Rudderstack, Segment, & Zapier

Alright, this is a pretty huge changelog. Lots of good stuff to report. The headline is that our official integration with RudderStack, Segment, and Zapier was all released over the last week.

Official RudderStack and Segment Destination

If you're already using Variance you don't have to worry about this one. But for all new users, hooking Variance into your Customer Data Platform of choice is even easier than it was before. To add Variance to either platform you simply choose your source and add the official Variance destination. Setup is easy and covered in our RudderStack and Segment docs.

Zapier Updates

We pushed out our official Zapier app as well. Now Variance is easy to connect to thousands of other SaaS apps. We think Zapier is an incredibly powerful platform and beyond the ability to do obvious things like enrich Variance contacts and accounts with CRM or Clearbit data, you can also push custom events straight from Zapier into Variance. What does this mean? Up until now, a CDP like RudderStack or Segment was the only way to get data over to Variance. Now with Zapier, you can actually create any type of event and associate with a Variance contact or account and follow it just like other events. That means actions from systems like Docusign, Hubspot, or just about anywhere else you can imagine are now able to be layered in as events seamlessly. This fits into our broader vision of helping sales fully realize its event-driven self.

Here's a rundown of all our new functionality:

Triggers

• New Account (Instant): Triggers a Zap when a new account is added to Variance. This is most useful for adding enrichment to your accounts in Variance from either your CRM or an enrichment service like Clearbit. Also makes it easy to send new accounts to downstream tools like CRM if needed.
• New Contact (Instant): Triggers a Zap when a new account is added to Variance. Same use case as New Account.

Actions

• Track Contact Event: Allows you to create an event in Variance. This could come from any connected Zapier trigger. This is most useful for pushing events from systems that might not be available as sources in your CDP like Docusign or email opens.
• Track Account Event: Allows you to create an event in Variance that is associated with only an account and not a contact. This is most useful for tracking account-level events like opportunity stage movement or a daily volume update.
• Create Account: Allows you to create an account in Variance. This is particularly useful if you're pushing new events in and need to associate them with an account.
• Create Contact: Allows you to create a contact in Variance. Same use case as create account.
• Update Account: Allows you to update the properties of an account.
• Update Contact: Allows you to update the properties of a contact.

Searches

• Find Account: Allows you to search for an Account in Variance by ID or domain name. Also allows you to create the account if it's not found.
• Find Contact: Allows you to search for a Contact in Variance by ID or email. Also allows you to create the contact if it's not found.

As always, let us know if you have any questions.

Additional Updates

We've got a long list of additional updates, some of which may be deserving of their very own changelog. Rather than just doing bullets for these, I'm going to give them a little more space to breathe.

Suggested Tags on Follow/Filter By

We introduced tags as a way to create groups of Event Types, Contacts, and Accounts. This makes it much easier to create multiple streams with the same set of filters, for instance. To make this even easier, we've now started to add suggested tags to the Filter By tab on Streams. Just click one and it will automatically filter that stream down accordingly.

Property Previews

Property follows allow you to follow a set of Accounts, Contacts, or Event Types based on a property filter instead of just directly. To make this easier to use, we've now added live previews for when you're following a property. This makes our property filters much more powerful.

Merging Accounts and Contacts

These next two features are much more for the operators paying attention. First, we are offering a way to merge Accounts and Contacts. We know that it's hard to always have data stay clean, sometimes two of the same account or contact show up. Now you can merge those together in a non-destructive way that will simply tell Variance that all of these Accounts and Contacts are the same.

Hiding Properties

Finally, to the point that data isn't always clean, we have added the ability to hide properties to make it easier for your team to navigate Variance. If, for instance, you have some properties that are no longer in use or don't display data in an expected way you can simply hide them from users so they won't be confused. Simply click the overflow menu and you'll be able to hide the property. This won't delete anything or change data in any other system. (You need to be an Admin to see this functionality.)

That's it for this time. Thanks for reading! If you have questions or want to learn more about Variance, please be in touch!