How Jamey Harman, Senior BizOps Analyst at Guru, is using data to support CS with health scores and more automated processes

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Jamey Harman, Business Operations Analyst at Guru, has a lot on her plate. She began on the customer success team working directly with customers, before transitioning to the business operations team where she helps the customer success and sales teams access the data they need to scale their efforts and drive revenue for the business.

What’s your role at Guru? How did you first get started working with data?

When I started at Guru, I was in customer success. I was working directly with clients, supporting their needs every step of the way – but I always had a love for data as well. So I started integrating myself into the world of data with baby steps: By learning a bit of SQL and taking some online classes. 

Once I had some knowledge, I began building reports for the customer success team. After doing that for a while, I realized that I would love to be in data full-time, so I transitioned to the business operations team so I could support the customer success and expansion AE teams. Now, I help these teams access and understand their data so that they can scale their efforts and be as efficient as possible in driving revenue.

What are some of your data needs?

We have a lot of data needs! While many of them are addressed by our data engineers and our analytics team, we’ve increasingly sought to democratize access to all teams across the company. With a limited amount of time, we’ve always asked ourselves, “How can we ensure that the entire team has access to the data we need to be more effective?” 

As an example, our sales reps often ask for certain types of Salesforce data so that they can create targeted campaigns for specific populations in Outreach because they know prospects with certain attributes will be more likely to expand with us. 

Previously, I had to make a custom report for that team to grant them access to that data. Now, I can just push the data directly into Salesforce, and then they can use that in Outreach to target those populations.

Show & Tell: Creating account health scores and pushing up-to-date data into Google Sheets

We wanted to create a customer health score to help us identify any customers who were a churn risk. There were particular characteristics we knew flagged good health, like product usage, and we wanted to create a query to generate a score to embody this.  Essentially, the goal of our health score is to have the lowest possible number: If you're a zero, you’re the healthiest, but if you're a five, then you're at a high risk of churning. 

Using Census we push that health score, as well as the date it was last updated, into Salesforce every day, and we make it available right on the account page. That way, our customer success team – who is responsible for connecting with customers and preventing churn – has an immediate grasp on the health of any given customer.

This isn’t the only way we’re using automation to make life easier. On the business operations team, I spend a lot of time reporting on forecasting and doing book carving – which are just a few of the repetitive processes that I run every single week.

Census has helped us automate the push from the data backend into Google Sheets so that we can keep our spreadsheets (and data) fresh at all times. This simple automation saves us at least eight hours per week across everyone on our business operations team. Previously, we were going into the data warehouse, writing a SQL query, pulling out that data manually, putting it into a spreadsheet, fixing it, and then sending out that information to business leaders every single week. Now, by having Census push to our Google Sheets every day, we have the baseline data needed in our three core tasks –  forecasting, book carving, and pipeline reviews – all automated. 

What advice would you give to other teams that are interacting with data?

The biggest thing I've learned being in this role, and especially from having been a customer success manager in the past, is to have empathy for others. I love data, and I believe it’s an invaluable tool, but teams need to have empathy and be able to listen really effectively to the leaders about what their challenges are. 

Ultimately, teams need to understand what it is the leaders need from the data. If you have data, but it doesn't meet their needs, then it's effectively useless. By listening carefully and being empathetic to your business partners, you’re set up for success.

It’s important to be proactive, as well. If you identify a need that hasn’t been brought to your attention, raise your hand and share what you’ve noticed. The person who is closest to the data has a crucial role; they have the unique ability to see what’s happening, raise flags when necessary, and, ultimately, help the business use data for good.

Learn more about how Guru uses Census here.

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