case-study
Nimble Storage Amps Lead Generation to Create Dozens of Opportunities in 3 Months
The Challenge
Nimble Storage, the flash storage solutions company, maintains a global network of sales and support offices, and has relationships with a global network of resellers in the US, EMEA, and APAC.
The Nimble Storage marketing team was looking to simplify how the company told its Adaptive Flash story to a very technical audience base. With buyers who are deeply interested in new technologies, Nimble struggled to find a user-driven marketing engagement tool that could successfully drive prospects to interact with their solutions and clearly communicate their value proposition across multiple platforms, including the web, trade shows, and mobile devices.
“At trade shows, people like to explore technologies before talking to a sales rep,” said Fred Love, Marketing Director at Nimble. “That’s why the interactive 3D product models and immersive 3D storytelling was a great fit for us. Customers can interact, drive, and own the conversation and not feel like they’re being sold to.”
Although they would reuse the trade show equipment, Nimble was spending up to $100,000 in hardware expenses to populate physical racks with both their hardware and partners’ equipment (switches/networking gear), $5,000 in shipping/drayage costs per show, as well as additional fees for a dedicated technical expert at each event to keep everything running smoothly
The Solution
After seeing their partner Cisco Systems at VMworld utilizing virtual 3D Product Models (which look and behave like the actual products) on the Kaon v-Rack (two 40” Kaon v-OSK MT™ interactive touch screens mounted within an actual rack), they knew they needed a similar solution to effectively communicate their unique product differentiation. Nimble immediately contacted Kaon Interactive to obtain pricing and capabilities research.
Love stated, “After getting an estimate and seeing the interactive 3D product storytelling
demonstrations, the ability to economically duplicate this immersive experience on our website, at trade shows, and on mobile devices made it extremely compelling for us to move forward.” While Nimble’s initial focus was on developing a 3D Product Model of their data storage hardware, their greatest excitement came from bringing to life their Adaptive Flash platform through interactive storytelling. “Kaon’s application allowed us to express a complex and technically detailed solution story interactively, in a simplified way that clearly communicated our value,” said Sean Roth, Product Marketing Manager at Nimble.
Using a New Disruptive Marketing Platform
To achieve cross-platform distribution and to accommodate the large size and rich marketing content (videos, animations and real-time photo-quality 3D renderings) that Nimble sales and marketing application required, meant that they would need to distribute their content using the Kaon Application Delivery Network (ADN). The Kaon ADN addresses the problem of distributing a single interactive user experience to all platforms: mobile, desktop, browser, Kaon v-OSK MT™, and Kaon v-Rack™. That means literally hundreds of different devices, architectures and platforms, global networks, enterprise firewalls and proxy servers, and a user base that needs everything to be very straightforward.
The Kaon ADN helped overcome these challenges, as it is the world’s only platform that can deliver and support online or offline access to unlimited users on all devices from one universal location, without redevelopment fees. What appears to the end-user to be a very simple thing (an application that “just works” on every device) is actually the result of a suite of very complex technologies, all working in perfect harmony.
The ROI Advantage
Not only was Nimble able to engage prospects and more effectively communicate their value proposition, but now, they also are able to capture higher qualified leads by requiring a registration on their website before viewing the interactive 3D storytelling applications, fueling their CRM database and sales funnel.
To leverage the investment as much as possible, Nimble placed a banner on the homepage of their website to promote the interactive 3D storytelling application. In the first three months after the application was released, their marketing team was able to capture hundreds of pre-qualified prospects, which sales converted into dozens of face-to-face meetings.
Before Nimble deployed Kaon’s interactive sales and marketing application, they would ship physical equipment to the 25+ large/mid-sized events they attended each year. The utilization of the immersive 3D product storytelling applications on the Kaon v-Rack (a virtual rack) not only generated sizable booth traffic and a buzz at these events, but it also eliminated the hassle of shipping hardware to trade shows and having a dedicated tech person on the floor at all times.
At the 400+ smaller shows, Nimble is now able to demonstrate their product portfolio at small tabletops on mobile devices and laptops, generating new interest and sales opportunities that weren’t previously possible.
“We are so pleased with the initial response that we are looking to syndicate the interactive 3D product application on technology vertical websites like TechTarget and IDG to further drive pre-qualified leads,” said Fred Love.
“Our sales people have adopted the tool in droves and are downloading the interactive 3D storytelling applications on to their mobile devices and using them as a backdrop for our narrative,” stated Fadi Azhari, Director of Product Marketing at Nimble. “It’s great to have an interactive 3D product application that communicates so clearly one version of the truth that can be updated and pushed everywhere. It was a great investment and we’d do it again.”
“It’s great to have an interactive 3D product application that communicates so clearly one version of the truth that can be updated and pushed everywhere. It was a great investment and we’d do it again.”
Fadi Azhari, Director of Product Marketing, Nimble Storage