PieSync works in the background and syncs contacts two-way and in real time between your favorite cloud apps.
Ghent, Belgium
SaaS
30+ employees
Teams at PieSync use ChartMogul to measure demand and growth, to test pricing changes, and to capitalize on new upsell opportunities.
On November 4, 2019 Piesync announced that they are getting acquired by HubSpot. Congratulations to the whole Piesync team!
Piesync enables companies to keep their data synced across cloud apps. With two-way syncing, companies can feel confident that their customer data is accurate and up-to-date across every app and work more efficiently.
Piesync is highly data-driven when it comes to their product and day-to-day operations. The Belgium-based startup doesn’t have a sales team and instead relies on their breadth of integrations and levers like pricing to drive growth. This means that they need continual feedback on how integrations drive customer acquisition, and how pricing affects conversions and retention.
Fortunately, PieSync has ChartMogul, which helps everyone in the company stay on top of important SaaS KPIs. With ChartMogul, PieSync can:
- Measure demand for supported integrations
- Track growth across industry segments
- Test pricing changes
- Identify and manage upsell opportunities
PieSync is keeping an eye on MRR
PieSync’s North Star metric is monthly recurring revenue (MRR), specifically net-new MRR. ChartMogul breaks MRR down into activity types — new business, expansion, contraction, churn and reactivation — helping PieSync see the different activities that feed into MRR changes each month.
MRR movements helped PieSync realize that a significant portion of their net-new MRR comes from expansion; i.e. upgrades due to more contacts being stores or moved to higher-tier plan. This insight has helped PieSync put more focus on customer success to increase expansion MRR.
Leaning into trends
Ruben Camerlynck, PieSync’s head of growth, checks ChartMogul every day in order to monitor business growth and spot opportunities. He’s especially interested in evaluating partnerships and marketing: Are new integrations driving signups? Are our current campaigns working? If he sees an interesting uptick — say, one integration partner is suddenly driving a significant number of new customers — he can quickly adjust his efforts to captialize on the opportunity.
“On a day-to-day basis, I generally go into ChartMogul to track KPIs and see if there are any new jumps in net-new MRR. I dig in to see if that’s due to a campaign we’re running or a new partner we’ve connected to so that we can double down on that activity.”
His favorite ChartMogul features are cohort reports and custom segmentation. PieSync boasts more than 160 integration partners, so being able to look at each partner separately is a must. Using ChartMogul, he can drill down into the performance of every partner and see which ones are driving the most MRR growth, as well as which are associated with a higher customer lifetime value.
He’s also keen to understand the industries that see value in PieSync’s offerings. Using a combination of Clearbit and Stripe, firmographic data like industry and company size is piped into ChartMogul, allowing PieSync to evaluate growth and performance across key groups. PieSync can go directly into ChartMogul and get an at-a-glance view of their customer segments driving growth, the industries bolstering that growth, and adjust their messaging and marketing accordingly.
“Custom segments are really flexible. We can quickly and easily analyze any crossover between the different layers of segmentation that we use. Since we use quite a lot of different layers and have more than 160 partners, it can get quite complex! So ChartMogul is very useful for us. We can drill down and see which segments are performing well and which we need to focus on”
Running pricing experiments
Like most SaaS businesses, PieSync understands the power of pricing changes to unlock massive business growth. Ruben and the team run occasional pricing experiments to see the downstream impact of small changes.
This past summer, Ruben adjusted the pricing for new users. They used ChartMogul to test the following changes across the customer journey:
- How will pricing impact PieSync’s trial-to-paid conversion rate?
- Will pricing changes increase our average sale price?
- Will customers on the new pricing plan stick around? Will retention be higher compared to customers on earlier plans?
- How will the new pricing impact expansion revenue; i.e. their likeliness to upgrade?
They also use the data coming in from ChartMogul to feed into a custom calculation: average revenue per deal. Essentially, Ruben will follow a cohort of trials and track new business MRR after 30 or 60 days. By dividing the MRR total by the number of trials, he can evaluate the efficacy of pricing changes. In some instances, they’ve been able to increase revenue per trial by more than 30% just from pricing changes.
“ChartMogul’s cohort reports are good for analyzing the pricing experiments that we do because they don’t limit insights to new MRR. We can also combine these reports with the upgrade profile for customers over time and churn as well. So it gives us a much better overview of pricing changes”
Informing the whole organization
It’s not just the growth team using ChartMogul. Everyone at PieSync has access and is able to use revenue and customer data to inform their daily activities. For example, customer success.
The success team is tasked with helping customers achieve their business goals by using PieSync. Part of that is keeping them as active and happy users. ChartMogul is a key part of their software arsenal and helps them track and and analyze churn at both a micro and macro level. They can see which individual accounts are churning out and when, but also can take a look back to identify patterns in churn. This helps them more easily diagnose the root causes of churn and work to address them.
The team also oversees upsells. With ChartMogul, they can use data to generate lists of customers that are good upgrade candidates and work to more them to a more suitable plan.
Ruben appreciates that even those who might not need to be in ChartMogul every day are keep to pop in and quickly interpret data.
“ChartMogul is really easy to use. You can drill down really deep, but it’s also visual for people that aren’t using data that often. It’s easy for us because we don’t have to make fancy presentations to share with the team for themt o get an understanding of the metrics and KPIs. They can just go to ChartMogul and see what’s going on.”