VMware is a leader in cloud-native endpoint protection dedicated to keeping the world safe from cyberattacks. More than 6,000 global customers, including ⅓ of the Fortune 100, trust VMware to protect their organizations from cyberattacks. The company’s partner ecosystem features more than 500 MSSPs, VARs, distributors and technology integrations, as well as many of the world’s leading IR firms, who use VMware’s technology in more than 500 breach investigations per year.
Given the growth in their industry, and release cycles of many new products, they were also facing a huge market landscape and more complex deal cycles. VMware’s Compete team is a strategic, lean team. Scale, automation, and a well-planned strategy were key components for Competitive Enablement success, especially for their large teams of global sellers.
As with any highly competitive industry, the volume of intel to keep up with was very high. But while most companies think of building a competitive intelligence program starting with competitors, VMware took a different approach – they would create insights, messaging and positioning with customers at the center.
→ Using the model as a guide, the team was able to identify additional resources needed to create a measurable competitive program. This was key for getting program approval from their Executive team.
→ Klue became the central platform to capture key competitive insights, starting with the Carbon Black BU. Seeing success here caused the broader CI teams to begin conversations around centralizing competitive intel across all VMware business units.
→ Klue’s organized boards and cards gave the VMware team the needed structure to revamp their content strategy to a more ‘customer centric’ approach, which included:
- Highlighting the most critical use cases. Listening to recorded sales calls, analyzing win/loss data and taking a closer look at their buyer journeys helped the team identify the most common customer use cases heard by sales, and mapping those back to what their current solution could address.
- Building customer value beyond just technical traps. With such complex and lengthy sales cycles, the team created messaging and positioning focused on what mattered to their customers most, and used benefit-oriented language.
- Sharing frequent sound bites. Making shorter valuebenefit points using their buyers’ language available to sales to create an instant connection and build trust with prospects.
- Creating a repeatable system. Managing resources and time effectively were critical, with limited bandwidth and resources. The team at VMware was able to create a repeatable system for intel crowdsourcing, curating, sharing and measuring using Klue.
→ Better visualization and presentation of insights to sales. Using Klue’s battlecards, reps found instant messaging using customer-oriented language. Reps could also easily see when and who last reviewed insights in battlecards and other formats, and quickly search for insights based on certain keywords.
VMware is making great progress and already seeing successful results from Carbon Black sales teams – more wins – from the reps who’ve been using Klue in their deals.
- Restructuring intel to solution insights in Klue battlecards results in more accurate, usable insights and better sales conversations
- 250% increase in Klue usage in 1 yr
- Quarterly sales survey showed increased confidence in deals for those reps using Klue
- Overall higher win rates
- Consistent solution-based messaging across the entire sales team
