Thomas Schiavone, co-founder and CEO of Calixa, on the PLG data pipeline

Understanding the customer’s pain point is at the heart of building any great product. In this interview, Thomas Schiavone, CEO and Co-founder of Calixa, a product-led sales insights platform, speaks about the importance of having the right analytical tools to get a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs. He also mentions his early days, working at Twilio; the origin of the tool that would become Calixa; the emerging trends in data warehousing; differences between top-down vs bottom-up approaches to sales; as well as his vision for Calixa to unify sales, marketing, and product teams. Read on to understand his hunch-driven, visionary perspectives.

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The following interview was conducted by Sacra— January 2022

Background

Thomas Schiavone is the CEO and co-founder of Calixa.

Questions

Let’s start with context. What is Calixa, and how did you come to start it?

How do people use Calixa? Do they look at the dashboard to see different people or organizations that are important, then go off to a CRM or other tool to actually take action?

You mentioned that Monkey was used by all these different teams internally. I'm curious what kinds of trends you see with Calixa around usage? Is it as dispersed?

On the larger side, are you seeing companies come on that want to just pipe data into Salesforce or HubSpot?

That helps clarify the difference between Calixa, reverse ETL and just a traditional CRM.

Is there a way teams would use both Calixa and Census or Hightouch?

You mentioned your distaste for the term “PLG CRM.” I’d love to hear more about that.

I think part of the problem is obviously having two acronyms, “PLG” and “CRM.” It doesn’t look good.

Do you have a sense of what are the most popular data sources and also the tools people are using to implement learnings from Calixa, whether it's going to another tool or taking action within Calixa to cause an effect in another tool?

In talking about reverse ETL, one thing we hear often is that it’s adopted and used by the data team. Obviously, that's different from tools like Zapier, which completely non-technical teams can use. Where does Calixa fall on that spectrum? How much of an engineering resource need is there to set it up?

Do you have a sense of what changed? It sounds like just carving out data teams as separate from the engineering team was a big part of it.

How important to this is this idea of SQL as the common language that all these tools speak?

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on where HubSpot, Salesforce — the traditional CRMs that were the locus of all customer information — might trend long-term, given both PLG adoption and the data warehouse becoming the center of gravity.

It sounds like you'll have that button the investor wanted that turns companies into PLG.

You talked about this idea of sales being just one aspect of the platform and the future vision being to unify sales, marketing and product. I’m curious to hear more and get into some of your thoughts on the size of the market and TAM.

Zooming in on the modern data stack trend, would you say a big part of that is the data warehouse becoming more important? And when you talk about empowering end users, is that like empowering marketers to use real data sourced from the warehouse and not rely on a filtered view created by someone else?

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