people start monitoring way too much stuff. I think we're probably going to get into that, but certainly my advice is, understand that we at Klipfolio, we've got a long history of working with a BizOps team. So we have a BizOps business operations team, and they're really critical in making sure that the data integrity and the data quality of all of our systems sings and plays nicely together.