How DPOrganizer Serves 2,500 Users Across 25 Countries with a Super Customer Strategy (Interview with CEO Alicia Hatt)

Introduction: What is DPOrganizer

Alicia Hatt

00:00So, yeah, dporganizer is a dagment man data protection management software, basically the CRM for your data privacy needs. And, yeah, today, here to talk to you about the nine things you should ask your super customers to do for you

00:22by asking what you can do for them.

Defining the Super Customer

Alicia Hatt

00:27So let's meet the super customer. They are our ultimate user who not only drives engagement, but also helps us to optimize our solution offerings and help us enhance customer experience and accelerate our business growth. We

00:45very the

00:47people

00:54are the And And

00:59to

01:04do

01:10And it doesn't matter which business we're in. We all our customers, especially in the tech industry, we're using our customers. So we have several customers where we use their tech stack and then work together. So it's a mutually beneficial working relationship. And we've heard over these two days, many speakers talk about the fact that you can't really get someone to do something for free, but you can do something that helps you both.

Why DPOrganizer Embraces Being Boring

Alicia Hatt

01:42So over, yeah, the next eighteen ish minutes, we're going to talk about how

01:50these three kind of areas work together: inspiration, collaboration and innovation. We're going to talk about how innovation leads to advocacy, collaboration leads to excellence and innovation inspires success. And, yeah, we're going to kick off by talking why, at least for us, why we are boring. We work in a not very

02:15known or hip thing that you want to talk about. Data privacy is something we all care about, and data protection is the way we go about doing that, depending where you live. We're based in Sweden. We care about GDPR. If you're in California, it's the California Consumers Protection Act. But we were started by

02:36data privacy lawyers that want to make a tool that was purpose driven. So by knowing we're boring and we're very honed in on one specific area, we can force ourselves to make ourselves more interesting by acknowledging that we're boring. And how we do this is we made it our mission to build our business by listening and collaborating with our customers.

Purpose-Driven Origins and GDPR Focus

Alicia Hatt

03:02We are passionate geeks. We feel there's great power in staying true to your inner geek, learning about compliance, staying up to date with digital transformation, consumer rights. And for every country, there's these are different rules or regulations or they have nothing, which in itself is something you need to be aware of. What's coming with AI? How we are doing this? We are obsessive about staying focused on top of the ever changing nature of our core, the

03:35law. And it's some countries, it will take years to put something new into place.

03:49Be that. That.

03:53We're do

03:58We believe in our purpose. And We're about providing peace of mind, not a product. And yeah, like I mentioned, you're thinking about the daily statute changes. There's no global standard. What applies to you does not necessarily apply to me. What applies to your customers doesn't necessarily apply to us.

04:22It's, you know, specific to our business, we're dealing with a lot of people that are DPOs or chief privacy officers, and they still it doesn't matter if it's, you know, a 25 person company that works with a bunch of larger companies or a large company. Often, it's one person that's alone, and they're responsible for making others in the organization care about them. And we have to help them provide peace of mind. You can do what we

04:50do, not as well, in Excel. And do that.

04:57We're going

05:06So what's the takeaway of this first section? Yeah. Inspiration about is about advocacy. You want them to work for you, but you need to work for them.

05:18It becomes a self fulfilling business engine. We know that when you do something negative, more people hear about it when you're positive. And we want to operate in the background, but we want you to know and we want all our customers to know what we're doing well and the fact that we're in this together.

Inspiration and Advocacy: Working for Your Customers

Alicia Hatt

05:37The how. For us, referrals. Yes, we want to refer each other to our businesses. I mean, these two great days, we're dealing with lots of CEO founders, you probably use them, they might be your competitors. But if you learn about each other's businesses similar to your customers, you can give back as well as get back. And this leads to increases of revenue through upsells. For us, it's about landing and expanding. We want the clients to grow

06:08with us over time, and we want them to share our content. They become great brand ambassadors. Often when they are these one man bands, they want you to help them sell the narrative. For the next year, they want to, you know, for example, use our e learning tool to educate their colleagues to understand why do we care about that. And that's the great thing we're hearing more about these chief privacy officers because we're putting someone in

06:32the c suite that actually is in the discussions about why we care, what's happening, and what will happen.

Collaboration: Weekly Releases and Always-Beta Mindset

Alicia Hatt

06:40Our excited

06:46We opportunity

06:50the to always in beta mindset. We want to be hearing our in real time from our CS colleagues, oh, I wish your tool did this. Okay. How can we make that happen? We do, in our organization, updates every Thursday. We push it out to our customers, but we also update our team members so they know what we're doing to make their lives easier.

07:15And, yeah, this is kind of going with that. Never be perfect, never assume you're perfect and keep striving forward. For us, because the rules and regulations are constantly changing, we have to adapt to the times. I mean, we were talking about ChatGPT and how this could potentially benefit or challenge our business, gives us a good opportunity to constantly be adapting what we're putting out on the market. The how. We built it for our customers, not for

Building for the User, Not the Buyer

Alicia Hatt

07:42ourselves. Our founders were data privacy lawyers, and they wanted something that was purpose built for people like them. So it was about something that functions well, easy to use, and that's the feedback that we strive to maintain as we grow.

07:59Your user is probably not the buyer. For us, we have about 2,500 users in 25 countries, and we don't have that many customers. So who's buying our product is not usually the end user that's doing it the day to day. It might belong to the IT budget. It might belong to the legal budget, sometimes even the HR budget. And so we have to really drill down on who it is. Are they the DPO that signs the

08:26contract? Probably not. But does that DPO have to sell the head of legal on it? Most likely. So when we started from going from lawyers to DPOs and to, yes, now Chief Privacy Officers, that's where we focus first, but now we really want to focus on everyone else.

08:46Be do And

08:49able we're that.

08:57Our how. We find be out who in the organization is actually using our tool, and we reach out and get their input. We want them to use the tool. We want a high touch point. We want you in our tool every day, whether it's updating e learning courses for their colleagues or just to check on what's happening. We want and we're constantly striving to have more features because if you're using it daily, you're more likely to

09:23get what we offer out of it and to understand what we could do better. So our daily users tend to be our best super customers.

Daily Users as Super Customers

Alicia Hatt

09:32Kind of touching on that last point here too, but creating intuitive experiences. We want to listen first, observe second, build third and then break it in, do able And And

09:52that. And do

09:57working on on lot of of the

10:01doing.

10:03That we're

10:13able

10:15do do that.

10:17We're

10:20And

10:23to and you get feedback, it's like, oh, it didn't flow this way. I personally think differently than our end users because I'm not a privacy professional. I don't come from a legal background, but I want it to feel intuitive so that we can make you want to use our software. How? We have to observe our super customers. Like I said, we have 200 2,500 plus users, but not that many customers. And our super customers aren't necessarily

10:55the ones that have the most users, but they're going back to that point is they're in the tool daily. They're thinking about what they'd like to see. Often, when you're a bigger organization, when you're up for renewal, you might need to go out and compare three options depending like municipalities in Sweden, they have to come with three quotes. They have to have sat through the demo, they've actually have to get the proposal. And we want that

11:22feedback. We want you to go and try our competitors and realize that we're better, easier to use. And better for you might not be better for everyone, but we're not trying to be for everyone at this point. So when our super customers, as an example, go out, show their colleagues they got the proposals, the feedback we're looking for is we're maintaining that ease of use as we have more offerings that their colleagues are like, oh, yeah,

11:48we love that e learning module that you had where you explained what is GDPR or what is CCPA and what they liked, what they didn't like. And then we can get that feedback, fix it and fix it till everyone in the organization is going to be using it.

Collaboration Leads to Excellence

Alicia Hatt

12:05Which leads us to the recap on, yes, collaboration leads to excellence. We build things together to make better things. And yeah, honesty is the best feedback. Please reach out after and say what I could do better on this topic. This is not something I've done before, but I love to hear about it. And it goes both ways when we're talking to our super customers. They give us something, we give them something. Because ultimately, how they're using

12:35the tool, we can get back for things that benefit in their organization, and they give us with a more sellable product and something again, not to harp on the point, but we get them in the tool daily. And we want to share the stage. Often we'll host webinars with our clients where they're actually go through their personal journey with similar industries about why they chose us, what they like about it, and who are we speaking to.

12:57Typically, one person in an organization. It's rare that we have a team of, say, five. And so we want to make these DPOs and CPOs'lives easier by allowing them to do more with less. Budgets are tightening up. They have to convince CEO to keep our tool, but they have to show why it's driving value outside of their role in the organization. Often, you can have huge multinationals where you have one lawyer responsible for everything. And

13:30the CEO is like, we'll just go back to Excel. You don't need this. We don't need the visuals. It doesn't matter. We just have to do that. Well, why should they care? Why should the CEOs care? Because in a lot of m and a processes, you need to say you are GDPR compliant. You are doing the right things. And often, through a sale of a business, if that's not true, there'll be clawbacks and the investors benefit.

13:57And

14:00do

Innovation: Constant Testing and Relevance

Alicia Hatt

14:03And

14:08can benefit your business. And for us, it's when you go through what that customer experienced, we've had customers in the tool in thirty minutes, and that's a rare occurrence. But for them, it was so exciting that they didn't have to buy an onboarding process. They could start throwing their data in our software and it's great. But when we have that kind of written testimonial, we can use that with our product team and think about what would

14:36have benefited them sooner and what will benefit them later.

14:41So coming into the last section on innovation, the value of constant testing. A plan is only as good as how hard it is tested. We want our customers'ideas. We want ways to execute. We want our colleagues to sit in a room and talk about what we could be doing two months from now, six months from now, and a year from now. We're the

15:11able to to

15:17we're

15:20And be do and actually get it to work beautifully.

15:26The value of relevance. We talked about how we make it relevant for the C suite when they don't need to care. They have someone to help with that in a lot of organizations. But we want that shared need, shared time, shared resources and shared beliefs.

15:43We're always struggling with it only matters to me, but it matters to all of us. We all are affected by data privacy in our personal and professional lives. And so we can get a lot out of it by just discussing it because it's not always about the business. Often that person has a self interest to make it work better. So the how, yeah, make it relevant every user or make it so easy to use, it starts

16:07to matter. And that's what I've mentioned a couple times in this talk that ease of use is what we're going for. We don't want to be for everyone, but we want that person that wants that easy touch point that encourages them to get in our tool

16:23then then we're be to

16:33And great you then be deliver

16:40great

16:42able for to

16:49Yeah, our last takeaway, innovation inspires success. Innovation through collaboration is the accelerant of success. How? Success comes in test. Test and test again. Don't be afraid to fail. Fail early and often. Share your user research. Say what's on your mind and work together. And nothing is more powerful than seeing the reality in action. And ideas are team sport. So constantly invite collaboration for new ideas. Over the last twenty minutes, we've talked about how inspiration is about

Multi-Year Deals and Iterating with Committed Customers

Alicia Hatt

17:25advocacy, collaboration leads to excellence, and innovation inspires success. And for us, we're constantly at various points in time trying to move across these silos, but they all flow together. When we say we talk about and share our content, create those brand ambassadors, they're the ones who are helping

17:53we're we're

17:57we're

18:00be do And this hasn't been always the case when And you're early on, you're a little bit afraid to say where you're struggling, you don't know this touch point, how do you make it intuitive. And so for us, you know, when we have, like some customers that sign on for multiyear deals, you're a little bit less worried about failing with them because they have a shared interest. They're going to stay in your tool, they're going to

18:26use your tool, and they're okay to go on the bumps along the way. And not every idea or updates can appeal to many people. You know, with our Thursday releases, not everyone notices, and that's great because if one person has something, we avoid anyone else having that experience because of one super customer. At least that next super customer is like, oh, it was flawless for this upon a time. Or the customer success team actually took my

18:51feedback, and a Thursday later, they had implemented what I was after and what we were hoping to do together. And as someone who doesn't have thousands of customers, we only need a couple good super customers to bring the next generation of super customer. So, yeah, thank you for your time, man. Yeah. Awesome.