Building Customer Advocacy With Your “Other 90%”

Craig Nunes, Vice President of Marketing

Today’s Agenda

• 3PAR: A Self-Assessment• Why We Turned to Social Media Tools• The Results and Benefits We’ve Seen• Best Practices and Learning Regarding Social Media• Q & A

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• Company Background– Founded in May 1999 by Engineers from Sun

Microsystems Server Group

– Headquartered in Fremont, California (USA)

– Strategic investors include Oracle, Veritas, Sun, Cisco

– 3PAR (NYSE: PAR) is a public traded company on the Big Board

– Shipping commercially for over 6 years

– Selling today in U.S., Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa

• Recognition– # 1 Alternative to EMC in the Fortune 1000 (InfoPro)

– 3PAR products top Fortune 1000 and Mid-Size Enterprise rankings (InfoPro)

– 3PAR #1 in Completeness of Vision, 5 straight years (Gartner)

– 3PAR #2 storage vendor in the US hosting market (Gartner)

3PAR Company Overview

Our Marketing Challenge

• Persuade a pragmatist or conservative IT buyer to choose 3PAR over EMC, HDS, and NetApp.

• 3PAR customers vary in their willingness to be referenced

– Hard: Hosting/SaaS companies

– Harder: Internet/Web 2.0

– Hardest: Large enterprises and government agencies

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Hard Hardest

Where We’ve Been: “Block and Tackle”

• In-depth interviews for PR• Produce named case studies• Support product launches with

reference quotes• Place references in speaking

opportunities• Recently launched Boulder Logic for

reference management

But, we wanted to do more!

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Unlocking the other 90%

10% are References…• They’re a “Must-Have”• “Power advocates”• Easy to wear them out• Takes time, care, feeding

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… But 90% are silent!• No testimonials• No industry break-outs• No ROI information• No statistics on usage

What We Did Before Social Media: Brute Force

• Approach:– Used 3rd parties, like industry analysts, to interview our customers

and write reports

• For example:– Enlisted the InfoPro to conduct telephone interviews of 100+ 3PAR

customers– Customers remained anonymous– Interviews lasted 1 hour to 1.5 hours

• Results:– 10 page analyst report– Cost $$ tens of thouands– 3 months to complete– Time consuming to support

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4 New Goals We Set for Customer Evidence

1. Activate our “happy but silent” 90%

2. Create more targeted success stories

3. Amplify and scale our reference pipeline

4. Get more bang-for-buck from our budget

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Social Media Approach: Let Your Customers Do It!

• We’re now using TechValidate Software to:– Ask fact-based, metric oriented questions of our

customers– Find new named references prospects– Auto-generate collateral sourced from our customers

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Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

• Customers participate because they are guaranteed anonymity

• TechValidate acts as a trusted source for all customer evidence collected

• Customer statements attributed to title and industry

– Example: “CIO at Fortune 500 Financial Services Company”

• 3PAR in control of:

– Which customers we survey

– What questions we ask them

– All responses remain private to 3PAR

– Publish and use what supports our marketing objectives10

In Action: 3PAR Green IT Initiative

• Challenge:– Prove to conservative IT buyers that we

are a more cost efficient storage platform.

• What We Did:– Conducted outreach to 120 customers– 42 responded – 35% response rate– Including: Allianz, Fox News, AllState,

Northrop Grumman, JP Morgan Chase

• What We Achieved– Near real-time insights into customer

responses– Created new statistics, proof and insights

in days– Found 10 new reference prospects

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In Action: 3PAR Cloud Computing

• Challenge:– Quantify operational impact of 3PAR

for upcoming announcement

• What We Did:– Surveyed 35 service providers– 16 responded – 46% response rate– Included: AT&T, IAC, SAVVIS

• What We Achieved:– Collected customer evidence in less

than 10 days– Featuring customer evidence in

upcoming launch

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How We Are Using the Customer-Sourced Content

• Verified claims on our website • Using claims and statistics in press releases• Leveraging customer evidence to support sales• TechValidate-generated marketing documents

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Example from TV workflow

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Best Practices and Learnings

• Social Media can work, but needs investment – Investing now provides differentiation

• The Social Media approach provides an addictive, fast way to mine marketing gold– B2B social networking, blogs, new

mediums like twitter or micro-blogging

• Align tools with upcoming initiatives – Elicit customer data in weeks for launches, etc– Position new products with greater credibility

• Dedicate a power user to these tools– Designated our Customer Reference Manager to be the power user– Hired a Social Media Director to leverage additional mediums

• Your customers will help if you ask! You will be surprised!

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Future Directions for 3PAR

• Expand use of TechValidate across the entire customer base

• Deeper integration of TechValidate with Boulder Logic, Salesforce.com

• Leverage where possible our blog (StorageRap) with our customer reference program

• Build out arsenal of case studies for targeted segments and as self-service portal for sales teams

• Leverage new customer-sourced content in lead generation activities

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Thank youThank you

Serving InformationServing Information®®.. Simply.Simply.

Third Party Reference Tools We Use

Boulder Logic– Manage our growing reference pool– Automate access to references– Radically reduce burn-out, increase ROI

TechValidate– Conduct web-based outreach to our customer base– Transform customer feedback into verified evidence– Leverage new collateral to support marketing and sales

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