Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

SM: What kinds of questions did your customers have?

KS: For example, we had questions about the impact of mobile devices on corporate networks. We had questions about that, and earlier in February we blogged about IPv6, so a few people raised questions about this. It was an issue that was raised by European customers for few weeks, so we blogged on what our strategy is, our statement of direction on IPv6 is, and we blogged about when customers can expect to see that technology integrated into our product.

SM: Okay.

KS: It is a very quick feedback loop, much faster than trying to create off-the-shelf brochures and things of that nature. The blog becomes the reference point for frequently asked questions, but with a bit more depth than what we have with the normal FAQ one-paragraph answers.

SM: Are your customers engaging on that blog? Are they forming a dialogue with you?

KS: Not yet. I think most of our customers haven’t yet found their way to the blog. It is one of those efforts that we are working on this year, to really start to have our customers and partner community recognize the blog as a key go-to resource for information, and traffic is growing week by week. It’s up almost 50% from the baseline when we launched in May of last year.

What we see now is that we will Tweet and post the latest blog entry on LinkedIn and Facebook, and our partners who follow us on Twitter are sharing our Tweets on the blog as well. So, a lot of them haven’t subscribed to the blog per se, but they are re-Tweeting our blog for us. We are starting to see traction there.

SM: What about inviting some of your customers to start blogging or ask customers to start blogging on your site on these topics?

KS: That is an area for expansion. We were recently invited by Dell to begin to provide a blog post for their OEM blog. That is the trend I am seeing, and I noted it as an initiative that might be well worthwhile for us. I have also integrated blogs from our partners into our blogs; as I see a blog post that is right on point to a topic we write about, we integrate that in our blog.

SM: Guest bloggers are a good way to generate content.

KS: Yes, a really great way.

SM: Is there anything else significant that you are doing that we should discuss?

KS: One other thing that our sales team comments on BoldChat, a tool we integrated in September.

SM: What is it called?

KS: BoldChat is a chat tool that is integrated with all of the pages on our website, and over the first 60 days that we use that it has turned into the number one generator of high-quality leads: it has the highest conversion rate, and chats on the website have a high conversion rate to actual revenue of any lead source that we have.

SM: Very interesting.

KS: So we see a conversion rate that is almost 20% of the chats; one in five actually converts into revenue, which compared to our other forms of leads is very high. It is almost three times higher than the next closest form.

SM: That gives us a good segway into metrics. Of all the different things we discuss that you are doing, where is the maximum bang for the back? It sounds as though this chat tool is one of them

KS: I would say the chat tool is one. We also added a process that we use called Demos On Demand, so we had one of our senior product managers do a walk-through different videos for about anywhere between 15 minutes from an hour and half that are in chapters so that customers can jump to topics of interest. So, chat is number one, Demos On Demand is number two, and then we have other initiatives. We have an online live system, a virtualized instance of our product that is online. People can go to play with, and it would be the number three source. After that you fall into more traditional direct marketing kind of lead sources but those three – BoldChat at number one with about a 1 in 5 conversion rate; Demos on Demand at number two with about a 1 in 10 conversion rate on the Demos On Demand; and more traditional 5% conversion rates on test driving the appliance at number three. We track those weekly.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda
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