Klipfolio Connects Hundreds of Data Sources With Powerful, Intuitive Dashboard Builder That Gives Businesses Easy Access to Metrics

TL; DR: Everything about business seems to be moving toward data-driven decisions. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics can bring team members toward a common goal and improve performance across the board. For many small businesses, getting started with analytics can be daunting, but Klipfolio provides a dashboard designed — and priced — for anyone with the will to do it. Klipfolio’s Marketing Manager, Jonathan Taylor, spoke to us about the company’s dedication to making business intelligence manageable and rolling out enhancements that benefit both non-technical and technical users.

As businesses become more keenly aware of the value of analytics, Klipfolio is proving metrics dashboards are not something only executives can use to make high-level decisions.

Marketing Manager Jonathan Taylor described a conversation he recently had with a Klipfolio customer named Dave, who had recently been promoted to a managerial role and wanted to track his team’s key performance indicators.

“He’s a great seller but was still learning the management part,” Jonathan said. “One of the things that he immediately wanted to was lead the data journey of his team. He’s learning not just what the KPIs are but understanding them and the psychology behind them.”

Within six months of using Klipfolio’s dashboard builder and integrations, Dave was building information portals and displaying them on a television in the office. The metrics ended up becoming a rallying point for Dave’s team that ultimately led to better performance. According to Jonathan, the “I have to hit this number” mentality made a big difference in results.

“The awareness of the power of data is the big trend for folks who traditionally would not have had access to it,” he said. “Our products are very much geared toward the individuals within a team who are spearheading these kinds of innovations.”

Since the company’s beginnings in 2011, Klipfolio has grown to serve upward of 10,000 organizations. Many users are team leaders within businesses that are just getting started with tracking KPIs.

“The vast majority of our customers are starting their reporting and analytics journey with us,” Jonathan said.

Klipfolio’s affordability compared with that of competitors makes the company appealing to a range of customers. Plans geared toward small businesses cost $29 per month, while large organizations with more account, dashboard, and publishing needs could spend up to $199 each month.

“It’s not an onerous solution by any stretch of the imagination once you’re ready for that type of analytics,” Jonathan said. “For a typical business intelligence dashboard, you’re looking at thousands of dollars to get started. We allow them to do it for themselves for a fraction of that cost.”

Identifying the metrics worth tracking and locating relevant data sources can be daunting for businesses taking their first plunge into analytics. Klipfolio helps both novice and experienced clients identify the top KPIs that are most relevant to their organization and simplify the data points into an accessible package.

“If you set up something like Google Analytics on your website, all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Well, look at all this data, but what the heck does it all mean?’” Jonathan said. “Our platform provides guidance on how to distill that information.”

As someone who has been with the company for about seven years, Jonathan has seen a range of customers benefit from Klipfolio’s abilities to show business metrics holistically and get the data to the people who can benefit from it.

“Klipfolio can save me a lot of time building reports for my C-level executives,” Jonathan said. “I can give them the data, and then they constantly have visibility into what we’re doing. I’m providing the information they want, in a way that I don’t have to spend an hour putting these reports together every couple of weeks.”

Coming from a wide variety of industries, departments, and technical abilities, Klipfolio customers all have one thing in common — they’re all looking for metrics to bring clarity to their work and business goals. Klipfolio lets them do this independently and without limits, Jonathan said.

“From a competitive standpoint, we can play a very interesting role in disrupting some of the traditional business intelligence players who rely on those professional service contracts,” he said. “We say, however, that if you have someone relatively technical on your team who can spend some time on Klipfolio, there’s really nothing you can’t do.”

Klipfolio is firmly anchored around making data simple for employees at small and medium businesses, but the company also excels at providing robust flexibility and customizations that enable organizations to dig deep into their data.

“It’s kind of an illusion that simplicity is all that we provide,” Jonathan said. “We actually provide a lot of complexity underneath all that. The developers and folks on the operations side of the business can do some sophisticated stuff.”

The company’s high-touch support team enables customers to get the most out of the Klipfolio platform by providing free chat support and assistance get up and running for those who reach out.

“We’re not on top of customers constantly,” Jonathan said. “We have an onboarding experience for every customer who raises their hand. For technical folks, 50% of the time, they don’t want to hear from us, they just want to build. They’re very independently minded, and it’s pretty easy for them.”

In terms of how Klipfolio drives its business and innovations, Jonathan explained the platform road map always comes back to the company’s mission statement of making metrics accessible to anyone with ambition to pursue them.

“Our product team is on this continuous mantra of, ‘How can we make it easier for people like me to be able to go to the platform and get the metrics that we need to be successful, without having to call on our development team?’” Jonathan said.

The company has a long history of keeping a keen eye on the market for data-driven products that meet changing customer needs. Although Klipfolio started with the current cloud application in 2011, the company’s founders actually got their start with a dashboard app for Windows in 2001.

“There is a heritage here around using data, but there’s also a business methodology,” Jonathan said. “The founders are very good at sensing the market shift and the opportunities.”

This business sense has centered Klipfolio’s strategy on making data a unifying point for organizations and teams. Giving customers the tools to manage and customize their metrics is key to achieving that goal.

“The challenge we’re focused on is, ‘How do we make sure that everyone in the organization is rallying around metrics and connecting out to those services?’” Jonathan said. “That’s the direction in which we’re moving: to empower people to do the customizations and the kind of metrics monitoring that’s impactful for their business.”

To that end, Klipfolio is consistently working on new features to make customization easier and give developers the best possible access. The company recently released a new Salesforce connector that provides an interface for non-technical users to view metrics extracted from database queries. Jonathan said features like these are “unifying the metrics universe” for customers.

“Those types of developments are front and center for us,” he said.

Klipfolio’s office culture — right down to where they work, in a quirky space near downtown Ottawa — reflects the company’s creative approach to KPI solutions.

“We just moved into a new office at the end of last month,” Jonathan said. “We got to take over an old movie theater two blocks away from our Parliament buildings.”

It’s the kind of office where employees can pop their head over desk partitions to talk to coworkers or their boss, he said. The open, collaborative environment is enhanced by an internal organization that promotes input from every angle of product development.

“We have a large R&D team, and it’s segmented into four or five different groups focused around different aspects of the product experience,” Jonathan said. “We’ll have one cluster of developers, and attached to that group we’ll have a product manager, someone from our customer success and support team, someone from the marketing team, as well as someone from the UX team. There’s a very cross-functional approach to everything that we do. Not a feature rolls out where we don’t have input from every department.”