Who is Drata?
Drata is a security and compliance automation platform that continuously monitors and collects evidence of a company’s security controls, while streamlining compliance workflows end-to-end to ensure audit readiness.
Situation
With more and more companies acknowledging the importance of robust compliance, the tech landscape has become a sea of similar offerings. Standing out amongst a crowded field of competitors would require Drata to develop a deeper understanding of complex buyer behaviors, sharpen competitive differentiation, and craft more-personalized value propositions; yet, the strain of hyper growth left Drata’s internal teams juggling a broad spectrum of operational demands, leaving little bandwidth to orchestrate a holistic go-to-market overhaul.
Solution
Drata engaged Fluvio to provide outside expertise, allowing Drata’s internal teams to maintain a rapid pace of product innovation while simultaneously retooling the company’s go-to-market approach.
This effort began with Fluvio conducting extensive market research, combining primary interviews with secondary research to uncover trends, pain points, and unmet needs in this fast-evolving space. These insights were synthesized into a detailed research prospectus and in-depth personas that captured critical motivators, common objections, and solution criteria specific to Drata’s target audiences.
Armed with a clear understanding of the nuanced buying behaviors of CIOs, security officers, and others, Fluvio worked with Drata to develop clear, differentiated positioning and messaging that showcased Drata’s unique approach to “continuous compliance,” incorporating the critical language, proof points, and value propositions that speak directly to each persona’s priorities.
Finally, Fluvio collaborated with Drata’s sales and marketing teams to create collateral and enablement assets, ensuring everyone across the organization could confidently communicate Drata’s unique advantages.
CLIENT INTERVIEW
We sat down and interviewed Topher Stephenson, Senior Director of Product & Partner Marketing, to get his thoughts on Drata’s product marketing consulting engagement with Fluvio.
Topher Stephenson
Senior Director of Product & Partner Marketing, Drata
What problems were you encountering that led you to believe a product marketing consultant could help?
What we have as a hyper-growth SaaS startup is more work than we had people to do it. We encountered a number of team members that were going on leave for various reasons, and we needed someone who could come in quickly, have PMM expertise that could be applied to our business, and help us keep up with the many demands that we have on our time and attention. We looked at many vendors and found a great fit with Fluvio.
Why was Fluvio the right fit for Drata?
Fluvio offers access to world class talent, the ability to scale with that talent, and a business model that does the actual PMM job, not just the strategy job. They approach PMM in a way that applies best practices, full of customer empathy, research backed, not anecdotal, but really doing the hard work to understand customer needs and be able to do some of the fundamental jobs that a PMM needs to do. I was confident after early conversations that Fluvio could do that and scale quickly.
Fluvio did the job, covering the gap in people and serving as a ‘second set of eyes,’ bringing a point of view to help us figure out the best way to accomplish our goals. It was more than just task oriented, it was a strategic partnership, which I valued quite a bit. It wouldn’t have worked if it was just doing what we asked, because sometimes there are better ways and we found that in a handful of cases with Fluvio.
“Fluvio offers access to world class talent, the ability to scale with that talent, and a business model that is fairly-unique of doing the actual PMM job, not just the strategy job.”
What does Fluvio offer that is unique?
Fluvio’s business model – basically having someone who embedded in our team, someone who was in our meetings, someone who understood our business and our operating model, and someone who was working on work that was moving the needle – was super unique. Our philosophy at Drata has been somewhat hostile to consultants who only do project work or come in and do strategy work, and what I loved about Fluvio was that you operated at multiple altitudes. You drove strategy when needed to, but could also get down to brass tax and do the work that product marketers need to do.
In fact, I would bring Fluvio in, and I may bring them in as founding product marketers in the future, because scaling with Fluvio just makes sense. You get someone on your team that does high quality work, the value delivery is strong, and you have the ability to prove out the need for additional full-time employees before having to invest in full-time employees, and that's largely the benefit of the consulting model that Fluvio provides.