Driving Rapid Revenue Growth: A Q&A with Everbridge's David Meredith

David: Senior executives are dealing with myriad challenges: how do I keep my people safe; how do I help my team to be productive; and how do we communicate with our customers during these uncertain times? This current scenario is a perfect representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you are out there trying to sell something that is not related to any of the crises your customers are going through, it is harder to get their attention. If your business utilizes mostly “on-prem” [on premises] delivery models, the problem just got even bigger because customers are not allowing any more visitors. So even if you can close a deal, you cannot implement the solution and recognize revenues. Overall, customers are going to cost-containment modes, and the onus is on technology companies to get creative about communicating the value of their products and services.

When I speak for Everbridge, we are in a unique position because our business directly helps organizations keep people safe and restore operations amid the coronavirus, and most of our products are SaaS-based.

David: We have two separate issues going on right now in the world — a public health crisis and a financial crisis, with one crisis developing as a direct result of the other. If we were to experience a quick breakthrough in the advance of a vaccine for COVID-19, I think there still could be a V-shaped curve. Unfortunately, most people project it will take well into next year to produce and distribute a vaccine. In this case, companies and states must manage the health crisis without this vital resource for a longer period of time, and that could mean a longer recovery curve for the industry. At Everbridge, we are focused on leveraging our technology solutions to de-risk the return to work for businesses and healthcare organizations, as well as the return to public spaces for citizens, in the runup to finding a vaccine.

David: Speaking for us, we expanded the value proposition of our global critical event management (CEM) platform to emphasize specific benefits for our business, government and healthcare customers related to the issues they are facing due to the pandemic. We were very quick to pivot and launch our COVID-19- specific value propositions, and we are receiving a lot of positive feedback from our customers. We have launched a series of solutions under our CEM suite called COVID-19 Shield, which includes a collection of quick-start templates around specific-use cases our customers are dealing with in the current environment. Given that field marketing is not an option right now, we have placed a lot of emphasis on digital marketing and sales incentive techniques.

David: First, reposition your products and services to specific pain points your customers are dealing with as a result of COVID-19. Second, rethink the traditional sales and marketing techniques and try to become digitally savvy. I already see a lot of innovative companies doing the above two things, and those companies will emerge as winners when we come out of the pandemic. Third, trust your employees and empower them to be successful. At Everbridge, we acknowledge that our employees are working extremely hard, and we recently rolled out extended work-from-home policies, and expanded and flexible vacation plans, among other benefits. We have empowered our employees to do the right thing for customers and for the company.

David: Companies will start rethinking their traditional channel and sales strategies and begin challenging the norms. Many companies are operating at 100% workfrom- home models right now, and they are beginning to realize that they can run their operations efficiently — maybe even better than before COVID-19 happened. Speaking for Everbridge, we repurposed marketing money we had allocated for trade shows into a virtual symposium on the coronavirus in Q2. We drew more than 10,000 registrations, with strong C-Suite participation, and are on track to generate more pipeline and brand awareness than we would have achieved from the more traditional tradeshow spend. Smart companies will capitalize on their learnings from COVID-19 and rebalance their sales channels between physical and digital.