Domo demo piques marketers’ interest, but questions remain

BOSTON — Onstage at VentureBeat’s GrowthBeat Summit, Heather Zynczak, chief marketing officer of business analytics startup Domo, gave audience members a peek into the business intelligence software that spent five years in stealth.

An evangelist for data-based decision-making, Zynczak explained how Domo connects to multiple platforms to deliver precise data about a business. The reason she thinks that combined data is so important is because analytics on a single platform don’t tell a whole story.

For instance, she noticed that LinkedIn was delivering high distribution of their product, but Zynczak wanted to know whether the platform was providing opportunity to her sales team. In her Domo dashboard she was able to see that all commodity value was high on LinkedIn, and the market spend on it was below $2,000. However, she also saw that return on investment for that spend was low. In fact, the largest ROI was actually from Google.

The demo was short and sweet, Zynczak was fantastically practiced, and the interface looked very simple and sleek. That may be enough to pique the interest of audience members, but would it be enough to sell them?

Domo has a ton of competition from startups like Birst, GoodData, Looker, SiSense, and Salesforce’s recently revealed Wave service.

When I asked, GrowthBeat’s audience of CMOs revealed mixed reactions to the afternoon’s demo. Everyone agreed that it looked great, but they had a lot of questions about how the interface could play with the tools they’ve already invested in.

“There’s so much overlap,” said Michael Atwood, VP of business development at marketing shop Wilde Agency. “They may have a part that I want, but I have to invest in the whole thing.” For executives and managers who have already spent money implementing a variety of analytics tools, Domo’s ability to connect with existing intelligence infrastructures will be key.

Speed will be paramount. “Where can it draw data from? How long does it take?” asked Jeff Clark, VP of global marketing at customer experience management agency SDL. He says that he’s worked with intelligence companies in the past that promise to connect to everything, but implementations can take as long as eight weeks.

Domo’s big sell is that it’s easy to use and design-savvy. Its good looks and the media hype surrounding the company and its large financial raises may help bring the company more attention, but ultimately the execs buying its product have more questions about how the tools work in practice.