In the SaaS world, there’s no shortage of data. But turning all of those numbers and pieces of analysis into shareable knowledge has been a challenge that many companies struggle to fix.
Enter Hex, a workspace for collaborative analytics and data science. Their product is all about empowering users to learn things, and organizations to know things, so everyone can make better decisions with data.
Both Hex and Pocus have the goal of getting data into the hands of the people who need it so they can take action. Hex specializes in giving data scientists and analysts superpowers, while Pocus does the same for GTM teams.
Recently, we chatted with Andrew McNealy, Head of Enterprise Sales at Hex, to learn more about how Hex has grown from mostly PLG to driving pipeline and running effective sales playbooks using Pocus.
The Early Days at Hex
When Andrew joined Hex nearly 3 years ago, the company was pre-revenue with only a handful of small customers. While initially there was a strong internal push for Hex to use a PLG motion, the company quickly learned that while some small customers would self-serve, the bigger customers still had to run complex security and infosec reviews. The plan was to drive traffic to their site, let users request trial access, and “let the bucket fill up with high-intent, qualified leads” for sales to manage. This strategy was hectic and high effort, with Andrew and his first SE managing contacts via a Typeform and manually provisioning trial accounts themselves.
Outside of hand-raisers, Andrew’s team had limited visibility into key signals to help them convert trial users into paid accounts. Sales didn’t have much insight into product usage and were unable to build repeatable playbooks. They also couldn’t see which leads were engaging with marketing content or attending webinars. Much of the buyer’s journey was a black box.
Challenges to Moving Upmarket
As Hex grew, they ditched the manual account creation and implemented a fully self-serve PLG motion, but they still struggled with identifying and converting high-value opportunities. Because Hex relies on a database connection to provide value, the self-serve motion was not an effective way to acquire enterprise accounts. Enterprise companies typically have more stakeholders who need to be influenced, onboarding can be more complex, and security requirements mean more compliance oversight. Enterprise accounts simply can’t “plug and play” the way that SMBs can via self-serve. Moving upmarket would require Andrew’s team of reps to take the lead.
Hex was focused on capturing enterprise customers, but they faced several challenges. They had a large volume of self-serve users to dig through, their existing scoring system didn’t provide much insight, and they struggled with proactive customer retention.
Lots of Data, Little Prioritization
While Hex’s self-serve motion brought in hundreds of sign-ups each month, reps found it difficult to parse through the noise for high-priority upsell and expansion opportunities. Before bringing on Pocus, the team relied on other systems that didn’t give reps access to all of the signals they needed.
“We couldn’t see who had made it through to ‘aha’ moments. We couldn’t identify usage patterns or product signals. We couldn’t make anything repeatable.”
Lead Scoring Didn’t Paint the Whole Picture
Hex’s lead scoring was a black box. On top of the limited product usage data, marketing efforts were largely invisible to Andrew’s team. Reps had limited information on who was showing up to webinars or engaging with marketing content consistently. Without any context on why their scoring system surfaced a lead, reps didn’t know what the best action to take was or how to personalize their outreach.
"Historically we've done a really good job of bringing people into our orbit via webinars, partnership events, and trials, but we relied on the AE's to follow up on all leads - warm and cold. There was no sense of prioritization on which leads were the hottest or where reps should spend their time."
To make matters worse, there was a lack of prioritization or personalization with follow-up. All leads were treated with the same level of urgency and sent the same messages The lack of visibility made sales efforts chaotic and difficult to track or measure.
Stuck Being Churn-Reactive
Sales’ lack of data visibility didn’t just impact their ability to land deals, it also prevented them from proactively retaining revenue. With no line of sight into how their accounts were — or were not — using their product, Andrew’s team couldn’t intervene if they saw slow adoption or a decrease in usage.
Andrew knew that giving his reps access to all of the product data and user signals would help them identify high-value opportunities, personalize outreach, and proactively retain accounts. Building a tool to accomplish all of this would have been time-consuming and incredibly difficult, even for a BI company like Hex. He needed a tool that could provide this information without making sales reliant on the engineering team for all of their data and analytics.
Powerful Insights to Drive Personalized, Timely Outreach
Adding Pocus was a powerful unlock for Andrew and his team. Suddenly, his team had access to all of the product and user data they’d be lacking. With the ability to see all of their intent signals in one place, the Hex team was able to:
- Use signals to power playbooks. AEs leverage Pocus to track engagement in their top accounts, identifying the most active users for targeted expansion playbooks.
- See the full context behind a lead. No more flood of leads with no clear prioritization. By integrating rich data from Hex's platform, Pocus empowered the sales team with valuable context to tailor messaging and prioritize outreach.
- Move from reactive to proactive. SDRs now work from prioritized lead queues in Pocus, broken down by key segments like event attendees, partnerships, and trial users. This allows them to focus on the hottest leads and take timely action. With visibility into product usage data, Andrew’s team is also able to identify at-risk accounts and intervene before the customer begins to churn.
Pocus’ flexible data model makes it easy for the team at Hex to scale playbooks and iterate so much faster. Sales no longer feels bottlenecked by the RevOps and data teams, since they can manage data and reporting on their own.
“I had an SDR reach out to me to say they were going to have the data team pull a list of all of our contacts who have a Snowflake data connection and have at one point taken a specific action in the product. I told them ‘No need — you can build that list in Pocus!’”
The Results: A Repeatable Playbook That Drives $10M in ARR
Perhaps one of the best proof points of Pocus’ impact was Andrew’s ability to land what he called his “white whale” account.
Since joining Hex in 2021, Andrew had been determined to sell their platform to a specific very large public enterprise org. They had tried multiple times via different strategies to break in but had no success setting up a meeting.
One day, an AE let Andrew know that they had set up an initial meeting with this account “out of nowhere.” When he asked how the AE managed to make contact, they told him this account was surfaced in their Pocus dashboard. A senior leader attended a webinar, then became highly engaged in Hex’s trial environment, and was surfaced to the AE to action.
“A quarter ago we would have had no way of knowing that this contact showed up to a webinar or signed up for the trial environment. Being able to connect those dots led to setting up a first call — that was a big one for me. I realized with Pocus we’ve got a repeatable playbook now that we didn’t have before.”
Since implementing Pocus, Hex has seen transformational results across the business:
- Scaled their playbooks to drive over $10 million in ARR
- Improved lead follow-up with prioritized queues for SDRs and AEs
- Reduced management overhead through streamlined Pocus reporting
By gaining a direct line of sight into customer data with Pocus, Hex has scaled its business to new heights while increasing efficiency. The sales and marketing teams are aligned like never before, and empowered to take action on the right opportunities. With a foundation in place to support and steer its rapid growth, Hex is well-positioned to continue its momentum in the enterprise segment and beyond.
Curious about how Pocus can help you turn a variety of signals into revenue?
Book time with a Signal-Based Selling expert on our team.
Adding Pocus as pipeline mission control
- Clear Visibility Into Key Signals: Hex’s sales team doesn’t need to guess which leads are most likely to convert because Pocus prioritizes them all within reps’ inboxes.
- Effective Coaching Tools To Improve Impact: Leaders can now provide feedback to marketing on lead quality, as well as track the outreach effectiveness of their team with integrated reporting tools in Pocus.
- Generating millions in ARR: Having access to all signals in one place has helped Hex build signal-based playbooks that work — driving millions in pipeline.
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