Our customers often ask, “If TechValidate is so great at capturing customer voice, why don’t you use it on your own customers?” Well, we recently did just that, and this is the first post in a series about the results.
Why We Did It
Reason 1: To create more sales enablement content…
At TechValidate, we’ve been fortunate to have no shortage of customer proof, from the testimonials and interviews our clients have been happy to do on our behalf to the logos of the well-known companies that use our software. Still, our sales and marketing teams have been asking for more content to support their efforts in a couple specific areas:
- More Quantified Customer Metrics – Qualitative customer content is great, but equally important — and much harder to come by — are quantified metrics on customer ROI and product performance. Quantified metrics — charts, graphs, and statistics — give credibility your value propositions like nothing else.
- More Targeted Customer Content – While we already had several customer interviews, testimonials, and case studies, our sales team needed more — many more, so that we would have a wealth of customer content for each segment of our target market. Our goal was to amass an arsenal of customer content that we could tailor to each prospect segment, by industry, size of company, etc.
We’re very pleased with the results of our survey (more on that below), as it’s helped us build out our content matrix to better support our sales team.
Reason 2: It’s good to eat your own dog food…
“Dogfooding“, or “eating your own dog food” is a term software companies often use to describe the process of using their own software. This is often done to demonstrate what the software can do, but also to find ways the software can be improved. This applies to TechValidate as much as any other software company.
Photo credit: shouldbecleaning on Flickr
Going through the full process of using our software from our clients’ perspective (as opposed to testing it with data that we don’t need to use in the real world) was a fun process for our team, and gave us new insights into how our clients think. This exercise has also shown us which parts of our application can be streamlined, and we’re already at work on the improvements.
The Results
Several interesting themes emerged from our customer survey:
- Rapid ROI: 73% of our customers said their investment in TechValidate was paid back in 6 months or less. [TVID: 024-F7E-037]
- Customers use TechValidate to turbocharge their customer-referencing activities. See a chart of the top challenges customers solved with TechValidate. [TVID: 0D6-E71-C38]
- Customers use TechValidate content across a wide spectrum of their marketing and sales activities, but especially for sales enablement. [TVID: 61B-AF3-364]
- Customers almost unanimously find TechValidate more effective for creating customer content than their previous practices. [TVID: 931-5CB-37B]
- 84% of our clients say that TechValidate content improves prospect engagement. [TVID: 91C-D64-6BA]
We’ll go into each of these themes in more depth in future posts. For now, you can read more about our survey results on our Customer Stats & Metrics page.
