Medallia engaged Sterling Communications to draw attention to the growing market for Customer Experience (CX) solutions, with the goal of attracting venture funding for the company’s next, breakout stage of growth. The company also wished to raise its visibility in order to better compete for the engineering talent streaming into Silicon Valley from top business management schools. It needed a media strategy that would garner coverage in Tier-1 business press, broader tech industry outlets, and CX trade publications.
Sterling leveraged Medallia’s longevity in the CX industry and its stellar customer portfolio for business-focused stories. For personality-driven coverage, we tapped a “married co-founders” angle and also interest in female Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. We put forward CEO Borge Hald as the spokesperson on business leadership in interviews with the San Jose Mercury News and the Silicon Valley Business Journal, and built President Amy Pressman’s profile as a thought leader on growing a corporate culture to the point she was named one of “50 Women in Tech Dominating Silicon Valley.”
Sterling ensured a continuous stream of positive coverage by carefully timing news about high-profile customers such as Tommy Bahama and funding rounds, culminating in a $150M investment that brought Medallia to “unicorn” status with a $1B valuation. Sterling had just three weeks to craft the messaging and orchestrate a series of media interviews, challenged by an offsite quarterly business review and extensive travel. The tight timeframe was driven by two factors: 1) avoiding an informal leak once the funding had closed; and 2) having the news hit before the summer doldrums and start of quarterly earnings season.
The strategy around the $150M infusion worked as intended, giving Medallia and the CX category broader awareness (coverage reach of 52.5M), and attracting a large number of potential new employees (1K+ searches for jobs at Medallia on the day of the funding announcement). Coverage in media outlets such as Fortune, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and the Wall Street Journal generated a tsunami of business media interest, with joint appearances by the CEO and president on KTVU (FOX) TV and Bloomberg TV. The CEO eventually appeared on the cover of Forbes representing one of four “unicorn” entrepreneurs, while the president was the focus of a New York Times “Corner Office” column on her leadership strategies.