Aviv Canaani, CRO of Datarails, took the company from 90% outbound to 90% inbound and 30x growth. Here’s how he uses audience data, open-ended attribution, and AI to make revenue predictable.
Five years ago, Datarails was a company with a couple million dollars in ARR, and 90% of its deals came from SDRs making cold calls. Today, 90% of its sales come from inbound marketing. The company has grown roughly 30x and raised a $70 million Series C earlier this year. And the person who drove a lot of that, Aviv Canaani, didn’t come from sales. He came from marketing.
Aviv joined Jessie and me on Deconstructing Data, and I went in expecting a conversation about lead gen. What I got was a lesson in what happens when one person owns the entire funnel and has nobody left to blame.
How do you reach CFOs with marketing content they actually care about?
Datarails sells a finance operating system to SMB and mid-market CFOs. One governed layer for all financial data. That’s not exactly an audience you’d expect to find on TikTok. But that’s one of the channels Aviv Canaani and his team are investing in, alongside Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and Instagram.
His insight is simple, and honestly kind of funny.
“Even when CFOs are bored they would doomscroll on their phone and they would look on social media and probably not reading ebooks as a lot of other companies might think.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
So Datarails makes memes, works with finance thought leaders like Secret CFO, and publishes original research on what CFOs are dealing with right now, including how they’re adopting AI. The rule is that the content only has to land with a tiny slice of the market.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s not relevant for 99.9% of the market. It needs to be relevant for the 0.1% of our audience of CFOs.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
Here’s the thing. That’s exactly how you should think about it. You’re not trying to reach everybody. You’re trying to reach the people at the bottom of the funnel, and content built for them eliminates a ton of wasted spend on audiences that were never going to buy. And when you’re competing for attention against celebrities, comedians, and people’s friends in a social feed, the content has to be genuinely good.
Aviv also sees TikTok as wide open territory.
“I believe that TikTok can be what Facebook was like 10 years ago.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
He’s quick to add that it’s all data-driven. His campaign managers are data geeks who care about cost per lead and cost per acquisition, and money only goes where the numbers show it’s working.
Why “How did you hear about us?” beats your attribution software
This was my favorite part of the conversation, and Jessie’s too. She’s been pushing the “how did you hear about us” question for a long time.
Datarails doesn’t rely on attribution software alone. When someone signs up, the form asks how they heard about the company, and it’s an open text field, not a dropdown. The SDRs ask again on the first call. Then every sales call is recorded in Gong, so the account executives pick up even more context.
Aviv shared a story about one of their biggest recent deals. The attribution software said the lead came from Google. The SDR heard “we saw you on social.” Then, mid-call with the AE, the buyer joked that he saw Datarails ads on TikTok all the time, so he finally had to ask for a demo.
“If we wouldn’t have combined all these data points together, we would never know that.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
His marketing team pushed back on the open-ended field years ago because free text was hard to analyze. That problem is basically gone now with LLMs. And as Aviv points out, “LinkedIn” in a dropdown tells you nothing. Was it an ad? An influencer post? A Secret CFO campaign? The messy answer is the useful one. This is how you get visibility into dark social, and it’s why we ask the same question at BDEX. Attribution software will never pick up that someone heard about you on a livestream.
How should you measure brand spend that doesn’t produce leads?
Aviv Canaani allocates about 10% of the Datarails budget to brand. He doesn’t measure it in leads. He measures engagement from the right people: CFOs, controllers, and finance leaders commenting and starting discussions. If a brand campaign gets no engagement from the target audience, it probably isn’t working.
But he’s clear that brand spend is earned by hitting the number first.
“If everything had to show up in a spreadsheet, you would never do anything that’s brand related or anything that’s long term.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
He compared it to a VP of Sales who still spends time hiring and training reps this quarter so they can close deals two quarters from now. You hit your target today, and you invest in the future at the same time. I think that’s the most honest answer to the brand vs. performance debate I’ve heard in a while.
What happens when marketing and sales share one revenue goal?
When Aviv was VP of Marketing, he’d sit in management meetings and say he hit his pipeline number while the VP of Sales said he missed revenue. That never made sense to him.
“It’s one funnel. It’s not two funnels.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
After he took over sales, the first challenge was trust. Reps assumed he wanted more meetings so marketing would look good. It took time to show them he only cared about revenue. Now, when his sales leaders want to tighten the SLA and make it harder to book a demo, his growth team agrees, even if it means 100 fewer meetings. Aligned incentives make those conversations easy. (He cited the old Warren Buffett line about showing him the incentive and he’ll show you the outcome.)
On the data side, Datarails has one RevOps team that owns a single go-to-market data layer across Salesforce and HubSpot, so everyone uses the same definitions for qualified leads and conversion rates. They connected that data layer to Claude, which means anyone on the team can run their own analysis.
I’ve done the same thing with Claude and Salesforce, and it’s been a game changer. You have a conversation over email, tell Claude to update the opportunity, and it adds the notes, updates projections, and pushes the close date out a month because it inferred the deal will take longer. I used to fight with salespeople to get that data into the CRM.
Aviv has gone further. Datarails uses a call-listening tool called Momentum to update Salesforce fields automatically, and revenue per account executive has grown about 20% year over year. He even wrote down everything he used to check at the end of a quarter (deals in the wrong stage, missed follow-ups, unescalated competitor mentions) and gave it to Claude.
“I used to push them a lot at the end of quarter to understand forecasting. I hate to say it, I stopped asking them. I asked Claude and it’s sometimes as good if not better.”
— Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer, Datarails
And Claude doesn’t sandbag. When a rep says 30 days and the deal is really a 90-day deal, Claude will tell you.
The tech stack: Deeto for customer voice and AI closed-lost interviews
Beyond Claude, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Chili Piper for lead routing, Aviv’s standout tool was Deeto, a customer voice platform. It keeps your best customers in one place for reviews, case studies, and reference calls. The really interesting part: Datarails now uses Deeto’s AI to run closed-lost interviews. Lost prospects get paid to talk to an AI interviewer about why they didn’t buy, and Aviv says people open up more than you’d expect.
The bigger picture
What struck me about this conversation is how much of Datarails’ growth came from refusing to accept partial data. Partial attribution, partial pipeline metrics, partial goals. Aviv Canaani pulled it all into one view, one team, and one number: revenue. That’s the same principle we believe in at BDEX. When your data is fragmented, you’re making decisions on a fraction of the truth. When it’s connected and clean, revenue gets a lot more predictable.
Connect with Aviv Canaani: Find Aviv Canaani on LinkedIn (he says he’s the only one there) and learn more about Datarails at datarails.com.
Want cleaner data behind your revenue engine? Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to see how BDEX identity data can power your marketing and sales.
Watch the full episode: How Better Marketing Data Builds Predictable Revenue on YouTube
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
