Case Study: IBM Belgium achieves scalable social proof and faster product validation with SurveyMonkey

How large B2B enterprises like IBM get social proof at scale

IBM faced a common enterprise marketing problem: customer stories are essential for credibility, but sales teams weren’t delivering enough case studies or references—especially for new or acquired products with few customers and for mature products that needed competitive differentiation. Cheri Bergeron, Marketing Leader for Strategic Client Programs, set out to bypass that sales bottleneck and get social proof at scale.

Her team used TechValidate to run targeted surveys and market studies, let respondents choose anonymity to increase participation, and slice results by industry, region, and company size. The approach yielded tangible assets—eight targeted testimonials after an acquisition, a 1,000+ response market report for IBM Graph, segmented proof and demand-gen reports for Cloudant, competitive proof points for DB2, and new customer references—giving marketing and sales ready-made credibility and competitive ammunition.

IBM Belgium

Cheri Bergeron

Marketing Leader, Strategic Client Programs