Retool consolidated all ETL jobs in Polytomic

About Retool

Retool is a visual app builder that massively cuts down on the time and people needed to develop applications. Companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 500s use Retool to rapidly develop applications with minimal engineering time.

We spoke with Jonathan Krangel, Head of Revenue Operations at Retool, about their use of Polytomic to sync data between their internal systems.

About Retool’s Revenue Operations Team

In Jon’s words, Retool’s’ Revenue Operations team is the Product Management team for the go-to-market (GTM) side of the house. It’s their job to be obsessed with their users, whether in each of the GTM verticals (e.g. sales, customer success, SDR) or those that operate cross-functionally (e.g. the CFO and finance team).

The Revenue Operations team is responsible for the technology stack as well as ensuring its applications, operations, and reporting serve the aforementioned stakeholders in a manner that’s fast, scalable, and accurate. It’s their job to constantly add features and ensure scalability in order to meet the growing needs of the business and the cross-functional users that consume their data.

"It’s incredibly important for my team to have the agility to immediately solve organization-wide data problems that impact GTM as soon as we anticipate them. Rather than spending weeks depending on other teams, Polytomic grants us the ability to implement solutions on our own."

Retool's World Before Polytomic

Although Salesforce sits at the center of Retool’s GTM operations, like any growing company they acquired many other tools as well as a data warehouse. In order to ensure smooth operations, all these data siloes need to integrate with Salesforce. Historically, doing this required an internal tools team and all the overhead and favor-negotiation that entails.

After Polytomic

Polytomic takes care of all the above. Whether it’s ETL (extract, transform, and load) into the data warehouse, Reverse ETL (syncing from the data warehouse into Salesforce and other tools), or other use cases like in-flight transformations or connectivity with arbitrary APIs.

"Polytomic does all that and more. It also grants us use cases we did not even envision when we bought the tool. For example: managing cross-object reporting within Salesforce without involving the data warehouse. I am able to pull data from Salesforce, transform it, then send it back to Salesforce all without touching the data warehouse."

Reducing Dependencies on the Data Team

Because of Polytomic, Jon’s team is able to manage all data pipelines that flow both into and out of Salesforce without needing to consume Data team resources.

As Jon says, the Revenue Operations team is better positioned than the Data or IT teams to manage the unique challenges of Salesforce with all of its many modes, settings, and limits. Not only does Jon’s team need to sync data into and out of Salesforce, but they also need to have tight control over how data is transformed within Salesforce.

Polytomic allows them to do all this and thus load-balance all their operations on their Salesforce instance, rather than splitting up operations to be handled by different teams and risking collisions. One feature of Polytomic that is particularly appreciated is the ability to transform Salesforce data in-place without requiring a round trip to the data warehouse.

"Sometimes, all I want to do is transform some Salesforce data in-place. Polytomic does not force me to depend on a round-trip to the data warehouse with the freshness latencies that entails. Instead, I get to run my transformation on current data in Salesforce without involving any other infrastructure."

Polytomic's Generic API Connector

In addition to native integrations, Polytomic has the ability to connect to arbitrary APIs. Jon makes use of this feature for certain niche use cases: a vendor may not have a full API integration but has enough endpoints that serve necessary data. Polytomic makes it easy to connect to these endpoints and pull any data into any other system or spreadsheet, all without involving engineers.

Polytomic's Customer Support

"Polytomic’s customer support has been unbelievably great. The level of consistent, immediate responsiveness has been a huge benefit to us. It’s clear that Polytomic invests in the success of our business in a way that most companies talk about but don’t actually do. More than just support, we feel we have a thought partner."

Retool's Future With Polytomic

As Retool continues to grow, Polytomic will continue in its role of being the connective tissue between the systems fueling this growth.

"Polytomic permeates every corner of our operations and provides me with a single pane of glass to see all data flowing through my stack."