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Hey Spiceheads,

David from the Box Customer Success team here. We are excited to be beefing up our presence within Spiceworks. Could you help us with a little direction?

  1. How best should we interact with you in the community? I’ve seen some great posts about being honest and not salesy. What else do you suggest?

  2. We feel that security is top of mind for IT Pros when thinking about file sharing services. This said, we would like to help you by providing resources and educational information. What resources would you like to see from Box to make your life easier?

And to spice things up (pun intended), we have Box t-shirts for the first 20 responses

Thanks and kind regards,

David

15 Spice ups
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Just watch and answer questions. whenever a customer is asking about a competing program, don’t jump in with “their product sucks, use ours”, instead point out what functions your’s has without making mention of the competition.

Be helpful, even if it’s not your product- you’d be amazed at how well people remember a good source of information over a sales weaseling.

Welcome to SpiceWorks, pants optional!

6 Spice ups
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Welcome to Spiceworks and I hope your beefed up presense will be noted

  1. spend a bit of time reading here in the advertising forum. There are some REALLY good posts about how to interact with the community.

As Magnus said get your technical people in the community answering general security questions. As a result when we have a project that your product would be a good fit for we will very likely remember your company with good feelings (now if you end up pushing “use our product” posts the opposite will happen).

and that all relates to question 2. Spend some time answering questions and you will see where the resources and education are needed. In most cases when I learn about something it comes through interaction with other people not going and reading some white paper or the such. Speaking of witch if you do have white papers make sure we don’t have to enter our contact info to get to them. I don’t like or want to read white papers in such cases.

4 Spice ups
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Welcome to Spiceworks!!

Definitely chime in with suggestions, not just in one group but make your presence felt by contributing to any group that would reflect your commitment towards spiceworks. There is nothing wrong in advertising your product while replying to relevant posts. What I personally appreciate and like is when Partners proactively reach out to help fix issues and provide a direct channel to expedite issues for the user. Also we love plugins that make our lives easy through spiceworks console.

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I would say that the whole being honest thing is important! Don’t be pushy with your product. If it’s right for a situation, explain why but don’t bash other people’s products either. Also, the more helpful you are overall in the community will improve the community’s opinion of both you and your company. Look at people like Katie@Unitrends and Priscilla@HP as great examples of this. Ivan@Dell is also excellent. But all in all, welcome to Spiceworks! Look forward to working with you.

Thanks,

A.J.

3 Spice ups
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  1. Know yourself. If you’re in sales, acknowledge that, if you come up with a question you can’t answer don’t be afraid to say you’ll get back to someone, don’t try and answer the question, or (even worse) use sales mumbo-jumbo to avoid the question.

Try and be the un-sales guy, you’ll catch more quality leads by being a general good guy and just simply being there than plugging your product all over.

It may be tempting to just plug, and while you might get more responses that way, the quality is going to be lower.

Essentially build a relationship with the community, as if you weren’t a vendor, as others said, look to Katie for a good example.

To expand and simplify: Answer the questions you can, Chat with the community, and be a generally nice guy, then worry about selling.

  1. As far as resources, i think the Antivirus vendors do a pretty good job of getting information out there, Sophos (http://community.spiceworks.com/pages/sophos) posts information linking to their “naked security” blog (http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/) and Symantec is always posting information on the latest threats on the forum.

Personally, i think the blog approach would work best. Again, i’d say be a nice guy first, then worry about selling. There’s no need to post a link to an article from you, about you, telling people that you’re awesome.

After that, i think just simply standing on the soap box, letting people know who you are, what you do, and why you think you deserve their business works just fine.

Offers of free bacon don’t hurt either :wink:

Looking at your site it looks like you do already offer a free version for personal use, it might help to follow Unitrends’ lead and offer a free, somewhat usable business version, that’ll get people more interested in paying you money.

As the drug dealers say, your first hit is free.

Best of luck,

-P

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Booze, and lots of it!

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Contribute on whatever topics you’re comfortable with. Build a presence, in both the IT and non-IT forums. We even have a cooking forum.

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Welcome aboard.

I don’t have anything funny to contribute to this today, but like others I appreciate an honest statement of who you are and what you can do for your customers and a willingness to use preferred methods of communication.

I for one hate cold phone calls. Calls related to email discussions are OK if we both decided that a call is appropriate, but cold calls are a waste of time.

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One thing that seems to cause a lot of strong (negative) feeling is badly worded or illogical polls - so if you post any, make sure it can capture all possible answer. Otherwise you’ll end up with less responses, and a unfavourable reputation.

Oh and giving away t-shirts always helps, but you seem to have that one sorted already :wink:

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  1. Honest and not salesy is good. Also appreciate that if you as a Marketing/Sales person says that a word means X and a load of IT Pros say it means Y, then it means Y, regardless of what you think :wink:

  2. In terms of resources, you’ll find a lot of posts about people looking at hosted sharing and then there will inevitably be replies of “but what about compliance?” anything that you can provide to make your product stand out in those cases is good

2 Spice ups
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Good point Huw. I’ve seen a lot of posts that are avoiding hosted storage because of “compliance issues.” Addressing those as they pop up would be useful.

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Allow your technical staff to respond to questions.

Accept constructive criticism since we are trying to help you improve the product used in real situations.

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Something I think would be useful to see in terms of resources are tips and tricks, especially those that help out the SMB IT Pros and MSPs out there. Blog entries with examples of how these work in real life are great, too.

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  1. Answer posts without advertising Spam, if we think it’s relevant we’ll come to you

  2. I like to an overview of the product as well as technical info, marketing hype turns me off. How will you secure data in the long run? What happens to the disks when they are swapped and how can I trust you.

cheers

Ben

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Thanks so much to everyone for the feedback and my sincere apologies for the delayed follow up.

Really appreciate everyone’s insights and guidance as I get started here on Spiceworks.

Just wanted to clarify that I am not a sales guy… I am the Manager of Customer Advocacy here at Box. I am part of our larger Customer Success team and manage our community forum, one of our Twitter feeds and co-manage our Facebook page.

We are very much looking forward to getting honest feedback about our product and I know that won’t always be glowing reviews. To be honest I think that Box will benefit much more as a company from the constructive criticism we’re likely to receive here.

Thanks again to everyone for their time and consideration.

2 Spice ups