A customer story for every customer: how Netskope scaled advocacy with integrated data ft. Cache Walker

Ray Rhodes 0:00
I'm Ray Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders of User Evidence. If you're not familiar with User Evidence, it's a tool that helps you better leverage the voice of your customers at scale. So, you know, people like Cache who have lots of customers in different industries and company sizes and roles who are super hesitant to go on the record and talk publicly about how they leverage your tool — User Evidence is a tool that can help you do that better. I'll demo today how we help you create case studies and testimonials, or aggregate statistics from those customers, that you can use in your marketing campaigns.

Host 0:39
Great. Martín?

Martín Galtieri 0:41
Martín Galtieri. Nice to meet everyone. I'm customer advocacy manager at Wings4U. We are a customer marketing and advocacy agency that provides professional staffing and content creation globally.

Host 0:56
Thanks, Martín. All right, Cache, I'll let you introduce yourself, and then we can jump right in.

Cache Walker 1:04
Awesome. Well, nice to meet everybody. I am Cache Walker. I am currently the Director of Customer Marketing at Trellix, and previously was at Netskope. A lot of what we're going to tell you about today is things that I'm trying to rebuild again at the moment, but that we had just figured out before I made a recent change. But I'm excited to talk with the group about these things.

Host 1:33
All right, excellent. So I guess, maybe just to kick things off, tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that you were facing at Netskope before all of these tools and processes were put into place.

Cache Walker 1:54
Yeah, the challenge is probably something familiar to most in this space: you need more. There's never enough of anything. You need more case studies. You need more customer quotes. I don't remember a time in my career where people ever said, "We have enough references. We have enough case studies. We've got enough customer goodness." So that challenge for more — and usually being a limited team, or a team of one — is a constant challenge.

And then I think one of the main things that helped drive where we ended up going, and a lot of the tools we ended up using and processes that added to that, is that I really wanted to develop — I had a goal to get a customer story for every customer. I wanted a story for every customer, and so that was kind of the north star, that everything I was going to do downstream from that had to ultimately drive up to that. So I think that guided the way we went about getting more of everything.

Host 3:10
All right, thanks for that context. And why did you feel that these partners in particular were the best match to help you with some of the challenges around scaling?

Cache Walker 3:24
Yeah, I think when I go back to that north star, Kaylee, that's where we were very particular about the partners we worked with. We had been using previous systems in a lot of these aspects and felt limited in getting to that overarching goal. So when we selected to work with Wings4U, with SlapFive, and with User Evidence, it was primarily driven around: who's going to partner with us to get what we need today, but to go for what we want to do ultimately tomorrow, or whatever that end of the road is? We didn't want to feel constrained from day one. We wanted to have partners that we felt were going to keep up with us going towards that goal.

Host 4:17
And maybe just to expand a little more on that — I know that you tend to be sort of an early adopter when it comes to things like AI, so I know you may have had some slightly different criteria in mind when looking for partners. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about some of the vision that you started out with.

Cache Walker 4:42
Yeah. I try to be an early adopter. I don't know — my kids would probably argue otherwise, that I'm an old man that knows nothing.

But I think when we started looking at partners from the get-go, we didn't want things that were going to consume our efforts. We wanted things that were going to multiply them. There are a lot of systems, there are a lot of things we can do. We needed everything we were doing to drive a win today and data towards more wins tomorrow. I think that was something we were very particular about — in addition to wanting partners that would be willing to adjust to some of the ways we wanted to go about what we wanted to do, and provide that flexibility, and ultimately that worked with data well. We didn't want something where it felt like, oh, it went in here and it got stuck. We wanted systems that worked well together, processes that worked well together, and ultimately the pieces would become more than the parts alone.

Host 5:53
Great way of putting it. Did you face any internal hurdles when you were looking to get approval for all of these partners?

Cache Walker 6:04
Yeah — D, all of the above, probably, right? I think we're probably most familiar with that.

I think one of the biggest hurdles — and I imagine this exists everywhere — I'm not sure there's a CRM admin or a Salesforce admin that's saying, "Hey, please give me some more projects." Limitations on technical resources within organizations is probably one of the main reasons folks get pushback from their internal teams, and that was definitely something we faced.

Ultimately, that's one of the reasons it was not only a technical solution thing that we were looking to do. We brought in the Wings4U element because we wanted to bring our own technical resources into the discussion, to be a partner to our internal teams too. To say, hey, we're not asking you to do X, Y, and Z. If you can do X, we'll do Y and Z. We came to the table with solutions, not just more projects they needed to fulfill.

Host 7:12
Great. All right, well, thank you for all of that context. We're going to quickly pivot, just to provide a little more visual context before we dive deeper into the how of the project, to a really quick view of a demo of the integration between User Evidence and SlapFive. So Ray, I've made you co-host. If you want to go ahead and start sharing your screen, we'll be underway here.

Ray Rhodes 7:44
Awesome, thank you. Let me share my screen here. I'll fly through the slides in about eight seconds, and then I'll try to show the product for most of it.

The real goal at User Evidence — and you'll see a lot of security companies like Cache and Netskope — is we're trying to turn happy customers into best sellers. Because the reality is no one trusts vendors anymore, so they always look to their peers. We all know that in customer marketing. But there's usually this gap in social proof.

And I think we all know the problems. There are too many customers, right? Cache said he wanted a story from every customer, and usually, as a team of one, it's really hard to do this. So we wanted to invent a tool to help you do that. The problem is that the traditional ways — analyst research, one-on-one case studies, customer videos, G2 sites and things like that — they leave this gap in the middle where you just don't have all the things your sales reps are asking for, or your marketing team is asking for, or what you're trying to show to the market. You don't have industry proof points. You don't have certain features. You don't have competitive evidence. You don't have ROI data. You don't have account-specific stories. And it really starts to become a problem.

So this is what our tool is designed to help you do as a team of one. It's trying to help you scale those efforts. Your advocates might be 10% of your customer base, but User Evidence is really trying to unlock the stories within the other 90%.

The way we help you do that is by leveraging software at scale. We help you send surveys to the wide base of your customers with a good set of questions around how and why they use your product, that can then be turned into actual content and drive advocacy activities. What that looks like: it might be a traditional questionnaire like this. Give us an NPS score. What challenges are you solving? What competitors did you look at? What features do you really like about the tool? Tell me about your percentage in conversions, or metrics, so we can really help with ROI and stuff like that. We'll capture some quotes.

This would be a long survey — we usually encourage them to be a few questions shorter. But the last thing we want to do is figure out if we can use their name, and then we also want to know what else they're willing to do, so we're not really wasting that touchpoint. So for example, from this one questionnaire, you'll be able to generate a lot of User Evidence content, but you'll also be able to find out, of this large base of customers, who's willing to do other things. We can in real time help you drive other things, like G2 reviews, for example.

But what ends up happening is all this flows into our application, where you can take these responses and turn them into digital content assets. So here's the quote I just submitted — you now have a testimonial tile that can be shared on Instagram or Twitter. Your sales reps can use it in PowerPoint. We can create individual customer case studies from that data as well, or you can even create aggregate reports or statistics. Bill.com uses us primarily to talk about ROI and time savings and efficiency gains.

But all from that one survey, you'll create a bunch of content. You'll identify people who are willing to be advocates. So we'll see here what they're willing to do, and you'll create a bunch of content that can all flow into SlapFive and help you run a more full, comprehensive program. So, all that was three minutes and 45 seconds. It usually takes a lot longer. So feel free to chime in with any questions later if I can provide more detail.

Host 11:41
We did actually get a question, so we'll use that little extra time here. Jenny asks: do you ever have a hard time getting people to fill out the surveys? And how often do you have folks send surveys to their customers?

Ray Rhodes 11:54
Yeah. So usually — I mean, Cache can talk a little bit about his experience in terms of response rates — but across our customer base, it can range. We work with people like Netskope who have customers that are like the Department of Defense, all the way down to people who send gift cards for small influencers on the internet. So response rates can vary, but usually we see anywhere from like 8 to 12%. We use some gift card incentives or eco incentives and things to drive that. But across our customer base, on the low end maybe 5%, on the high end 15%, but somewhere in that middle range is what we've seen.

And then, what was the other one? What about signed consent? Very difficult, yeah. So that was another thing. You'll notice some of the responses are anonymous. We think that's okay, especially for security folks. So User Evidence will verify the anonymous responses, and then you can publicly cite an anonymous testimonial and reference that it came from User Evidence — similar to an anonymous G2 review or something like that.

Host 13:10
Okay, well thank you so much for that context, and please keep the questions coming in. We will make sure to answer all of the questions, but we may leave some for the end, and if we end up needing to do any additional follow-up afterwards, we absolutely will.

But just to keep things moving here — I know Ray just showed the User Evidence side. So just a little bit of context: SlapFive really becomes the true system of record for all of your customer advocates, in order to provide a single pane of glass into what all of our advocates have participated in, and what they are willing to participate in. So that when new needs arise for the business — like somebody to speak with an industry analyst or take a reference call — you're able to really quickly narrow down your advocates based on the activities that they have opted into doing.

So Ray just filled out that survey there. What happens in SlapFive after that is completed is that he is created as a member in SlapFive. Here we can see his member profile, automatically associated with his company. We would be pulling in all of the metadata about his company — things like industry and company size — from our Salesforce integration as well, at the company level. And then now we have the list of activities that Ray is willing to do.

You can also set a limit for certain activities across all of your clients, so that you're making sure that people are not being reached out to too many times to participate in reference calls over a certain period. We can also see that he already has an activity history, which is that he just completed that survey, and we can also see the new asset that was created and associated with him.

So here on that member profile, we can see all of these elements in terms of Ray and his engagement with the program. And as your program and the activities that this person does grow, you'll start to see a fuller picture of how engaged these advocates really are. Here's an example of somebody who would have been in the program for longer, who has participated in lots of activities, and may have some pending requests out there that we can see from here as well. And then as you receive requests or have initiatives, you're able to leverage all of this data to find the right people to reach out to, who won't be so burnt out over time.

The other really exciting piece of this integration is that, because of our Salesforce integration, SlapFive actually recommends customer content right on the opportunity that a sales rep is in in Salesforce. So they're able to see recommended customer stories — including the ones like what Ray just created — right from within their opportunity. They can share that out to prospects, and then as prospects view those assets, we're actually able to create what we call a revenue influence event.

So a revenue influence event in SlapFive is really any event during a purchasing process in which an existing client influences a purchase decision. It could be opportunities starting from a referral; in this case, it's customer content being viewed by a prospect, or clients taking a reference call. All of those influence events roll into this revenue influence reporting. So we're able to show, of the open pipeline today, what dollar amount has actually had some form of customer influence, versus what are these opportunities where maybe we can still leverage a customer story to gain velocity in the sales cycle. We're also able to show the impact on expansion revenue, and answer questions like: do we win more when there is some form of customer influence involved, whether that was an asset being shared or otherwise? We can also show the impact on the length of the sales cycle. And one of my favorite views here is being able to demonstrate customers by the revenue that they have influenced.

Host 18:02
So for example, if stories that are captured in User Evidence are often shared during the purchasing process with prospects and viewed, and then those deals end up closing, we're able to attribute the influenced revenue from those customers all the way back to those individual assets. So you get a great picture of what's really resonating from a content perspective with our clients, and what is the end impact of all of this work that we're doing for the advocacy programs.

So with that, we will return back to Cache and talk a little bit more about his processes, and hear some from Martín as well.

Cache Walker 18:54
Kaylee, before we dive into that — I just wanted to mention something about both systems that I think is important that folks realize. Not only does it fill that content gap, not only does it plug in and make it easier, but it helps with the chase.

I had a quarter where I produced 15 case studies. It's possible, right? It's exhausting, it's time intensive. You can do it. You can't do hundreds. You'll run into a limit, you'll have bandwidth issues. But one of the hardest things about producing quarters like that — or producing case studies, period — is the chase. You're always looking for: who can I talk to, and what can I talk to them about? Everybody will say, we need a case study about this person doing this functionality with this product, and you're like, okay, who's doing that?

Having the data through User Evidence, where the customers are coming in and giving us feedback — that's the primary source of data, and then we're able to go action it. But then having that plugged into SlapFive, so we can see these indicators, start searching against them, comparing them to our database — as well as the advocacy opt-in. Don't underestimate that, because we had that performing at a 58% clip for the folks who took our surveys. 58% of them were selecting to be an advocate for Netskope. And that was another reason we needed these systems to connect and integrate, because otherwise it would have been a lot of batch updates for Martín, and a lot of pushing to and fro. We wanted to be quick.

The other part that helped us with was internally. So that's all plugged into Salesforce. We were able to then showcase it to CSMs, start showing them, hey, this is what your customer's saying. To a sales rep: hey, this is what your customer's saying. That conversation then is so much easier if you want to get that customer on record for a case study. You say, "Look at this great feedback we got from Glenn over at the road department. Could we get them on record and do a case study or a video?" That sales rep or that CSM is automatically more plugged in, more engaged. They've seen some of the goodness, and they want to go get more.

We also used it to showcase to them who we didn't have coverage for. Hey, we've got really good coverage in these other areas, we're really missing your area — could you help us champion getting more involvement from your customers?

So on both sides, it just created this kind of flywheel that really maximized all of our efforts. So I don't think it's even just that one gap that Ray highlighted that these things have an impact on. I think it was having an impact on the front end, driving us more case studies because we had more data in the middle with the content, and then all in between, because everything was integrated and we were able to be hyper-transparent back to the business and get more buy-in, which then helped us get more collaboration from our other stakeholders.

Host 21:46
I love that. That was

Cache Walker 21:47
a lot, but I wanted to make sure we didn't miss out on that.

Host 21:51
It was great. And I think we always think about content as helping knock down objections with prospects, but I love that the content was helping you knock down objections from your CSMs and customer experience team, who might be a little bit protective of that customer, because they can suddenly see that, okay, this person really is ready to advocate.

Awesome. So now, gearing more towards both you and Martín on the project side: what were the goals behind this project, and how did this all begin?

Cache Walker 22:29
Yeah, so it really began — I think

Martín Galtieri 22:31
I'll take that, if you want, Cache.

We started by designing the necessary data models to be prepared to implement SlapFive into the Netskope Salesforce, so we could test the use cases that Cache and Netskope wanted to solve. This involved working closely, at the first stage, with the Salesforce admins and engineers at Netskope, deploying the solution in their sandbox, and preparing everything we needed to be ready to scale in production. Security, data compliance, and data integrity were extremely important for this project. So for me, it helped a lot to speak technically with the Salesforce admins and engineers at Netskope. That was also crucial at the first stage of this program. Go ahead, Cache.

Cache Walker 23:25
No, I was only going to add: it basically started with starting to look at data, starting to look at the processes. And then I would go to Martín and be like, hey, what if we plugged in our LMS to SlapFive? What if we plugged in our LMS to User Evidence? What if we started harvesting these other things and starting to get a real 360 view of our customer? And then he was able to say, okay, let me go have the technical conversations, and have the knowledge to make those things happen.

Host 24:01
Yeah, and I know that was definitely a multi-step process. So Martín, could you dig a little bit deeper into the approach to handling the data and the advocacy activities?

Martín Galtieri 24:15
Yeah. We combined the technical and advocacy knowledge, and that allowed me to create the necessary models in SlapFive, as well as the tickets for the Salesforce engineers, saying, well, we have to do this, we have to deploy this, and we also have to modify the layout that Netskope had in Salesforce. So that was also part of the project.

Identifying all the necessary objects that we needed in Salesforce in order to handle the data that is coming from SlapFive — that was also a technical task and challenge. As you know, we're working in the cybersecurity space, so security is very, very important there.

We defined these things in our weekly meetings with Cache, and we then collaborated with engineers and architects at Netskope to implement those structures in Salesforce. And as I said, we had to include new objects, and that was also tricky for the complex environment in a corporation like Netskope. By doing this, the sales reps were going to be able to see all the advocacy activities their customers did at a glance, without leaving Salesforce. So they go to the customer influence tab and they can see what their customers are doing — all the different activities, from certification workshops and many others, there at a glance.

Host 25:44
Yeah, and

Cache Walker 25:45
I think there's an important aspect to that. Because when we talked about finding partners, finding systems that were multipliers and not consumers — this is an important element of that, because we integrated Martín as a member of our team. He was going and having those conversations with our Salesforce admins, not me. So by him offloading that, I was able to go do more case studies, or go do more of this. This wasn't something that was super time intensive on my behalf, outside of being the executive sponsor or the champion for the program — obviously being on launch calls and stuff. When he's talking about these technical things, those are things he was doing directly with our team, and that was so invaluable, to have him embedded like that.

Not only with Netskope and our Salesforce admins, but then with your team, Kaylee, at SlapFive, and with Ray and the team at User Evidence — we had this hyper-collaboration. And that's where I think all of the goodness came together, because it wasn't one piece, it was all of it working together, constantly. I would say Martín was kind of the magic sauce in the middle, the data connector, especially as we were figuring this out.

I don't remember if we were the first ones to do all of this, but to plug these systems of User Evidence and SlapFive together, we had to figure a lot of this out. And so some of that go-between — that was Martín, that was making it happen. I think now that we've figured out this model, a lot of the integrations are built, and it would be a little bit easier. But having someone contribute — that's where you get a multiplier, and not something that's just going to be like, oh, this sounds awesome. Everybody's going to hear this and think, oh, this sounds great to have this system working like this, I could never get there. I could never have gotten there either. That's where we brought in the right partners, and everybody contributed at a high level to make this happen. And Martín was in the middle, spinning the wheels and connecting it all.

Host 27:52
Yeah, that's really helpful context, thank you. And I know that for you guys, obviously the integrations, but also automation, were really crucial. Maybe, Martín, could you elaborate on some of the steps to making sure that all of that was ready to scale?

Martín Galtieri 28:11
Yeah, for sure. Well, Cache and I designed what the solution should look like, in our weekly meetings — designing the layouts and what was important from the Netskope side, knowing the culture. Then I had to create the necessary models and fields to capture that advocacy information, and import that data into SlapFive using their batch upload tool, ensuring integrity and consistency of that data that was going to be prepared to be taken into Salesforce.

Designing the spreadsheets and the data that we needed for SlapFive was also a very important and complex step of the project — preparing all those Excel files in order to be intaken by SlapFive. That was also something complex.

We also connected Netskope and SlapFive using APIs, building the data flows using the Workato tool, with the help of User Evidence and the help of the SlapFive team. This helped us automate and integrate the data from other systems into SlapFive. And once we have that information in SlapFive, we can publish that information to Salesforce, so the reps can see all that information there.

We worked with User Evidence to set up the SlapFive integration via API, building a unique environment — combining SlapFive, combining the information from Netskope, and combining the information from User Evidence — automating information from assets, surveys, and advocate-related metrics. All of this laid the foundation for integration and automation with other systems, and that also helped us set the stage for scaling in production.

So, after having our User Evidence integration into SlapFive, we started capturing automated information from 10 different survey campaigns, and this resulted in 600 clients, 830 assets, and 330 new advocates, with our 58% respondent conversion rate to advocates. This provided very valuable information to our SlapFive instance and to the Salesforce instance. So it was really crucial to have all those systems automating into one single place.

Host 30:35
Yeah, those are some really impressive metrics.

Cache Walker 30:38
And we didn't want the headaches of the batch updates. I think figuring out the model —

Cache Walker 30:42
batch updates, that was the big headache on the front end, and getting everything plugged in. We wanted to be working towards a better solution, right? One that was less heavy, that was less involved. That's ultimately where we were like, hey, we've got to get these integrated, because I didn't want Martín doing batch updates and data validation forever.

And when we got to that point where everything was plugged in — Martín, in September or whatever it was — that was an aha moment, because then it was like, okay, now I'm going to just do strategic initiatives, or X, Y, Z. Martín actually took over our reference program as a whole at that point.

So there was the building, there was the configuring, there was the plugging in at first. But this wasn't meant to always be time intensive. Once we got past that finish line, it was so much better with the automation and the APIs that were developed.

Host 31:40
Yeah, makes sense. Almost like creating a hub-and-spoke model, so that other systems can feed into the model. That makes a lot of sense to me.

So I know that reporting was a really influential aspect — it was an output, but it was also kind of influential from a cultural perspective, from what I understand. So maybe, Martín, if you could just start out talking a little bit about that, and then Cache, I'll ask you another question here in a moment.

Martín Galtieri 32:12
Well, yeah, reporting was essential. Luckily, we have SlapFive native Salesforce reports. They allow us to track advocacy activities, monitor revenue influence, and also create custom reports using new SlapFive objects combined with existing ones. So we can create multi-layer reports using different information — existing information from Salesforce, and the information that Netskope has about marketing campaigns and many other things that are there — and combining that information with the SlapFive info was crucial for us.

This also gave the sales reps the possibility to find detailed information about Netskope advocates, so they can use that advocacy data to better support their selling process and their selling quality, and have more insights in order to take a decision on the strategy they were going to use for that customer. So it was really crucial for us.

Host 33:17
Thank you. And so, Cache, maybe if you could provide some of your perspective on the impact of the reporting across the organization, and whether that facilitated any change management as well. Because I think there's a bit of a cart-before-the-horse conundrum with a lot of organizations, where they're being asked to report on all these things, but then told, well, we're not going to give you a tool to do so until you prove that you're making that impact. And so I know that's a conundrum that a lot of people are faced with, and I feel like the organic way that things rolled out at Netskope was kind of inspirational.

Cache Walker 34:05
Yeah, and I mean, we did get those asks, right? Like, when will you be able to show impact on revenue? When will you be able to show influence? And so we would be realistic with folks. We would tell them, hey, when we launch this project, by year-end we want to be able to showcase impact on revenue. I was really excited that we were there by July, and we beat the thing, and then we started reporting on it.

But I think what got us the cultural change is that hyper-visibility, not just the reporting. When I hear "reporting," I think of a dashboard you send out monthly. They get their metrics, you show that big number — hey, X million influenced in revenue. That's important, and I think it's good to have in mind with your program.

But when I think of the impacts, I think of that data visibility and that constant reporting, where people can get to what they need, so you're always showing your impact. You're not waiting for the end of the quarter. You're not waiting for a QBR. You're showing it to every CSM. You're showing it to every account owner. That's when you're going to get the cultural shift, because they all know what you're doing, because they're seeing it daily. Or if you get something, you highlight it, right? You can't wait for a report. Highlight it to the rep: hey, did you see what Glenn over at the road department said about this feature? He loves it. Throw it up on your social. Make that rep feel good. When you start combining all the things like that, that's when that reporting, that data visibility, really changes the mindset and everybody's buy-in.

Host 35:41
Yeah, that makes sense. And I know one of the big challenges across this industry is really building those bridges of trust between sales, and between customer experience or customer success. Just curious if you could expand a little bit more about your approach to doing that.

Cache Walker 36:06
Yeah, I think part of it is that data visibility. It's being a partner to them. But ultimately, there's an approach to it too: it's going to them to help them be successful.

When I think of our success with our CX org — which was massive, and we had such a good partnership with them — it didn't start like that. It had challenges. We had to get going. It started with weekly meetings, monthly meetings, where we'd go through, we'd analyze NPS promoters. Who can we reach out to? We really held their hand, white-glove treatment.

But then when it got to its pinnacle — through months of hyper-transparency, championing their wins, helping them be successful — we reached the point in Q3 of last year where they said, hey, we want to commit to driving more references. And I said, okay, well, your current number is X. And they said, okay — and this is their vice president — he said, we want to quadruple that.

And then I realized we had reached a point where they weren't helping me get to my goals; I was helping them get to their goals. Because them being able to showcase happy customers was a huge win for our support organization. And along the way, we built portals on User Evidence that were all about support. So the goodness is constantly feeding in. The reps are constantly being celebrated. I'm throwing it up in Slack. We're putting it in front of their leadership. This wasn't just something that was helping our case studies move forward. This was helping the positivity around all of the things we were doing increase.

Host 37:45
It's almost like meta customer marketing, where yes, you're celebrating the successes of your customers, but also your internal customers, who are oftentimes the sales and marketing teams. So it sounds like putting in the work to make sure that they are celebrated as well really helped pay off in the end.

Cache Walker 38:07
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you will always be a team of one, or three, or five, right? That's never going to cut it at any organization for the impacts you are wanting to have. For you to be successful at the level you want to be, you have to make advocacy everybody else's thing that they can help drive, and make them celebrated for it. Find a way that it drives an impact for them. Provide that data visibility. Provide easy templates. Make it easy. Make it simple. Make it happen. And then it's their win. When it's their win, they'll pick it up and run with it. And it was huge for

Host 38:42
us. Yeah. I loved, at CustomerXCon, we had a session with some VPs of customer marketing, and I think it was Maureen from SmartBear who said, "You have to find out what everyone's donuts are." I thought that was really

Cache Walker 38:58
the favorite donuts quote. Yeah, I remember that saying — great. But yeah, find out what makes people work, right?

And even your executives. A support leader — they have never gotten enough marketing. I can tell you, your support leaders will say, "We've never gotten enough marketing. We don't get any of the goodness." Drive them case studies. Drive case studies about your support organization. Drive customer feedback. Do a survey. We built a survey just for our customer support organization that was just there to generate positivity about what they were doing, the impacts they were having on customers.

We had mentioned something earlier about how difficult it was to get high-profile customers, or Fed and SLED customers. We built a Fed/SLED-specific survey and sent it out to them. Ray did some customization to make it so it never even asked them to go on the record. It was completely anonymous. But it's those kinds of approaches that I think really helped us be successful, because it was never about us. It was about the impacts we wanted to have across the organization.

Host 39:56
Yeah, a very different approach than just getting the directive of, hey, go and create 10 case studies this quarter, and then feeling like you're grasping at straws. It sounds like you had a little bit of an internal campaign to determine those donuts for the different teams, but then it sounds like you were also connecting back to the organization's own strategic growth initiatives with a lot of the content.

Cache Walker 40:24
Yeah, and everything we were doing was towards a bigger goal anyway. All of the systems, all the things we were doing, were going after every customer story. We were never going to have enough. We didn't want 15 in a quarter. We wanted a story for every customer. So I think that's what led us to the ultimate success: because we were chasing something so much bigger than these little things that we were accomplishing along the way. But the wins were awesome, because we were still continuing down towards the bigger goal.

Host 40:55
Yeah, and I feel

Martín Galtieri 40:56
— sorry, again — using that information to solve and to handle hard reference requests from the sales reps, when they need something specific. You have all that data there, so it's also very easy to see the information and say, yeah, we can use this information for this, this, and this, so the reference request is solved. So that also helps us a lot in managing their reference requests.

Cache Walker 41:24
Yeah. I wrote a line down last night — I love that, Martín. I wrote a line down last night. I said, the secret sauce is just stacking wins and data. That's the trick of it, right? Everything we did gave us more data, and along the way we had a bunch of wins, which helped us down this path.

Host 41:42
Yeah, that makes sense. So what would you say to somebody who's hesitating on moving forward with partners like these, because they think that the change management internally might be too time consuming, or they're just kind of afraid of running into the typical nos in terms of budget?

Cache Walker 42:05
Yeah, that's valid. I would say having the right partners is actually a budget-conscious decision. It's not one where you're asking for more. You're asking to do something pretty smart and pretty streamlined.

Because with agencies like Martín's, there were some quarters we flexed his hours because we were building. There were some quarters we pulled them back a little bit. You can't do that with headcount. So if you're going to your boss asking for headcount, A, you're going to have that challenge, but also you can't deploy that way. Even when we maxed out on Martín's hours, we still had some hours left on our contract, so we were able to bring in strategic resources from Wings4U to help with certain projects.

So it was that flexibility that allowed us to actually build in what was a budget-constrained year at Netskope. Things were tight. We didn't get more budget last year — we actually had less. And we deployed each of these vendors under that idea that we were working smarter, not just throwing money around. And that's why we built the way we did.

Host 43:18
And did it make your departure any different, do you think, having these things in place?

Cache Walker 43:24
You're probably asking the wrong person. But I think so, yeah.

I think, like, change management, right? We didn't create — I didn't become the source of truth. SlapFive did. And so not only my change management when I left, but every sales rep, every CSM that leaves — that was our whole idea in a story for every customer. If you have a story for every customer, change management is easier. If the sales rep changes and this guy picks up this account, he can go read this story, even if it's not external, and be up to speed. That was the real idea behind it: data and stories help everyone know the customers better, help the product serve the customers better.

And so yeah, I think ultimately it definitely would have made my departure easier. A, because Martín and the Wings4U team stepped in and augmented a lot of that right off the bat. But then also, it was so system-driven and so data-rich that the program didn't leave with me. The program is there and continues to work.

Host 44:38
Awesome. Well, if I had a microphone, I think that would be a mic drop moment there. So, is there anything else that you would like to add? If not, we can maybe start digging into more of these questions.

Cache Walker 44:51
No. I mean, I get the hesitations. I get that it seems like a lot. Figure out what makes sense for your business, and have the conversations with these vendors. I think that was our biggest thing: we had lots of conversations. I remember talking to the User Evidence team while we were still under contract with another vendor, hearing what they had to say, and then a light went on. I thought, oh my gosh, in order for me to get to my customer story for every customer, we're going to have to switch to these guys. So it's just: have conversations, and constantly be thinking about what the ideal program looks like for your company, and make steps toward that.

Host 45:30
Awesome. All right, thanks for sharing. I think we've got a few more questions here in the chat. I'm just scrolling up. Let's see — did we already talk about signed consents? So Anna asked: what about getting signed consents for customer stories? This can be difficult, in order to have them so that you can share them.

Cache Walker 46:01
Yeah, so I think I answered that one in the chat. We had a two-step process with User Evidence. Our legal team was super diligent about that. I would send out to the customer what their quote looked like and verify that we had their approval. We didn't do signed — we would do email approvals. But that's how we worked on those, which was the same process we followed for our case studies.

Host 46:25
Awesome. And then Alyssa asked: my stakeholders seem to think that if we have a certain number of hand-raisers for referrals, that we're going to see that number of referrals. Have you had to manage that expectation?

Cache Walker 46:42
Yeah, for sure. I think the more you get into this — I had this conversation last week at Trellix about an initiative — I think when you start breaking it down for them... I think everybody thinks of this as a magic segment of marketing, that it doesn't take awareness and consideration, that it doesn't follow the steps, and that people aren't going to fall out of your funnel on the way.

You have to start telling them things like, hey, start from the top down of your funnel. Instead of saying, hey, we've got to get to this many reviews — let's use reviews as an example. If we want to get to 50 reviews, if you chase 50 reviews, you're not going to get there. What you need to be chasing is: hey, we need 500 leads to get to 50 reviews.

So I hope that answers the question. You've kind of got to show them the funnel, and remind them that this isn't magic, it's just processes. People will always fall off. What comes into the pipeline is never going to come out at the end. But you've got to show them what you need at the front end to meet the goal at the back end.

Host 47:57
That makes sense. Any other questions? If anybody wants to hop off mute, feel free. We'll open it up.

Ray Rhodes 48:04
Looks like Jenny had one about segmenting your surveys, Cache. How do you make sure you're not sending things to multiple people, and how do you map out the strategy for doing that?

Cache Walker 48:16
That's a great question, and something that you guys, Ray, are uniquely positioned for. That helped us with not being limited on how many surveys we could send out. We could segment more appropriately and make sure folks were getting what they wanted to get.

My default approach was: I didn't want to hit the same personas multiple times in a quarter. So if there was one product that overlapped, we tried to figure out, okay, let's stagger these throughout the year. We tried to look at it through a six-to-nine-month lens and what we needed, and then do that accordingly.

Also, we were reaching out through various mechanisms, so it wasn't always Marketo, it wasn't always the CSM, it wasn't always the AE. We were going at it through different ways. So if somebody was going to do multiple ones in a quarter, it wasn't going to be a forceful ask — it was going to be on the community.

And there were folks that did every survey we threw out, unless it was a segmented one where it was like Fed/SLED only and they weren't part of that. There were folks that just really liked surveys, and you'll start to discover that, and it's awesome, because they give you a lot of goodness. But I think you just have to be mindful about not overpopulating and inundating them.

But then, Ray, you highlighted it at first: these surveys are meant to be quick. So I honestly don't know how quickly a customer is going to be fatigued from a five-to-seven-minute survey. It's pretty light. We had a pretty good conversion rate from survey completion to people who would then just go leave a Gartner Peer Insights review. That would tell me they weren't worn out by the survey, because they went and then took a 25-minute Gartner review with no coaxing from us outside of the thank-you on the landing page.

Jenny 50:02
Very nice. This is Jenny — quick question about the Influitive acquisition and all that. So it sounds like you don't really... we don't always need Influitive, which is good.

Cache Walker 50:22
That's up to everyone.

Jenny 50:23
No, I'm just curious, because I think you've used them in the past, and people are probably up in the air now about whether they should use them. So that's where I'm at. Just wondering your take on why you don't necessarily need them if you have all these partners instead.

Cache Walker 50:40
My view, Jenny, at least at Netskope — the reason we didn't do that is that one of the primary things when I had arrived was that we had just launched a community, and I did not want to cannibalize any of the efforts of the community. Those people had a place to exist.

I think elements like that do make a lot of sense if you're in need of that community element, and that might be a really successful thing for you. I think you have to look at it through that lens, and that's where those pieces fit. For us, it didn't, because we had just launched that community and I didn't want to cannibalize those efforts.

Jenny 51:16
But if you already had one, what would you do? How would you move them to this instead? Sorry, it might be too much to ask on this call, but —

Cache Walker 51:28
If I already... I don't know. Let's chat.

Jenny 51:32
Yeah.

Cache Walker 51:33
Let's set up a meeting and chat, Jenny.

Unknown Speaker 51:35
Okay. Segue.

Host 51:36
So I just dropped this into the chat. If anybody has any follow-up questions, or wants to dig deeper on any of these topics in a one-to-one conversation, or have a conversation with SlapFive and User Evidence, with SlapFive and Wings4U, or Wings4U and User Evidence — I just dropped that survey in. You can opt into doing any of those things.

And also, please just provide your feedback and let us know: was this helpful? Was there anything that you felt was missing? If you do have any deeper follow-up questions for any of the folks on the call, we will triage those and make sure to get answers to you. And if there's enough interest, we may entertain the idea of doing a separate Q&A. So please fill out that form and let us know.

But in the short term, if anybody has any closing thoughts — maybe Cache?

Cache Walker 52:38
I think people make a difference. I think the people we work with make a difference, and obviously that had a huge impact on what we were able to do at Netskope. I won't minimize how impactful it is to work with great people. The partners we chose and the vendors we worked with were just the same part of that equation — the people were awesome. And so I think that's where, now that I'm away from it, that's the key to success: we worked with great partners, we worked with great people both internally and externally, and that's what allows you to be successful.

Host 53:14
Love it. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time, and thank you everybody for joining us today. We hope to hear some feedback from you all, and I will be sending out the recording as well. So thank you, everyone, and have a wonderful rest of the week.

Ray Rhodes 53:30
Yeah, thanks everybody.

Jenny 53:31
Thanks so much.

Martín Galtieri 53:32
Thanks for your time. Bye bye.