PLAN DE PREVENCIÓN Y MITIGACIÓN DE IMPACTOS, (PPM)

The offices of SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading online survey platform, are located in a brand new, four-story building directly across from the Palo Alto CalTrain station. The headquarters perfectly represent the SurveyMonkey brand, which has morphed significantly since the company’s founding in 1999.

Current CEO Dave Goldberg took over the company in 2009, when co-founders Ryan and Chris Finley sold a majority share in the company to a group of growth equity investors. Goldberg’s mandate was first to build the infrastructure to support the company’s impressive viral growth, and second to leverage the company’s position and

profits to greatly expand the business. The 14-person team had built a profitable subscription business under the Finleys, with wildly loyal customers. These customers loved the quirky, friendly, helpful brand. Revenue in 2008 was over $20 million on a very simple business model: free for a pared down version; $20 a month (or $200 a year) for unlimited online surveys plus support.¹

Subscribers saw the platform as a “secret weapon” that helped them make better, data-driven decisions and enabled them to be more productive in their jobs. Being the secret weapon for product marketers, human resource pros, and teachers everywhere, plus the fact that SurveyMonkey has always invested heavily in taking care of the customer, built incredible loyalty as well as positive word-of-mouth.

The Finleys designed the business model around access to the service, not ownership of the software, which was a brilliant early decision. According to current COO and CFO Tim Maly, “Since perceived value was always much higher than the actual cost of the service, and because it helped people succeed, and due to the fact that our support was top notch, the result was tremendous loyalty from the beginning.”²

Goldberg’s people needed to professionalize the already successful business and evolve it over time from a mere survey tool to the leading platform for helping people make decisions. Their vision included adding new offering tiers with even greater functionality, translating and localizing the product to make it more accessible to people around the world, and making the brand more sophisticated, while simultaneously keeping their loyal core and maintaining the brand equity that already existed. It’s always tricky to change an organization’s branding and core offering, but it’s especially difficult in membership businesses because the relationship is based on ongoing trust and consistency.

SurveyMonkey was one of the first of the digital service companies (aka Software as a Service or SaaS) to embrace the freemium model, in which customers could choose from a free subscription or a paid, premium subscription with additional benefits. Maly talks about the initial selling approach as “consumerization of the enterprise.” Individuals subscribed to SurveyMonkey and expensed the cost, which was negligible, to their organizations. Then they used the product so they’d be more successful in their decision making. Eventually, the CFO or CIO would notice that a lot of people across the organization were using the app and would begin to discuss a broader, perhaps companywide, arrangement. This consumerization of the enterprise approach has also been used by dozens of companies including Salesforce, Yammer, Box, and DropBox.

Over time, SurveyMonkey noticed that annual subscribers were more loyal customers than monthly payers. They were committed to the platform and used it in multiple ways.

Over time, SurveyMonkey noticed that annual subscribers were more loyal customers than were monthly payers. They were committed to the platform and used it in multiple ways. When members of the new leadership team came in, they wanted to rethink pricing to better serve long-term customers and also to make it easier for big organizations to manage multiple buyers. In other words, they focused on their best customers and optimized around them.

The new team incorporated multiple tiers, spending months carefully analyzing behavioral data about its current subscribers, looking at feature requests among different groups and exploring different ways to parse the new services that had been developed to please these groups. One key decision made was to leave the current option at the same price and offer significant new features and services at the higher tiers. The new team was

While some current subscribers upgraded, the vast majority of the subscribers at the higher tiers were new subscribers. SurveyMonkey’s new offerings attracted more sophisticated users and generated more revenue as well.

SurveyMonkey has always invested heavily in product development, surveying customers, evaluating data, and conducting focus groups, all with the goal of understanding how people use surveys, what needs are adjacent to surveys, and how to deliver the highest-quality data. When I asked Maly why SurveyMonkey invests so much in innovation, even though subscriber satisfaction and retention are already very high, he pointed out that his company’s mission around decision making is a huge opportunity. As long as demand is growing and opportunities exist to make it even easier for people to make great data-driven decisions, SurveyMonkey should continue to invest in innovation

Incentivized customers to keep their surveys short to make them painless example, by sharing aggregated data through shared surveys or by offering advice on making better decisions in certain vertical markets. It has noticed clusters of like-minded subscribers. For example, it has noted HR employees creating employee engagement surveys, teachers creating parent feedback surveys, and product marketers creating customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys. SurveyMonkey has created high-quality, professionally designed survey templates to meet these segments’ needs, working with groups like the Society of Human Resource Managers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It has also enabled its users to easily share their survey results with others, typically colleagues or collaborators.

SurveyMonkey extends the community through its API strategy. An API, or application-programming interface, is a set of programming instructions and standards for way to get a community started is by initially offering benefits that don’t depend on community. In other words, users of SurveyMonkey, like users of LinkedIn and WeightWatchers.com (see case studies coming up in Chapters 17 and 19, respectively), initially received value from the tools without needing to connect with peers. But over time, as the community grew, opportunities for user-generated content, peer-to-peer advice, and shared data added value to the membership. By allowing members more freedom to help one another, SurveyMonkey creates additional value.

In contrast, Egnyte, as a file-sharing service, has incorporated a viral component from

its early days, and has leveraged partnerships with more traditional companies to build its Ram wanted to provide a hybrid storage, sharing, and collaboration solution for file management.³ Unlike the existing cloud-only storage providers, Egnyte promised to support storage across a mix of local, private, and public clouds. This hybrid solution lets or you have the flexibility of a cloud solution—into an “and” situation where organizations could keep sensitive and regulated content in secure, company-owned servers while storing everything else in the cloud. As CEO Jain likes to say, “The cloud is not enough.” This difference is just one of the things that makes Egnyte unique compared to much larger rivals like Box, Dropbox, and even Google Drive. And this difference was what attracted some of the most sophisticated investors in Silicon Valley, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, and Polaris Partners to invest more than $62 million in the company’s first few years.

Another major point of differentiation for Egnyte is its decision not to incorporate freemium into its model. While Box and Dropbox have grown primarily through their free offerings and consumerization of the enterprise, Egnyte has focused primarily on serving businesses. It has a free trial to provide a taste of the value but has chosen not to carry free users in exchange for the buzz that freemium can create.

Instead, Egnyte is investing in partnerships with traditional “premise-based” storage providers. These partnerships appeal to the on-premise providers because it allows them to offer their customers the benefits of the cloud without requiring them to make a choice between the two options. As a result, these large companies, like Netgear, Synology, and NetApp, get to preserve their relationships with existing customers and keep selling storage boxes, while Egnyte gets introductions to large potential customers. It’s a win/win.

As of May 2014, Egnyte had over 200 employees and 1.1 million users at 40,000 companies.⁴ Customers go well beyond the small businesses that were initially targeted, to include leaders like Nasdaq, Home Depot, Ikea, and Coach.⁵ The company sees blue skies