Zai Divecha, Associate Customer Programs Manager at Box, recently sat down with us to talk about why Box uses TechValidate, how Box leverages TechValidate content, and what it’s like to be a TechValidate customer.
Here’s the video (scroll down for a full transcript):
Key Quotes:
“TechValidate has been a great tool for us. We’ve been able to collect data on customers who otherwise might not be willing to give us PR or legal approval to use their name.”
“[With TechValidate] we’ve been able to get more ROI statistics that previously we haven’t been able to do at all.”
“The customer success team that I’ve worked with so far has been totally phenomenal to work with, and at many points gave me great tips for survey design that I hadn’t even thought of.”
Video Transcript:
Zai Divecha: My name is Zai and I’m the Associate Customer Programs Manager at Box.
How has TechValidate helped Box generate customer proof over the past couple of years?
Zai: TechValidate has been a great tool for us. We’ve been able to collect data on customers who otherwise might not be willing to give us PR or legal approval to use their name, but they’re totally willing to take a quick survey, and answer questions like, “How much money has Box saved them? How are their teams benefiting? Can they quantify how much more productive their teams are?” It’s been a great tool for creating content that we wouldn’t otherwise have access to from individuals.
What business results has Box seen as a product of using TechValidate?
Zai: Our sales team is always looking for ways to quantify ROI and that’s a really tough nut to crack. Even big research firms that have millions of dollars to spend, who go and do a quantitative ROI study, it’s really hard to capture exactly the benefit of a product, and with TechValidate we can get pretty close. Say, all things considered, migrating costs, or the cost of offloading your servers…to employee productivity…to how much money do you save by using Box…to how long did it take you to recapture the cost of using Box. So we’ve been able to get more ROI statistics that previously we haven’t been able to do at all. And our sales team and our analyst relations team have been really chomping at the bit for hard numbers to show the benefit of Box and we’ve come pretty darn close with TechValidate.
Would you recommend TechValidate to other B2B companies?
Zai: Yeah, I would absolutely recommend TechValidate to other B2B companies. It’s just a great tool and it makes survey design also really simple. I actually come from a research and survey methodology background, so I was a little suspicious at first and I was like, “Oh, actually these guys really know what they’re doing, and make it really easy for someone who wouldn’t have access, or wouldn’t have a background in survey design to design a really effective survey using best practices.”
How has TechValidate changed how Box generates customer content?
Zai: I can say that compared to other types of customer content marketing that we’ve done, it’s been great to supplement the in-depth, very traditional case study format, where it’s like this one customer, here’s how they’ve done X, Y and Z with our product, here are the benefits they’ve seen. It’s a great tool to say, it’s not just that one customer, actually it’s 75% of customers in that industry, or not just this one law firm, but actually we see that 90% of law firms that we work with, have found X, Y and Z benefits.
Who’s the primary audience you give your TechValidate content to?
Zai: Mostly to our sales reps. We put statistics on slides for them that are already in our corporate branding, we can just slap them into the decks that they’re already creating. We also integrated TechValidate with Salesforce, and so they can access all the TechFacts and charts right in Salesforce which they’re already in eight hours a day. And then, yeah, infographics that they can email out really easily, so in a handful of different formats.
How have you used the statistical evidence you’ve created with TechValidate?
Zai: So I went ahead and created a series of infographics using a lot of the TechValidate stats. Just to package them all in a really concise way that sales reps could forward to their prospects.
What’s been your experience working with the TechValidate customer success team?
Zai: The customer success team that I’ve worked with so far has been totally phenomenal to work with, and at many points gave me great tips for survey design that I hadn’t even thought of. Like, “Oh, if you rephrase this question, you might actually get a better response” or “You know, we’ve seen customers in the past do better when a question is formatted like this versus like this.” You say, “Oh, okay cool” And sure enough, those answers get great responses. So, a lot of insights that a self-service tool I think just wouldn’t have been able to contribute.
How do you plan to leverage TechValidate going forward?
Zai: So going forward over the next year, one of our goals is to get really in depth and create marketing assets to support specific clients or business use cases. So for instance, how a marketing team uses Box, which is different from how a sales team uses Box, which is different from how a finance team or an HR department might use Box. And so, I want to create a series of surveys that really go in depth to quantify the benefits to each of those teams individually and make the questions really specific to that team. The big picture like, “Does Box make you more productive, yes or no?” is a little general, but it’s great to be able to say, “Look, the VPs of sales teams say that their teams close deals 8% faster with Box”. And that speaks directly to the business challenges that they’re trying to solve.
Thanks, Zai! To see more customer interviews, please visit our customer videos page.
