Announcing the Twilio Segment Data Momentum Award Winners

Companies that use customer data to generate insights end up outperforming their peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin. With that data point in mind, it’s clearer than ever that customer data is critical to the success of any business—but unfortunately, the majority of companies still struggle to use data effectively. 

That’s why we launched the first-ever Segment Data Momentum Awards.

The Data Momentum Awards were born out of the inspiring stories we hear from our customers on a daily basis—stories of accomplishments that fuel the entire success of businesses—but too often happen in the background where the work is felt but not seen. By sharing these stories, our goal is to shine light on the various ways companies have found success in applying customer data to change their company trajectories. We hope you can be inspired by their results to drive similar impact in your organizations.

This year, we opened up four award categories: Data Impact, Data Culture Transformation, Data Creativity, and Data for Good. Each of these categories aligns to Segment’s own core values, Drive, Tribe, Focus, and Karma, which we live every day here at Segment. We regularly celebrate Segment team members who embody these values, so it was only natural to extend this honor to recognize our customers for their accomplishments.

On behalf of the entire Segment team, we’re honored to announce the following 2019 Segment Data Momentum Award winners:

Data Impact: IBM

The Data Impact award recognizes an organization that has modernized its infrastructure to unlock data that powers innovative customer experiences and drives business impact. 

With more than 400,000 employees worldwide and a growing product portfolio, IBM is the leader in enterprise services, security, and systems. To keep up with surging customer expectations, the Growth & User Engagement team set out to improve IBM’s customer data infrastructure. They knew they needed to better understand user engagement and unify the customer experience across multiple product offerings when their data was previously siloed. 

Segment served as the infrastructure standard and data governance platform to accelerate IBM’s growth across its cloud product portfolio. With Segment, IBM now enables different product teams to easily collect data and share with downstream tools, getting visibility across all cloud products for the first time. IBM now uses Segment data and integrations for in-depth data science, iterative product improvements, and hyper-targeted event-based communication—all of which drive customer adoption, retention, and conversion. 

By rolling out a modern data architecture across 130+ global product offerings, IBM has achieved:

• 10x ROI on its instrumentation investment

• 4x increase in trial-to-paid user conversion rates

• 30% increase in product adoption

• 17% increase in billable usage

Data Culture Transformation: AB-InBev

The Data Culture Transformation award recognizes an organization that has revolutionized the way it elevates data in order to build a culture focused on data-driven insights.

With well over 500 brands and a myriad of beer varieties, AB-InBev—maker of Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois—is the leading global brewer. While working to digitize its merchant buying experience, AB-InBev recognized an opportunity to enhance its B2B e-commerce platform with real-time data and analytics. The team turned to Segment to provide a data infrastructure that would help AB-InBev save its merchants’ time and resources to better manage their own businesses. 

With Segment implemented, more well-established business units such as customer success, trade marketing, and promotions can now take advantage of enhanced targeting and engagement campaigns. For example, the customer success team can use the data from ‘Rate my Delivery’ or ‘Order Cancellations’ to directly contact and address merchant needs through proactive engagement messaging. This ultimately saves merchants’ time and resources and allows them to better manage their own businesses. By building a strong global customer data infrastructure with Segment, AB-InBev has unlocked a culture focused on enabling better visibility into customer trends and insights at a global scale.

AB-InBev has onboarded 16 global markets to this new data infrastructure and has driven:

• Improved sales performance through stronger customer success offerings and more personalized business development strategies.

• New business capabilities, like algorithmic selling, loyalty programs, and personalized customer engagement campaigns.

• Stronger connections with merchants and the communities they serve.

Data Creativity: Proposify

The Data Creativity Award honors an organization using data analytics to solve business challenges in a unique and innovative way. 

Proposify, a leading online proposal software company, was beginning to see significant uptick in growth but had lean and nimble sales and development teams to convert incoming leads. With a major new product release on the horizon, the company worried it did not have the proper tracking plan in place nor data parity across its various systems to effectively turn interest into happy, paying customers. To streamline this process and bring scale to teams across the organization, Proposify chose Segment.

Since implementing Segment, Proposify was able to creatively implement a new, more sophisticated lead scoring model in Marketo and Salesforce that accounted for new and enriched customer data from Clearbit on business firmographics, as well as how customers interacted with their website. With this additional context on customers, the sales team was able to shorten the sales cycle significantly, and the support and success teams were able to provide better assistance to customers faster through Gainsight and Intercom.

With Segment, Proposify has realized:

• 152% increase in sales pipeline

• 312% increase in sales velocity

• New Customer Success tool implemented in one month

• Negative net MRR churn almost every month

Data for Good: Upsolve

The Data for Good Award celebrates an organization that is applying data towards the greater good.

Upsolve is a non-profit helping 20 million low-income Americans in financial distress get a fresh start through Chapter 7 bankruptcy at no cost. The organization relies on data to improve and automate a process that typically involves months of working with expensive lawyers and filing extensive paperwork. Upsolve has helped thousands of people who have experienced everything from domestic violence and homelessness, to unexpected medical emergencies and predatory loans. In order to continue to provide best-in-class service for a fraction of the price, Upsolve needed to iterate on its platform, moving toward full automation.  

Having an incredibly small development team, Upsolve implemented Segment to help augment its business model and find new pathways to growth and self-sustainability. Spanning across Connections and Personas, Upsolve’s Segment implementation afforded the team in-depth analytics for a better understanding of its users, expanded metrics around anonymous visitors and content efforts for SEO growth, and personalized lifecycle marketing. 

With Segment, Upsolve has:

• Achieved 24% month-over-month growth

• Helped 1,800 US families clear their debt

• $100M of debt cleared

Congrats to the winners of the inaugural Data Momentum Awards, and to all the data innovators who share your stories with us. 

We can’t wait to see how next year’s entries evolve as companies continue to find new and interesting ways to drive meaningful business impact with data. 

Want to learn more about Segment? Get in touch for a personalized demo.