After verification by TechValidate, responses from these participants have been published by our clients in some equally impressive numbers – 8,778 statistics and testimonials, 3,872 case studies and 1,894 charts that all reflect the unbiased voice of the customer.

This customer research from the more than 1 million participants has been shared through social media, on websites and blogs, lead generation campaigns, and more. The quantity and quality of this customer research further reinforces the fact that the most credible content that marketers can show prospects are the results that their current customers contribute.

Check out our Content Library to see customer research highlights from industry leaders across Technology, Health/Biotech, B2B Services and Telecommunications – and see these growing stats in real time: https://www.techvalidate.com/vendor-research

To that end, LaunchPoint provides TechValidate with a great way to showcase the combination of TechValidate and Marketo together.

Check out TechValidate listing and browse the other applications and services that work with Marketo:

We’ve also collaborated with Marketo to produce the guide, “Getting Successful with Marketing Automation – More Than Technology.” Click here for a free download.

Find real life examples of how current customers apply TechValidate in lead generation & lead nurturing campaigns here.

How it Works

Traditionally, our clients use the TechValidate platform to invite their customers to participate in their TechValidate surveys. Our clients upload customer lists, and our software then sends out personalized email invitations. This results in high participation rates, but clients must be able to supply a list of their customers to TechValidate.

However, with Public Questionnaire Links, clients can now solicit feedback from their customers in any digital or online medium of their choosing, using a single web link for all recipients. TechValidate verifies the identity and responses of all participants, ensuring that results are credible and come only from your actual customers.

With the public link, our clients follow the same workflow as before, but instead of TechValidate sending email invitations, clients include a single link in their own communications. All data collected through the public link appears in the TechValidate application and can be quickly published using the same workflow.

The Net Result

TechValidate customers can now gather publishable customer research directly from where their customers already connect everyday, without having to proactively contact their customer base.

How Our Clients Are Using It

Here are some of the most common scenarios where our clients are using Public Questionnaire Link today:

• Customer Communities or Portals: The public link is often embedded in the sidebar of a customer community as a way to reach already engaged customers.
• Events: At tradeshows and user conferences, clients have used iPads or other mobile devices to gather feedback from individual customers in real time.
• Customer Newsletters: The public link can be embedded in a customer newsletter to further utilize this customer touch point and gather publishable feedback.
• Personal 1-1 Emails: TechValidate clients have written individual, personalized  emails soliciting an important customer’s feedback (e.g. a CIO or other high ranking executive where they might have a direct relationship). These emails embed the public link and can be quite effective in getting high value customer proof.
• Inside SaaS Applications: By embedding the public link inside a client’s own SaaS application, TechValidate clients gather feedback directly from their users as they use the product.
• End of a Free Trial or New Customer Win: Emails that are automatically triggered at the end of a free trial or at a set period after deployment have proved to be a great way to gather publishable content about these new wins and purchasing rationale. Clients have automated this entire process using marketing automation (e.g. Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot) to send the emails and a public link to collect the customer feedback.

Some highlights:

“Before we brought in TechValidate…we might have had a dozen or so long-form case studies. Now, we literally have 5,800 responses from our customers and have case studies and other assets that we can use in marketing and sales that amount to about 250.”

“Basically, in a short period of time, growing from a dozen or so to effectively 250 assets that we can use really changes the game. It helps inside sales, it helps in our corporate presentations, and it helps in the messaging and the positioning of the whole company.”

A New Capability

Most B2B organizations struggle with getting enough public references to support their sales and marketing activities. Organizations often have policies precluding public endorsements altogether, while requests for testimonials and case studies are slowed or squashed by legal and PR reviews.  As a result, B2B organizations typically report that no more than 5 to 10% of their customer base publicly endorses them.

We call the 90+% that doesn’t participate in customer referencing the “Silent Satisfied Majority,” and TechValidate has always focused on generating a wealth of content from that part of the customer base. We do this by allowing people to participate without having their name and organization publicly displayed.

Now, with our Named Content capability, your customers who don’t need to remain anonymous can opt in to let their name and organization be displayed in TechValidate content. Our clients have found that 5-20% of their participating customers opt in to let their name be used.

The net result: a large amount of named customer evidence can now be generated efficiently and at scale, in addition to the anonymized content that TechValidate already creates.

How It Works

TechValidate sends your customers an invitation to take a short market research survey on their experiences with your product or service.  At the end of the survey, your customer will have the ability to opt in and consent to have his or her responses attributed to his name, title, and organization. By default, all responses are publicly blinded, unless a respondent explicitly consents to his name being used.

After data is collected, our clients log into the TechValidate application to review the responses and automatically publish customer proof points at a click of the button. If the respondent has opted in to be publicly named, then all TechValidate content published from that person’s responses (testimonials, case studies, etc.) will include their name and organization.

Once published, these named proof points can be used in the same ways as other TechValidate content: social media announcements, press releases, lead generation campaigns, and sales enablement resources, to name just a few.

• Fusion-io was an early adopter of TechValidate’s cross-tabbing functionality. Now power users, they’ve created dozens of highly targeted assets for different verticals and solutions. With over 350 published TechValidate marketing assets, Fusion-io’s sales and marketing teams leverage this certified customer proof throughout those processes. Here’s an example of a recent blog highlighting results around how Fusion ioMemory has improved latency, application throughput, and ROI for Oracle users.

Click to view.

• Quest PacketTrap MSP has created momentum in their partner community by reflecting what other clients have seen back to their user base.

Click to view.

• Quest Software also used the findings of a recent TechValidate project in a press release picked up by the New York Times to establish their presence as a client-centric thought leader in their space. 

Click to view.

These are only a handful of ways that our clients are leveraging their published customer assets throughout their sales and marketing. For more ideas on how to effectively promote content check out more live client examples here.

For this infographic, we decided to look at U.S.-based IT pros who participated in TechValidate research studies. We’ve mapped how many live in each state and also their relative density — how many IT pros there are per-capita in each state. We also did the same analysis for the 50 most-populous U.S. cities.

Click on the thumbnail below to launch the full infographic:

Some findings that surprised us:

• On a per-capita basis, there are a ton of IT pros in the midwest, especially Minnesota and Colorado. We hadn’t expected this, but it makes sense since there are a lot of corporate headquarters in the midwest.
• While Virginia and Maryland have a lot of IT pros per-capita, Washington D.C. is off the charts. There are also probably a lot of IT pros who work in D.C., but live in the surrounding states, further pushing up D.C.’s numbers.
• Atlanta has a high number of IT pros, and also a high per-capita density.

So, while we may hear mostly about tech hubs like Silicon Valley and NYC in the media, the reality is that the majority of people working in IT are distributed around the country, and in a very surprising pattern.

As more companies invest in generating stronger customer evidence, the number of software companies and service providers offering solutions in the space has multiplied. In addition, we now have dedicated events and online communities for those in the field to meet and share ideas.

With the increasing sophistication and complexity of the customer evidence ecosystem, it can be difficult to keep track of the capabilities of the different companies in the space — where their offerings overlap, and where they complement each other. We thought it would be helpful to come up with a visual guide to this industry, so we took a shot at it.

Click on the thumbnail below to launch the full infographic:

As you can plainly see, no one software package or service provider does it all. Therefore, companies in this space often partner and co-provide services to deliver complete solutions to clients. Thankfully, in our experience the customer evidence industry is remarkably collaborative, and we’re fortunate to enjoy good relationships with many of the companies we see here.

Some notes on the data:

Thanks to that participation, to date over 370,000 real-world deployment facts, 1,000 research charts, and 1,700 case studies have been published to the TechValidate Research Library.

We felt it was time to do a fresh, in-depth look at exactly who is participating. Which industries and types of companies do our participants come from? What are their job titles? We put all the stats together in the infographic below.

Click to launch the infographic:

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But how do our clients actually use their TechValidate content to help drive their own sales? We put together an infographic to illustrate 10 of the most-common ways TechValidate content is used for marketing and sales.

Click to launch the infographic: