Customer Story | Frontify

For more than three years, Frontify has partnered with Clozd to capture direct customer feedback and use it to drive their marketing and sales efforts. Building affinity with their customers has been a consistent priority for Frontify’s team, and they’ve recently focused on leveraging win-loss insights to guide their new positioning, create persuasive marketing collateral, and refine their sales process. These efforts have resulted in new business opportunities, increased pipeline generation, and improved customer retention.

Benefiting from a Mature, Cross-Functional Program

Alexina Clements understands the power of in-depth, unbiased buyer feedback.

“My role is customer insights,” she said. “I focus on understanding what’s driving wins and losses, and on understanding what our customers think of us. We believe that great brands listen to their audiences, and we seek to instill that into our DNA to build trust and relevance. So I need to make sure we can gather this data; translate it into insights; and help inform strategic decision-making, content creation, and our product.”

To streamline and scale this process, Frontify—where Alexina works as a senior customer insights manager—has partnered with Clozd for several years. Over time, they’ve fine-tuned their process to the point where they’re experiencing the benefits of a mature, cross-functional program, including:

• ​Consistent buy-in and engagement from key stakeholders throughout the organization
• ​A streamlined, scalable process of capturing and sharing powerful insights
• ​The ability to identify and analyze meaningful trends over time
• ​Real value in the form of new business opportunities and increased pipeline generation

“Clozd really helps provide qualitative data that we’re missing in the typical surveys we send out or if we’re gathering information from our AEs or CSMs,” Alexina said. “One of the things I really like about Clozd is that, because we’ve had it for over three years now, we can see how we’ve grown as a business, what our customers think of us, and how that’s changed over time.”

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback is important, but it’s equally important for the right people to have access to the right data. This is something that Frontify—led by Alexina’s team—does exceptionally well.

The feedback Frontify captures through Clozd’s win-loss interviews is a critical part of their SWOT analysis, and it’s also shared widely at monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings.

Leveraging a Closed-Won Interview to Build Pipeline

Frontify creates even more value by sharing win-loss insights broadly and cross-functionally. They have a wide base of employees—including the entire commercial team as well as the product team—who access and use the competitive data within the Clozd Platform.

As a result, they’ve been able to create new business opportunities and drive renewal income.

“For example, I share specific Clozd interviews with the marketing team, enabling them to identify impactful quotes or customers to use in their marketing efforts,” Alexina said. “Recently, they featured a customer from one of these interviews in a webinar, which led to dozens of new opportunities with both existing and potential clients.”

For another recent project, Alexina has reviewed Frontify’s customer interviews from the past three years and curated the best quotes for various uses cases, including:

• ​Marketing
• ​Competitor comparison articles
• ​Social media
• ​Customer and prospect conversations
• ​Battlecards

“We're currently developing a system to organize and select the most impactful quotes,” she said. “Additionally, Clozd has offered to facilitate introductions to help get the necessary approvals for using the quotes. Everyone’s really excited about this initiative.”

Validating Their Strategy & Repositioning Themselves in the Market

Giving a voice to their customers also helps Frontify validate the trends they’re seeing throughout their different competitive intelligence channels—and then make changes if necessary.

“We’re seeing that ease of use is incredibly important to our customers when it comes to buying new technology,” Alexina said. “Fortunately, that aligns with a strength of ours—which we’ve validated through Clozd interviews.”

They’ve also validated that ROI and adoption rate are important to their customers—a good thing, since driving a high adoption rate is also a point of emphasis for Frontify’s leadership team.

“One thing that Clozd has shown us is there was an increase in mentions of ROI this year in comparison to any year previously,” she said. “So this was really helpful for me, because obviously I’d seen this trend throughout our industry, but I’ve also seen it with our customers. And having Clozd validate that really confirmed that, from a content-creation perspective, we should create more materials relating to ROI.”

Clozd interviews have also played a central role in guiding Frontify’s competitive strategy.

“We just launched our new positioning, and some of the interviews that Clozd did—paired with some surveys we’d done amongst our customer base—really informed our new positions,” Alexina said. “And we just signed a huge new client thanks to that new positioning. This research has a strong impact on these strategic projects.”

Relying on Customer Feedback to Strengthen Their Sales Team

Win-loss interviews have been helpful from an enablement perspective, as Frontify has incorporated powerful competitive intel into their battlecards and sales decks.

These VoC insights have also provided something more: an objective look at what their sales team was doing right and where they needed to improve. Frontify’s sales leadership team saw a chance to improve their strategy for selling a specific product and looked for a way to confirm their assumptions.

"Clozd provided an insightful perspective that confirmed something we had suspected about our product sales strategy,” Alexina said. “While the approach for one product was highly successful, their feedback highlighted areas for improvement with the second product. This has been incredibly helpful in fine-tuning our overall strategy."

Clozd was able to capture useful, objective feedback from closed-lost prospects, and those insights validated Frontify’s assumptions and led to corrective action.

“Our leads were really happy about it, because this was their inclination as well, but we needed some customers to actually validate it,” she said. “It would’ve been really hard for us to reach out and get this information from lost prospects, but Clozd filled that gap and did that for us—with a much higher response rate."