Main challenges

• Data was stored in databases, but not accessible nor legible to the Sales & CS agents who need it.
• Data must be analyzed and accessed in a GDPR compliant and secure manner.
• The Aikido team didn’t want to sacrifice their development resources to data visualization or lengthy API integration processes.
• Tools like Pendo, Mixpanel, Looker focus on product data, but don’t provide actionable customer-engagement insights out-of-the-box.

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How journy.io meets Aikido's challenges

• Journy.io combines Aikido’s customer data from Hubspot with product and user behavior data. The result is fed into the team’s favorite tools, such as Hubspot and Slack.
• The sales team has access to all the information they need about users. journy.io’s ready-made reports and real-time notifications make it easy to strike when the iron is hot.
• Thanks to journy.io’s Segment integration, set-up was easy and didn’t absorb too much development resources.
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With journy.io, our sales people can very easily visualize when new customers sign up, how they sign up, what they've looked at. We now can program notifications or build playbook automations on that.
— Roeland Delrue, Co-founder @ Aikido Security

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Story

Aikido Security was born from Roeland Delrue and his co-founders’ frustration with the predominantly sales-led cloud security industry. As buyers, they didn’t want to jump through multiple sales-hoops and sign a contract before trying the product, and they definitely didn’t want to pay steep enterprise prices. An industry ripe for PLG disruption.

Aikido managed to cut through the noise with their ‘try before you buy’ angle, self-serve, and quick time-to-value. But the team quickly realized that some prospects have more complicated decision-making cycles and require a bit of hand-holding. Enter Product-Led Sales (PLS).

To turn a Product-Led Sales motion into a success, teams need to meticulously analyze user behavior data (are users showing signs of experiencing prolonged value?) and overlay this with customer data (do the users belong to our ‘Ideal Customer Profile’, and can we detect a buyer?). An effective PLS motion doesn’t intrude, but steps in at exactly when the customer is ripe for monetization. Timing is everything.

This is no easy feat.

• The most interesting data is usually ‘locked away’ in databases, accessible to engineers, but not to the Sales- anc Customer Success people who need it.
• CRMs usually only have ‘static’ customer data (company name and details, contact person, etc.), and most product-analytics tools are only good at telling you which features are being used.

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If you would hire a full-time employee to set up Pendo or Amplitude or Mixpanel to accomplish similar things as journy.io, it would require a ton of manual setup and you most probably would end up building connectors, APIs and a rule-based engine with quite some PLG-specific rules. With journy.io, it all works out of the box.
— Roeland Delrue, co-founder @ Aikido Security

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What Aikido needed was a PLG-first tool, that could mix CRM-data - in their case Hubspot- with product-/user behavior data, make sense of it all, and notify the Sales team when the time is right.
Journy.io fit the bill, right out-of-the box.

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Aikido’s journy.io is set up to send a notification in Slack to let the Sales team know when it’s time to reach out to a customer. journy.io calculates customer health scores to indicate whether someone is at risk of churn or ripe for monetization and sends this data to Hubspot. Sales agents can see which acquisition channels a customer came from, what content they’ve consumed and how they’ve been behaving in the product.
Roeland Delrue is particularly impressed with how the journy.io team has been by his side to make sure he succeeds.