Supernova Award Category

The Problem

We are what an industry analyst described as "the industry's best kept secret". Our customers loved that our solution just worked and raved about it in the numerous case studies that we did with them. But the fact that they worked mostly in IT meant they preferred to keeping to themselves. We were challenged with getting more awareness for our data protection and governance solution that could be presented in a more organic (and more powerful) way, such as word-of-mouth or referrals. We did email campaign after campaign asking for reviews or referrals but didn't get any traction. They were getting our emails but we weren't able to "activate" our best customers.

The Solution

In one-off attempts, we would do individual email requests and after they accepted, they would receive a thank you note and a small gift as a token of appreciation. This was great except only the parties involved would know of this exchange and other teams, like our sales folks, would be out of the loop and sometimes requests would be repeated. We needed a solution that helped streamlined this process: request, execute, reward, announce, and update SFDC records. So we looked at an advocate marketing platform, Influitive, that could help us with some of these aspects.

The results

We constantly have a warm relationship with at least 25 of our customers that I could reach out to at any time with marketing asks such as quotes for a press release, customer reference call, crowd-sourced blog polls. Previously, this would've been a mess to manage, but I know who are the more active customers, more willing to help out in these tasks, and I can readily award them points, accomplishment badges, and rewards for their help. I constantly refer to my "All Stars" for feedback on topics I want to write about or tap their expertise on IT issues (such as who makes the decision in your organization to move business processes to the cloud).

Now the exec team -- CEO, CMO, and CRO --- has visiblity into who we've put out customer asks to, and who has responded, and who we can leverage when there are other customer asks from different departments for speaking engagements, reference calls, etc.

In line with our goal to increase awareness of our company so that we're not "the industry's best kept secret", we have encouraged more customers to write us product reviews, in their own words, on prominent forums and enterprise solution websites, that many prospects see.

Metrics

In the first two months that we launched this initiative we accomplished:

- 15 G2Crowd Reviews (previously 0)- 10 Google Reviews (previously 0)- 6 Spiceworks Reviews (previously 3)- 4 new business referrals- 3 new case studies - 2 customer crowdsourced articles (previously 0)- 1 featured customer in an analyst report by Blue Hill Research

The Technology

In order to accomplish this, we implemented Influitive and launched our own advocate marketing community called "Druva All Stars".

Disruptive Factor

The majority of the Influitive userbase is mostly sales and/or marketing professionals but we tackled the more challenging IT crowd, that required a bit more encouragement to interact with vendors and outwardly refer solutions they utilized. This project has turned making customer asks into a well-oiled machine as well as a community for our customers.

Internally, this initiative has been well-received by our board, and they are impressed by the results we have accomplished in under just one quarter. We have been able to demonstrate that we understand our target audience and know how to appeal to them and what needs to be done to get more authentic and external visibility.

Shining Moment

I am most proud that I have built relationships with at least 5 of the customers from the hub and that we talk outside of the platform so we're not just Druva and "their company". It makes the engagement and relationships built truly authentic.