My playbook to help my clients monetize Domo through Embed

Monday, August 18, 2025

I heard a story about the top car salesperson in the country last year. When interviewed, he said "I don't focus on selling people a car- I focus on selling them their next car." That's one of those statements that is so simple, but really makes you think. You have to earn trust from your clients and show you really care about their needs to sell them anything.

When it comes to data, trust in the numbers and platforms like Domo is how I have helped my clients develop brand new revenue streams and I'd like to share how we normally do this. I've done this for 5+ different clients and the play book has evolved, but the core strategy is roughly the same because it's simple and we are always focused on delivering value first.

The Audience

One of the greatest lessons I learned in business school was that you need to focus on your audience in order to build a product for them instead of building a product and then finding an audience. Furthermore, while a lot of strategies can be grouped as "I win, you lose" or "we both win", the strategy I subscribe to is "I win, you win, your customer wins".

So when it comes to your audience, who is your real customer? Where is the need? From my experience, the ideal customer is a client, vendor, etc who wants the ability to look at their data they are giving you whenever they want. Why? Because it helps them keep a pulse on the problem and because it reduces the time it takes them to produce slides and decks to share with their team or stakeholders. So, if I can help my clients look good to their clients which then look good to their managers, it's a win-win-win.

the operations

This is where you can really demonstrate value and it's a bit complex, so if you want to talk more about it, feel free to book 30 min with me and we can discuss. If you have several clients, you are probably ingesting a lot of their data and making dashboards or apps to show their insights on weekly calls or maybe you have to help them get ready for Monthly Business Reviews (MBRs) or Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). This usually is a rush and every time it's a real pain. What if there was a world where they could pull their own data without you having to do it for them? Well, with Domo, that world exists.

Here is usually my basic data operations play to monetize Domo when describing it to my clients:

Gathering ingredients: One very cool ability of Domo is the ability to connect to multiple data sources such as Google Analytics, OneDrive, Quickbooks, Netsuite, etc. If an existing connector doesn't exist, we can usually get it through email attachments, sFTPs or APIs. Regardless, you having Domo is a great because you can consolidate all of your clients' data in one spot to mix and match ingredients to show them real insights. Normally, we start off with sharing something like marketing data and it quickly snowballs into my client's clients asking if they can get insights into their own accounting, sales, operations, etc.

Cooking those ingredients via ETL: Once we have a pipeline that allows us to regularly receive the latest and greatest client info, my clients usually have me build the pipes/recipes/ETLs to process those ingredients automatically once we receive an updated item.

Plating the insights: Now comes the fun part where I'll make or help design dashboards/ apps for my clients to show their clients. This is where plating matters and where my clients love to work with me. If you can get your clients to love your dishes, they will want more and more.

Sharing the meal: Once we get buy-in from my client's clients about design, insights and cadence of updates, we usually use Domo Embed to setup monetization. If you aren't familiar with Domo Embed, you can generate an iframe code that allows you to put your dashboards or apps into your own website. For example, this page is Domo, but it's just embedded into my website. No one would know that unless I told them. So we take this method, paste it into a separate page for clients and then we password protect it on my client's website.

Charging for the meal: After we have embedded Domo into our website for clients to see their own dashboards, my clients usually setup a subscription plan for their clients to maintain access. What's nice about the password method as opposed to individually giving access to a large group of people is that we can change the password whenever we want especially if someone leaves the company. Some clients I've worked with charge $500 a month while others give it away for $0 as a means to retain client partnerships and instead make the embedded dashboards just part of their core offering.

Here's an example of Domo embedded onto my own website via iframe

the DIfferent tiers

Now that you've gotten your clients setup on Domo Embed, there are some additional add-ons you can do to provide even more value. Most of my clients charge for these extra features, but design this however best fits your business strategy. This is usually the value pyramid that I setup with my clients:

Level 1: Embedded Dashboards & App Studio

This is the monthly subscription that you can give to your clients. They can access it whenever they want and take screenshots or export for MBRs, QBRs, etc. Most clients love this level of detail and insights. Also if you show how to use the PowerPoint Domo Plugin or Google Sheets Writeback connector to power their Google Slides...you might as well be their favorite child (I'm an only child and still don't know what this feels like).

Level 2: Alerts & Scheduled Reports

Here is where you can really show additional value. My client's clients love when we demonstrate alerts and scheduled reports. With alerts, we have the ability to get automatic triggers if something happens such as websites going down, spend dropping below a threshold or data being in the wrong format for processing. Then, we amp it up even more with scheduled reports so that my client's clients don't even have to login to Domo to see what's going on. We can automatically send them weekly reports every Monday or 1st of the month, etc so that they can stay up to date on how their business is performing.

Level 3: Sub-instances

What if your client wants the ability to build their own charts in Domo? Well you can do that with sub-instances/ parent-child instances. What you can do is setup a smaller instance of Domo for your clients and you can push data down to their instance. This way they won't see data they shouldn't see and they can mess and around and build whatever they want on their own.

Level 4: Bootcamps

Just because your clients have access to Domo, it doesn't mean they are going to know how to use it efficiently. That's why my clients will then bring me in to do bootcamps to teach how to use Domo for either my client's client team members or a combination of my clients and my client's clients members.

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Final Words

At Kellogg business school, one of my professors said "You need to focus on creating value. Then and only then can you get a piece of it and turn it into revenue." Those words have really stuck with me and that's how I see helping my clients or my client's clients with Domo Embed. It's a great way to provide value to everyone and then to capture some of that value as new revenue for my clients.

If you're interested in discussing if you can setup Domo Embed for your clients, feel free to book a free 30 min call with me and I'm happy to guide you.

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