Smart Events, Time Windows, & More

Milestones have become a central part of Variance for all of our customers. It’s how they track account and contact progress against their customer journey. The concept of Milestones—a way to use actual customer behavior to track their progress—is powerful. The problem we’ve run into is that as soon as customers start using Milestones, they find other behaviors they also want to track that don’t quite rise to the level of being a “milestone” like onboarded or PQL. They want to keep their list of Milestones pristine. That’s pretty cool and mirrors the way traditional sales generally wants to keep their opportunity stages pristine. 

Enter Smart Events. Smart Events take the functionality of Milestones and extend them to a new part of the product. Now you can add as many different Smart Events as you want to track while still keeping your Milestones as a clean representation of your customer journey. The good news is that Smart Events will look very familiar if you’ve built a Milestone:

Just like Milestones, you can also tap into all the Smart Event data by filtering any list … 

And you can be notified when Smart Events are achieved by adding them to a Stream …

But, that’s not all …

Time Windows

If you noticed something new on that Smart Event builder interface, good eyes. We’re very excited to announce that Variance now supports time windows across Milestones and Smart Events. That means instead of just building against the raw counts (has been performed X times), you can also manage it against time (within the last Y days). It’s super easy to add a time window:

A Big Breakthrough in Time-Windowing: Early Warning Signs

One unique thing about our time windows is that we can notify you of both entrance and exit to the Milestone/Smart Event. In other words, if you build a Smart Event with a time window like the one above, not only will we send you a notification when an account has added three users in the last 14 days, but we will also send you one when they no longer qualify. For some teams, the latter is more important than the former, as they want an early warning when activity wanes. Here’s how that looks in Variance:

And Slack:

This is one of our most requested features, and we’re excited to launch it to the world.

CSV exports

Another heavily requested feature. You can now export any account or contact list view as a CSV. Just set your filters and then hit the download button.

Key events updates

This one comes courtesy of a customer request (thanks, Jason!). You'll now see a toggle on any activity chart that allows you to flip between all events and just key events (here’s a quick reminder on what key events are and how they work).

But that’s not the only update with key events. We’ve also added a new chart to give you a quick view of your key event activity at the contact and account level. The goal with our timeline views is similar to what your revenue team might have come to expect from tools like Gong, but instead of showing you what your customer is saying, we are showing you what your customer is doing.

Here’s what it looks like when you mouse over those circles:

Sync event properties to accounts and contacts

In our last changelog, we talked about the ability to sync event property data to accounts. We have now ungated that feature and added the ability to also sync that same data up to the contact. This is useful if you have specific data that comes through on an event that you would like to be filtering a view on or sending to a CRM. A perfect example is survey data, which generally comes through as a set of properties on the event but is best used as properties on the account or contact.

Syncing that data is super simple:

Other Updates

• Add contact Milestones onboarding step that makes it easy to create persona-based contact Milestones
• Display Milestones in list view as icon only
• Replace the tag onboarding step with key events
• Hide the activity toggle on event type pages
• Better markdown rendering for descriptions
• Prompt admins to setup key events