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Building a customer marketing program that delivers results: a tailor-made partnership

CUSTOMER

Fortinet

Industry

Cybersecurity

ORGANISATION SIZE

Large

Region

LatAm

W4U Service

Customer Evidence

An interview with Paula Fiszman by Karina Lesmes

Fortinet is the cybersecurity market leader in Latin America, and yet it struggled to scale its customer success stories production. Working with Wings4U changed the equation for the cybersecurity expert. From gathering customer insights to localizing content into native languages, Fortinet now has a seamless, end-to-end customer marketing program that delivers beyond targets and expectations.

It’s Friday morning in the Americas and I’m on a video call with the Wings4U team. We are about to interview Paula Fiszman, Fortinet’s Director, Corporate Communications, Latin America and the Caribbean. Scanning the little squares on my screen, we start talking about the weather in our respective cities. Miami and Bogotá seem to be undecided about the temperature; São Paulo is going through a heatwave; Buenos Aires and Bariloche are freezing.

To break the ice, I show Paula a red paper heart ❤️ my five-year-old daughter gave me earlier—her wish that I have a nice meeting. Paula smiled, and I knew we were off to a good start.

Barriers to execution

“Our mission is to create a digital world that can be trusted,” Paula begins. “In Latin America (LatAm), we are number one. Fortinet currently has 53% market share for cybersecurity equipment in the region.”
As one of the world’s three leading companies in cybersecurity, Fortinet is present in almost every country. “We lead the market,” Paula explains. “But for years, we didn’t have a formal customer marketing program. Because of that, we were losing out on so many opportunities. I’m 100% convinced that customers sharing their experience with Fortinet has more impact than us talking about the same thing.”
I nod in agreement. Companies like Microsoft and Zendesk use customer evidence as part of their marketing for similar reasons. I asked Paula what her main challenges were, and why she couldn’t build a customer evidence program for Fortinet.
"I had two main problems—bandwidth and execution,” she replies simply. "I had to contact customers, record interviews, write cases all by myself. It was too much for one person,” she admits.
The second problem—execution —was around the localization of content. “After approving the copy in English, I needed it to be localized into Spanish and Portuguese, in native-speaker level,” she explains.
Paula knew she needed help, but she didn’t know where to find it.

 

 

This prompted me to ask how Paula came across Wings4U. “A journalist told me about you at an event I attended,” she recounts. That journalist—Ivan—happens to be one of the professionals we work with.
“Ivan talked about his work with Wings4U, and what the agency does. That you guys create customer evidence programs for your clients, from written stories to video production. And the best part is that you also do localization!” Paula enthused. “I thought-—that’s exactly what I need.”
A few days after the event, Paula was on the phone with Melis Hamurculu, Wings4U’s Head of Sales. “How can we help?” was Melis’ opening statement.

Paula recalls, “It felt like she wanted to relieve me of my pain. It was refreshing.” Paula also remembers how Wings4U made a point to build their initial proposal around her needs. That was the start of a meaningful partnership between Fortinet LatAm and Wings4U.

At this point, I asked Paula to describe her experience with Wings4U. “Professionalism, execution capacity, a culture of service and customer care,” she begins. “I never need to follow up. You guys keep me on track. You have exceptional client management and you’re all very easy to work with.”

“Professionalism, execution capacity, a culture of service and customer care. I never need to follow up. Wings4U keep me on track, have exceptional client management and are very easy to work with.”

This ease translated into a seamless working experience. In fact, Paula sees the Wings4U team as an extension of her own team in Fortinet. “It doesn’t matter where we are, we work as a team. We create together,” she shares.

“I participate in the interviews only to introduce your team to our customers. Then I let you guys take care of production, I don’t need to keep an eye on you all the time.”

Paula cites a specific example with Ivan, the journalist that first introduced her to Wings4U. “Ivan was telling me that he had some doubts regarding a product of ours,” she recalls. “He asked if he could talk to one of our engineers to understand the product better and write better stories. This is super valuable to me. His proactiveness, how he strives to understand—it just shows how interested you guys are in getting things right. You always look for a way of offering a better service and improving the success stories you write.”

Paula’s exceptional experience led her to recommend Wings4U to Fortinet’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) team. “When the Corporate Department asks me about Wings4U, I always have good words to say,” she adds.

Paula was exceptionally pleased with our partnership’s outcomes. “In LatAm, Fortinet achieved our target number of case studies as early as September,” she explains. “We will finish the year achieving 130% of our goal.”

For Paula, this is a massive success, especially because the stories help business outcomes. “A big part of my job is to support the sales team,” she explains. “Ever since I started working with Wings4U, we’ve produced a lot more case studies. The sales team noticed how these customer success stories help them in presentations and pitches. The reason being, these case studies are very relevant for the market.”

Paula plans to continue growing Fortinet’s Customer Evidence program, but she also wants to build new formats. “We are all fascinated by the one video case you produced with us,” she says. “In the future, I’d love to have more of those.”

As the call closes, my daughter’s paper heart comes into the camera again, and we all laugh. It’s somehow symbolic of how Wings4U and Fortinet have forged a partnership that goes well beyond business. We are more than happy to support Paula with customer evidence stories for many more years to come.

 

About Karina

Karina is a Brazilian writer and localization expert at Wings4U. She loves words and the little universe inside and around them. She is also passionate about dancing, travelling, and meeting not ordinary people. Her book Pulso was published in 2017.

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