What is Data Warehouse?
A centralized repository that stores structured data from multiple sources for analysis and reporting.
Definition
A data warehouse collects data from operational systems (CRM, marketing automation, billing, product analytics) and stores it in a structured format optimized for analysis. Modern cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) have replaced on-premise solutions for most companies. The warehouse acts as the single source of truth for business intelligence, feeding dashboards, reports, and reverse ETL tools that push insights back into operational tools.
Why It Matters
Data warehouses are the foundation of data-driven GTM operations. RevOps teams use warehouses to combine CRM data with product usage, marketing attribution, and financial metrics. Reverse ETL tools like Census and Hightouch push warehouse data back into CRM and marketing tools, creating a feedback loop between analytics and operations. Without a warehouse, each team operates on siloed data.
Example
A B2B company sends Salesforce CRM data, HubSpot marketing data, Stripe billing data, and product analytics to Snowflake via Fivetran. The data team builds models that identify expansion-ready accounts. Census pushes these insights back to Salesforce as account scores, and marketing uses them to trigger targeted campaigns in HubSpot.