Whether understanding employee sentiment or re-learning buyer preferences, surveys have played a key role in many marketing, HR, and general leadership tactics this quarter. To explore some of the best practices on these topics, I chatted with Leela Srinivasan, CMO at SurveyMonkey and LP in Stage 2 Capital. Have a listen to the 5 minute interview below.
At the beginning of the interview, Leela elaborates on the ways SurveyMonkey has been assisting government agencies, such as the Rhode Island Department of Health, and nonprofits, such as COVID Near You, to enable light-weight, rapidly employable technologies for contact tracing and other applications to reduce the spread of COVID-19. This set of unexpected but highly impactful use cases have driven a heightened sense of purpose among the SurveyMonkey team.
Next, Leela reflects on how much HR has become an increasingly important aspect to every functional leader’s role over the past few months. She elaborated on observed best practices regarding the use of surveys to quickly and accurately understand employee sentiment on key issues. For example, as SurveyMonkey prepares for potentially returning to the office in the future, they started by surveying their employees about concerns with that decision. When asked for one word to describe their feelings, the following word cloud resulted:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/reimagining-the-workplace-after-coronavirus/
The top drivers behind the anxiety are show below:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/reimagining-the-workplace-after-coronavirus/
For the leaders interested in exploring similar sentiments with their employees, SurveyMonkey has assembled free templates available for use.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/coronavirus-return-to-work-survey-template/
Finally, Leela elaborates on how sales and marketing leaders are using surveys to relearn buyer preferences and translate the learnings into increased demand generation efficiency. She provides an example on how SurveyMonkey “ate in their own restaurant” to navigate this relearning process. Marketing leaders are one of SurveyMonkey’s primary buyer personas. Therefore, she and her team ran a survey to understand how their context has changed over the past few months. The survey illustrated that 42% of these marketing leaders had their budget cuts. Yet, 52% are expected to maintain the same demand generation output despite the budget reductions. SurveyMonkey responded to this “do more with less” finding by launching a new product called Expert Solutions. Operating within this new mandate, marketers cannot afford to have a campaign fall flat. Therefore, SurveyMonkey launched Expert Solutions to help marketers rapidly test messaging, creative, calls-to-action, and other aspects of their campaign designs, all at a low friction price point. The survey results were critical inputs to the product and marketing strategy here.
For readers who want to replicate this relearning of buyer sentiment process, SurveyMonkey also has a free template that can serve as a starting point for your survey design.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/coronavirus-customer-survey-template/
Thank you Leela for elaborating on these tactical approaches. If you have any questions for Leela folks, feel free to comment and I can relay them to her.
