Fanatical Customers

What is a fanatical customer?

Recently, I’ve been exposed to some customers who I would describe as “fanatical.” The definition I use is customers who become spiritual about a product or an idea… A common group of people I’ve seen in the industry is a term you may have heard called the “Apple fan-boy”. These are the people that buy the latest and greatest of the new Apple products when they come out. They are so in love that they have a zealotry about them… What surprised me is I started seeing some of these types of customers at Pure.

Where are they in the Enterprise?

Having spent a lot of my career working in the “Enterprise” market, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the largest Global 1000 customers in the world. In general, I’ve found that people have tolerated products that solve business problems, but very rarely do I find a fanatic. The closest I’ve found is someone who finds enough value in a solution that they understand why they need solutions to help scale and solve business problems. So I’ve seen happy customers who find value from solutions. However, I typically don’t get into religious discussions with customers about solutions as they feel like there’s a pro and a con with everything. Trade-offs to be made: Flexibility/agility vs stability/structure. Performance vs Scale. Etc…

What’s my new experience at Pure Storage?

Recently, I’ve spoken to some Pure customers who were zealous about our products. At first, it came as a shock, as it’s counter to what I typically have seen in the enterprise. I decided to try to unpeel what I’ve seen. Here’s what I learned:

1. Expectation Setting - Most customers feel like the experience that they get in the enterprise is one of being sold a vision but receive a product that falls short on delivering to their expectations. At Pure, I believe the company is modest in articulating the value of how much simpler things are, and therefore, exceeds customer expectations
2. Support - Most of the time, support and experience are an afterthought for companies that deliver products in the enterprise. Typically, troubleshooting happens when things have already failed. At Pure - 70% of our support calls are preemptive where we call customers about a problem we’re seeing. This is built into the company's software and culture.
3. Low bar - Frankly, the last piece of it is just a low bar. People have come to expect storage refreshes every few years with forklift upgrades, with data migration projects, and with overly complicated products, largely due to having to balance and optimize for performance/cost/etc… Most storage systems were built and architected decades ago. They haven’t taken advantage of modern paradigms. Sometimes they have tried retrofitting modern paradigms into the complexity they had in the past (lipstick on a pig) to create a franken-monster… I feel like most of Pure’s competitors have built the Homer Simpson car. Pure is just a newer company that used modern technology to solve the problem in the way it needed to be solved.

Why does Pure have fanatical customers?

The first piece I’ll share is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of most technology products in the industry is very low. Companies like Apple & Tesla have built a set of customers who are fanatical about their products and have great Net Promoter scores. Pure is proud to have an NPS of 83.5 putting us in the top 1% of B2B companies, outpacing some of the best brands in the industry.

A lot of this comes from the culture of the company. I believe a lot of us have heard the Steve Jobs quote:

Elon Musk also developed a similar focus on customers and wanted to drive to a simpler experience, but based on customer feedback loops. Pure is taking simplicity further - with a simpler business model as well a customer-centric focus. The team has a philosophy that will not allow for releasing half-baked products that disappoint customers. I was at a customer this last Monday, and when our sales rep was telling the customer that we’re going to deliver, the customer had to cut our sales rep off and tell him to stop selling. The customer has experience that we’ve delivered time and again and he trusts the company.

It’s all about Trust!

Recently, I just had my 10 year anniversary with the wife and we decided to spend it in one of our favorite places in the world: Maui, Hawaii. I have two small children - my daughter is 8 and my son is 5. Here’s a picture of us:

My wife and I had an interesting discussion with them in Maui about trust. The gist of it was that you should never lie, because if you’re caught, you lose trust and earning it back is ten times harder than earning it the first time. My son just started trying to fool me with “Mom said I could” when she wasn’t around and I was with him alone. Normally, I’d be the clueless dad and trust him, but I decided to do a parental “spot-check” just to keep him on his toes. I said ok, I believe you, but when we go home, I’m going to double check with Mom, and if she tells me that she didn’t say you could, then you’re going to be in real trouble. I asked if he wanted me to check with Mom and he said no. And this now is the core of what I believe creates fanatical behavior. It comes down to trust. All parents are fanatical about their children as we know we are raising the future. They want to see their kids grow up as decent people. They want to iron out bad habits early. They don’t want their kids to lie. They don’t always tell their children yes, and they hope that Trust remains, even as the “eye-rolls” start prior to them even being teenagers…

But I hope, after my kids grow up, we have a bond based on trust. It’s never about agreeing all the time. It’s about caring and developing trust. And Pure Storage goes beyond just focusing on customers, or serving customers, or treating our customers like they are the best customers on the planet. We treat our customers like they are our children (in the best way possible, of course). We watch them and tell them when they are doing something that might cause them problems in the future. We give them the freedom to make their own choices, but guide them to the best ones. And we genuinely care.

We establish trust, and we don’t break it. And that is what is refreshing in this day and age. It’s not about customers. It’s about building a big family. And this is the heart of why I believe Pure’s customers are fanatical about Pure.