We recently reversed roles and ran a TechValidate outreach project to our own customers. Our intent? To gather proof points and validation to support our own sales enablement and to get a quick understanding of our users’ sentiment in a scalable way. 260 respondents later, we learned a lot.
Much of the content that we’ve published from the project immediately landed in the hands of our sales folks through the TechValidate Salesforce integration. Hard metrics on ROI (return on investment) and time savings help them with credibility when speaking with new prospective customers. (Just like our customers, sales enablement is one of our top use cases.) The qualitative and quantitative findings will also support nurturing campaigns and webinars with our marketing automation system. You’ll also see us weave the findings into upcoming posts right here on this blog.
So what did we hear from our customers? Here are some of the highlights:
Top use cases for TechValidate content include lead generation/lead nurturing campaigns (59%), sales enablement (69%), and using on website (63%) as well as social (57%).
Compared to our findings in 2013, we saw a big uptick in use of TechValidate to fuel lead generation and nurturing activities (up from 49% to 59%). This matches the increased sophistication with marketing automation we have heard about anecdotally in conversations with customers.
Our customers need content, and they need it fast. Nearly 50% of our customers could create content over 40% faster with TechValidate. Lean marketing teams at small companies could create it even faster with over half saying that they can create content over 50% faster with TechValidate.
Gaining validation behind metrics like ROI is a key use case for our customers in their own outreach projects – we’re pleased to see that our customer base is paying back their investment in TechValidate in 6 months or less.
The primary challenges that our customers are looking to address include a lack of customer testimonials (75%) and major difficulties in getting enough named references (68%).
Our customers reported that by utilizing fresh customer validation content in their marketing and sales communications, they increased prospect engagement by over 25%.
