The Key To Highlighting Your Product? Focus on Customer Success
Small businesses exist to serve nearly every kind of need. You can find companies with offerings like delivering cookies on-demand or messages and photos printed on a potato, delivered fresh to your door.Though what MuleSoft offers may not be as easily understood as an everyday consumer product, it solves real problems for businesses like Spotify, McDonald’s, Salesforce, and The Coca-Cola Company in a real way.The company “connects SaaS & enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise” allowing its customers to innovate faster and scale more efficiently.So how does MuleSoft help prospective customers understand exactly what it does and how it can transform their businesses? Shana Pearlman, the company’s Content Marketing Manager, explains the ways she effectively highlights its genuine value.
As MuleSoft offers a number of different solutions across a wide range of industries, how are you able to offer a high level explanation of what the company does to potential new users?
We're very lucky in that the problems MuleSoft are solving are problems that multiple industries have in common with one another. Every company has the issue of how to connect systems together. Every industry has the issue that their customer, or citizen, or patient, wants to interact with them in different ways faster than ever before. Every industry has information stored in databases that can be difficult to extract. Everyone is using SaaS applications like Salesforce. The good news is that even though the industries are different, the underlying problem is the same, and therefore the solution can work in a diverse number of settings.
Amongst the many benefits of MuleSoft, is there a specific value proposition you focus on in MuleSoft's marketing?
We focus on showcasing how our platform enables organizations to change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect their applications, data and devices. We strive to highlight these customer stories in everything we do. Having our customers explain the speed, agility, and efficiency they’re able to drive by creating an application network with Anypoint Platform resonates very well with prospects.
To what extent do you delve into all the technical aspects of MuleSoft's offering via general marketing efforts?
Our customers are technical people who are looking to solve technical problems. But it's also our job to help technical leaders help their colleagues understand the strategic importance of integration and API strategies. It's important to establish our technical bona fides but also make sure that the "IT stuff" isn't isolated in some back office somewhere. Businesses need to get good at understanding how connectivity is key to better serving their customers and stakeholders, or they risk going out of business. So we have to ensure that both a technical and non-technical point of view emerges in our marketing.
Is there specific discourse or conversations you attempt to immerse MuleSoft in either through your blog or other content marketing strategies?
We always seek to highlight top trends like DevOps, microservices, and IoT — but regardless of the trend, our content marketing always has to come back to the main story. How is connectivity improving outcomes for our customers?
What would you advise startup founders whose product is not so easily explained in a single sentence?
Again, the best way to showcase your product is to highlight the success of customers. What is your product enabling them to do that they couldn’t do before? By highlighting these success stories, you can create a tangible understanding of value of your product.
What's coming up next for MuleSoft?
We're tackling a really big problem for enterprises – how to harness all the new technology available to better meet ever-growing customer expectations. I expect you'll see more from us about how businesses can adopt and succeed with all kinds of exciting emerging technology.