“We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game,” says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie. “This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.”

Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey, discusses how the company is driving its massive growth by focusing on enterprise solutions that are sold by the seat, in an interview on CNBC:

The Category For Experience Management Is Massive

The category for experience management is massive. Companies today are differentiating their products and services by their ability to be customer-centric. Everybody has access to off-the-shelf software and you can buy keywords on Google and you can target folks on Facebook but the ability to really be sensitive to what your customers care about and want is critical. Usabilla is the solution that we acquired earlier this year. They have a customer in KLM Dutch Airlines who was able to improve their app experience by a 2.8 to a 4.2 rating using our product. It really is about, can your managers and can your marketers listen to that feedback, understand the bugs, and then deliver and take action. That’s what survey software can do.

We don’t compete with Adobe and Salesforce at all. Frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers who need to be buying enterprise survey software. We exist in the Salesforce ecosystem and really try and help Salesforce customers get better data and get sentiment data from what their customers really care about. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, those are big systems of record. They provide you a lot of operational data. Where SurveyMonkey competes and thrives is delivering for customers that sentiment data. How am I really doing? What can we improve upon? That’s where we’re selling a solution into the Salesforce ecosystem and we partner with Salesforce in a really productive way. It’s part of the reason they bought into our IPO last year. 

Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game. This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year. 

We set about on our IPO last year and told investors our plan to make this business a lot more valuable. The two key driving factors first is to elevate our sales motion to sell directly to the enterprise. That has been wildly successful. We doubled year-over-year a hundred percent growth in revenue in the sales channel. We now have almost 5,000 customers, up 60 percent year over year. We now compete in that ecosystem and we have a really disruptive product. Consumers love our product. We’re now selling into the organization with a really talented sales team. 

There’s Been So Much Account Sharing On SurveyMonkey

Our team’s product is the collaborative self-serve product. We have a unique opportunity here. There’s been so much account sharing on SurveyMonkey over the years and in the current security environment, we’re asking people to pay for their own seat. That has driven a really healthy paid user growth. We see continued growth in those two areas. As I said, growth for us we’ve accelerated growth now twenty percent year-over-year, but we do it a disciplined way. We’re still able to deliver over $13 million dollars of unleveraged free cash flow in the quarter. We’re just not a company that’s going to grow at all cost. We want to have both healthy growth and disciplined cash flow.

We use politics in a fun way to help get a beat on what’s going on out in the world. Just like we ask questions about if you are potentially interested in buying an electric car or what do you think of Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, we also ask questions of the two and a half to three million people on our platform every day of who might you vote for and what issues are important to you. That really does give us a particular read on what American consumers are thinking.