SendGrid
Case Study
“Subscription growth is just something that can’t be handled by anything but a highly automated and scalable platform like Zuora.” – Yancey Spruill, SendGrid CFO/COO
SendGrid is a leading digital communication platform that processes over 36 billion emails every month.
They needed an infrastructure to scale with their high customer demand and growing transaction volume and provide the data they needed to make better decisions faster.
SendGrid chose Zuora to support their business goals of public market readiness, operational efficiency, and new customer acquisition.
Eight years after implementing the Zuora platform, SendGrid has grown from startup to a public company with 58,000 customers worldwide.
“With Zuora, we have access to the data we need to answer critical questions, from how to scale our sales and marketing investment, to how to understand profitability per customer. Zuora’s platform has enabled us to make better business decisions, faster.” – Yancey Spruill, SendGrid CFO/COO
Zuora Central functions as the essential system for SendGrid’s growth to a public company.
SendGrid provides a cloud-based service that enables businesses to engage with their customers via email, reliably, effectively, and at scale. Since 2009, SendGrid had seen consistent double-digit monthly growth, but such growth brought challenges. Specifically, their homegrown billing system wasn’t able to keep up with the increasing complexity of the company and its service portfolio. And they needed greater insight into their business in order to make informed business decisions on their path to IPO.
SendGrid chose Zuora as the “obvious choice” to tackle their billing and reporting problems and to help support their key business goals of new customer acquisition, operational efficiency, and public market readiness.
Zuora supports new customer acquisition by solving the usage-based billing and reporting complexity of SendGrid’s services portfolio for two types of buyers: developers and marketers. Running on Zuora, SendGrid can handle new discounts, change pricing tiers, and experiment with new pricing models.
SendGrid achieved operational efficiency with the help of Zuora: with Zuora, SendGrid is able to produce revenue numbers on a one-day close cycle.
And, Zuora helped SendGrid with public market readiness. With a single-source-of-truth to track all revenue-related transactions, Zuora provided SendGrid with the ability to access revenue and customer data in real-time on the first of every month and make immediate decisions critical to business strategy and growth.
The Zuora platform opened the doors to an entire world of subscription data for SendGrid, enabling them to make more confident decisions and track the outcomes.
According to SendGrid CFO/COO Yancey Spruill, “With Zuora we have access to the data we need to answer critical questions, from how to scale our sales and marketing investment, to how to our understand profitability per customer. Zuora’s platform has enabled us to make better business decisions, faster.”
The timely and accurate real-time data that SendGrid draws from the Zuora platform has kept them growing. As Spruill notes, “Subscription growth is just something that can’t be handled by anything but a highly automated and scalable platform like Zuora.”