How Ridgeline Powers an Enterprise Buying Motion with HockeyStack

The Who

Ridgeline is the first front-to-back system of record for investment managers. Founded by visionary entrepreneur Dave Duffield (co-founder of both PeopleSoft and Workday), the company was created to modernize an industry held back by outdated, disconnected technology. Powered by a single, real-time data set and embedded AI, Ridgeline helps firms automate complexity, accelerate collaboration, and deliver tailored client experiences at scale, without added headcount or risk. The Ridgeline platform replaces a fragmented tech stack (typically 8+ tools like OMS, CRM, Reporting, Client Portals, and Portfolio Accounting) with a single, continuously updated, unified system. With roughly 500 employees and customers across the U.S. managing complex assets and custom workflows, Ridgeline supports a sophisticated, high-consideration enterprise buying process.

The Problem

Before adopting HockeyStack, the Ridgeline marketing team was manually mapping digital and offline touchpoints over long sales cycles to find patterns in what worked. They were making educated guesses with painstaking effort—not confident, real-time assertions. Data was fragmented across multiple systems and people, and attribution was largely anecdotal.

“Understanding our customers’ paths to a purchase decision before HockeyStack was really anecdotal and required extensive manual research across digital channels, inboxes, rsvp lists, and spreadsheets. That understanding is critical to our growth, but it was not a process we could scale

Their event programs, while core to the brand’s presence, were difficult to optimize because there was little visibility into how those offline interactions actually fit into the buyer journey.

“We needed a way to aggregate everything we were doing into one place—and to customize it to how we view our full go-to-market motion.”

The Requirements

In a relationship-heavy market, with lengthy sales cycles and 30-40 year industry veterans making decisions through personal relationships, legacy attribution tools didn’t cut it.

They needed a platform that could combine quantitative data with qualitative signals like self-reported attribution—something flexible enough to capture and reflect the nuances of a relationship-based sales cycle.

“Traditional attribution missed everything that makes our market unique—word-of-mouth, peer influence, complex evaluation cycles. We needed something that could reflect the full journey.”

The Alternatives

Ridgeline evaluated analytics aggregators which could pull data from multiple sources—but required heavy analyst lift and offered little interpretive power.

“Those tools could merge data, but they stopped there. There was no interpretation, no journey model—just spreadsheets. We needed to move faster than that.”

They also lacked the ability to visualize enterprise sales cycles across multiple touchpoints.

“We needed to see the entire buyer journey over years, not just a few clicks. HockeyStack’s timeline modeling was the only thing that could show that.”

What set HockeyStack apart:

• Timeline modeling: Visibility across long, multi-touch sales cycles—combining self-reported and traditional attribution.
• Unified data layer: Seamless integration of HubSpot, Salesforce, and web analytics—no manual stitching required.
• Interpretability: Insights built for decision-making, not just reporting.
• Journey visualization: The ability to connect how early interactions lead to deeper engagement 

The Insights

With full-funnel visibility, Ridgeline can treat go-to-market as an investment portfolio. Every initiative—across content, paid media, and events—is evaluated through the lens of pipeline acceleration and ROI.

Before HockeyStack, events were viewed as top-of-funnel plays. But once Ridgeline saw real buyer journeys visualized, they discovered event attendance was more impactful late in the decision cycle—often after multiple digital and offline touches.

“It was a huge shift. Events aren’t primarily how prospects first connect with us—they’re how they convert. That realization completely changed how we invest and think about the value of face time with our prospective customers.”

The Results

Today, HockeyStack powers Ridgeline’s data-driven marketing strategy. Instead of relying on assumptions, they operate with clarity across the entire funnel—from first touch to closed-won.

Results:

• Full-funnel visibility across enterprise sales cycles
• Strategic shift in event investment and measurement
• Quarterly planning anchored in revenue insights
• Clear alignment across marketing and sales using shared dashboards

"Being able to compare different attribution models and pull all these different sources of data into the same instance... It's everything that we need. HockeyStack offers us a lot of flexibility to guide important and strategic actions."

‍