The Performance Principle

In today's world of Yelp, social media, and near constant internet access, it seems like anyone with access to a computer can share their thoughts and opinions (whether you want them to or not). This seems true for nearly every aspect of our lives except for enterprise technology professionals. Here is a group of individuals, advanced in every other sense but cannot make themselves heard about the products they use on a regular basis (e.g. enterprise software, hardware, services). This is precisely how the young startup IT Central Station came to be.

The need to be heard is an important one and, even with the proper social technology support, there still seems to be a large and silent majority.

So I was interested to read the results of a new survey by TechValidate on the types of B2B enterprise technology customers and how free they are to talk about the products they use. They found that by far, the largest group is "Silent Satisfied Customers":

• Silent Satisfied Customers: 90%
• Occasional Named References: 7%
• Frequent Named References: 2.5%
• Super Customer Advocates: 0.5%

Silent Satisfied Customers are "customers who are happy with the product but can't/won't participate in named reference activities (can't get legal approvals, don't have time etc.)." We created IT Central Station to enable these 90% of silent users to finally be heard. They can post privately and anonymously so their company name and real identity are not revealed. (See what a review looks like.) Reviews take just a couple of minutes to write. Go ahead, write one now and be heard!

The TechValidate survey The B2B Customer Reference Funnel can be seen here.