I know a lot of organizations have really struggled in the current environment, but the last six months have actually been quite exciting for us at Yellowfin. We’ve achieved a lot and have built a fantastic strategy for the future.
We’re staying focused
We have really focused in on our sales organization, hiring a new VP of Global Sales, Josh Read, and appointing new sales leadership in the regions as well. We’ve done a lot of work building out our sales organization with people who have a greater depth of experience selling BI software and into enterprise.
That, along with our new go-to-market strategy, is having a demonstrable impact on the leads and opportunities that we’re doing today. We really understand our target market, how we’re selling to them, and what resonates with them which is fantastic.
We’re on cloud 9
On top of that, we released Yellowfin 9 late last year and the result of that has been recognition from Gartner who included us in the visionary quadrant. But more importantly, it’s also resonating with our customers who love using Yellowfin 9. We’ve also seen our net promoter score increase significantly compared to last year, so that’s been a real testament to the whole team.
Yellowfin 9 packaged up so many things that our customers had been asking for and it’s lifted our product to another level that is unique. The feedback that we’ve had from our customers has just been phenomenal – everyone who’s used it has said it’s a fantastic experience and a complete change from what they had used previously. That combined with a real focus on customer success and building out our processes and methodology has really lifted our product.
Since the introduction of Yellowfin 9 our business has also pivoted towards people that embed complex analytical products and that means the nature of the conversations we’re having with customers has changed. They recognize us as a leader in this space and this has really highlighted to me Yellowfin’s points of differentiation.
We’re adapting
Lastly, I think working from home and being forced to think and work differently has had a huge impact on our organization. It’s proven our resilience and that we can remain very productive in this environment. We’re currently doing a lot of hiring and the talent in the market is phenomenal, which is an opportunity for us. The only negative has been that we’re paying for a new office in Melbourne that we haven’t been able to use yet.
This environment has also really helped us to stop, reflect and think about what’s critical to our business and what things we really need to focus on moving forward. As an organization, we’re very focused on helping customers get to the ‘why’ faster. So we’ve used this time to focus on the entire customer journey in Yellowfin – from awareness through to go live. We’re now refining and improving that and really focusing on our processes and offering along the way.
The organization will change dramatically as a result. We’re looking at everything from training people, helping people get the most out of Yellowfin, giving access to partners who deliver services that improve our product and helping customers get higher adoption. It’s a multi-faceted approach.
We’re all in this together
In the next six months, you’re going to see a very different customer experience from Yellowfin that optimizes that journey. Our goal is to delight our customers and that’s what I’m really looking forward to doing.
Yellowfin 9.2 release highlights
In this release, we’ve focussed on providing exceptional capability for our customers – both enterprise and software companies – to create and deploy embedded analytics experiences that drive user adoption with minimum amount of effort and coding.