How Yext Modernized Enterprise GTM Reporting With HockeyStack

The Who

Yext is a leading brand visibility platform that helps companies get found first, trusted most, and chosen more often across AI search, traditional search, the social web, and direct communications.

Jonathan Cherry is a Senior Manager of Marketing Operations & Insights at Yext, working closely with Bryan Fishkin, Senior Marketing Manager, and Nichola Nichols, Marketing Insights Analyst. As a team, they’re responsible for measurement systems that connect marketing activity to real business outcomes. As Yext evolved their go-to-market strategy, the team needed a modern attribution and reporting foundation that could reflect how B2B buying actually works across channels, across time periods, and across both marketing and sales engagement.

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The Problem

As Yext was evolving its go-to-market strategy, the marketing team realized their measurement framework no longer matched how buyers actually behaved.

Before HockeyStack, Yext relied on a homegrown attribution system and Salesforce reporting that forced opportunities into a binary view: sales-sourced or marketing-sourced. While simple to report on, this model failed to reflect the reality of a complex B2B buying journey where meaningful marketing and sales interactions happen both before and after an opportunity is created.

“We were tagging all of our opportunities as either sales or marketing sourced. And the sales cycle is just not that black and white.”

Because the team couldn’t reliably measure influence across the full funnel, they were pressured to over-index on tactics that were easiest to attribute -- primarily gated content and lead generation ads.
This created two major issues:

• Poor buyer experience: Over-gating thought leadership made the website overly transactional and limited engagement.
• Suboptimal investment decisions: Brand awareness, thought leadership, and top-of-funnel campaigns were deprioritized—not because they didn’t work, but because their impact couldn’t be measured.

“It definitely made hitting our pipeline goals trickier, because we didn’t have the capabilities to measure how top-of-funnel or brand awareness advertising efforts contribute to pipeline.”

Without visibility into anonymous web traffic, multi-touch influence, or channel-level ROI, Yext’s team was often forced to choose campaigns based on what could be reported on, not what actually performed best. Their homegrown system was also clunky, error-prone, and difficult for stakeholders to use, limiting trust in the data and slowing down decision-making.

The result: marketing goals were misaligned with desired outcomes, reporting was time-consuming, and the team lacked confidence in where to double down or pull back across channels.

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The Requirements

Yext had clear criteria for what a new platform needed to deliver:

• Measure anonymous web visitor impact so they could ungate content and still understand influence
• Unify spend + performance in one place across ad platforms, Google Sheets, and Salesforce
• Switch attribution models dynamically (first touch, last touch, multi-touch) based on the question at hand
• Clean, marketer-friendly UI so reporting could be self-serve and actually save time
• Credible drill-down reporting—if “Organic Search influenced $4M in pipeline,” Yext needed to click into that number and show the exact deals behind it
• Segmentation for real GTM decisions, including slicing by industry, territory, and account segments to make insights actionable for marketing and sales

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The Alternatives

Yext primarily weighed two paths:

1) Continue investing in a homegrown attribution system

The internal system was clunky, hard for stakeholders to use, and frequently ran into data errors. More importantly, it didn’t scale to channels and requirements that mattered most, like measuring the impact of anonymous web traffic, organic search, and other channels outside a narrow lead-gen motion.

2) Move forward with a different platform, Bizible

Yext evaluated Bizible due to prior team exposure, but chose HockeyStack as it made insights feel more tangible. The ability to segment results and, critically, drill into pipeline numbers and see the specific deals, made it easier to build trust with sales and stakeholders.

“With HockeyStack, we really quickly could click into that number, see the exact deal breakdown… it made the numbers tangible.”

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The Insights

HockeyStack quickly changed how Yext understood what was influencing pipeline and where they should invest.

• Buyer Journey surfaced hidden deal-cycle influence: Using HockeyStack’s Buyer Journey reporting, Yext saw that blogs and case studies were being consumed heavily during active deal cycles, something their previous framework didn’t measure or optimize for. Suddenly, content engagement became a measurable lever during pipeline creation, not a “nice-to-have” activity.
• Brand awareness became investable because it became measurable: Before HockeyStack, Yext felt forced to lean on lead gen because it was simpler to measure. With HockeyStack, they could tie top-of-funnel and brand advertising (like LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads) to pipeline influence by connecting impressions and engagement to downstream outcomes.
• Reporting became believable because it became provable: A major unlock was credibility: when Yext shared insights like “organic search influenced pipeline,” they could click into the number and show deal-level breakdowns. That made internal reporting more trusted and sales collaboration more effective.
• Unexpected expansion into PLG + ops use cases: Beyond attribution, HockeyStack became a broader reporting layer for the business:
  
  • A newer product-led growth experience where HockeyStack replaced parts of traditional analytics tooling
  • BDR manager reporting (event follow-up and activity reporting) that was clunky in Salesforce
  • Full-funnel reporting for a new PLG website experience, from signup → onboarding → checkout, combining web performance and Salesforce campaign activity
• Early wins with AI and automation: With Odin, Yext automated a weekly workflow: every Monday, Odin emails budget pacing vs. quarter progress, replacing a manual process and helping the team act faster on spend pacing.

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The Results

With HockeyStack, Yext shifted from optimizing for what was easiest to measure to optimizing for what actually drives pipeline, using influence-based measurement, deal-level proof, and self-serve reporting. Yext achevied the following results:

• Rebuilt measurement around influence (not binary sourcing). Yext moved beyond “sales-sourced vs. marketing-sourced” to measure meaningful marketing and sales engagement across the full buyer journey—before and after opportunities are created.
• Ungated content without losing visibility. By measuring the impact of anonymous web visitors, Yext reduced reliance on hard gates and improved the website experience while still tying engagement back to pipeline influence.
• Made brand and top-of-funnel spend investable. HockeyStack enabled the team to connect impressions and engagement (including LinkedIn Thought Leadership Ads) to downstream pipeline influence—unlocking better channel prioritization beyond lead gen.
• Increased stakeholder trust with deal-level drill-down. When sharing insights like “channel X influenced pipeline,” the team could click into the number and show the exact deals behind it—making reporting tangible for sales and leadership.
• Scaled adoption across the org. More than 20 marketers log into HockeyStack weekly, supporting a shift toward self-serve reporting and faster decision-making.
• Automated a recurring operational workflow with Odin. Yext replaced a manual budget pacing process with an automated weekly email every Monday that compares spend vs. quarter progress and flags under/over pacing.
• Expanded beyond attribution into core GTM reporting. HockeyStack grew into a broader reporting layer for the business, including PLG funnel reporting (signup → onboarding → checkout) and BDR/event follow-up activity reporting that was previously clunky in Salesforce.

“Without HockeyStack, we were limited to what we could prove with lead gen. Now we can invest in educating and engaging buyers and still tie it back to pipeline.”