Drata is a security and compliance automation platform that continuously monitors and collects evidence of a company’s security controls, while streamlining compliance workflows end-to-end to ensure audit readiness. Andy Lihani, Group Product Marketing Manager at Drata, shares his experiences working with the Office Hours team.

Drata is a leading provider of security and compliance automation. The company's platform features an autopilot system that allows automated monitoring and evidence collection along with actionable insights, reports, alerts, and SaaS integrations among others, enabling enterprises to build trust, accelerate sales, and scale their businesses securely.

Andy Lihani, Drata’s Group Product Marketing Manager, sheds light on the important role Office Hours plays in shaping Drata’s product roadmap, pricing strategy, packaging, and overall market positioning.

Prior to Office Hours, reaching out to customers for feedback meant coordinating with customer success managers (CSMs) and account executives (AEs), navigating internal approvals, conducting customer outreach, then finally scheduling the interviews. All together, this required significant time investment from the team.

Additionally, Andy noticed that feedback from active and happy customers can sometimes be biased, creating a hurdle in building a balanced feedback loop.

Drata tapped into Office Hours, a platform that condenses feedback loops by providing a direct, independent, and scalable channel to Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) experts and ideal client personas (ICPs).

After a sequence of successful projects on Office Hours, Andy now sees the platform as an extension of his team and a research arm through which he can access a wide range of profiles, including prospective customers.

Additionally, the Office Hours platform offers an intuitive UI/UX, making the expert vetting process seamless compared to traditional expert networks.

While the initial engagement with Office Hours focused on testing Drata’s pricing and packaging, it quickly became clear that the platform had broader applications including product development, positioning, messaging test, building new personas, and identifying market trends.

Drata's journey with Office Hours showcases a transformative impact on their research process. From removing bias in customer feedback to speeding up feedback cycles, Office Hours has become an important tool for Drata to stay agile, informed, and ahead of market trends.

Interested in learning more? Contact sales@officehours.com.

Learn how Drata, a security and compliance automation platform, leverages Office Hours.

Drata: Enhancing Go-to-Market Strategies with Office Hours

Brex, the AI-spend platform, has been at the forefront of innovation in the financial sector for the past five years, providing global corporate cards, expense management, travel and payments for every stage of growth, from startups to enterprise. Art Levy, Chief Strategy Officer at Brex, shares his experiences working with the Office Hours team.

Connecting with Diverse Customer Personas

As Brex expanded who it serves and its product suite, they needed to engage with prospective customers beyond their initial customer persona. The challenge was reaching out to individuals unfamiliar with Brex and understanding their unique perspectives. This demanded a streamlined approach to connect with net new customers quickly and effectively.

Levy commends the Office Hours team, led by Andrew Sommer, for their responsiveness, which combined with the product itself, enabled his team to meet and extract insights from a diverse set of personas at high velocity. The platform's unique model also aligns incentives for Brex, providing access to in-network experts and allowing for cost-effective engagement with out-of-network experts as well.

One feature highlighted by Levy is the encouragement of collaboration with experts off the platform. Unlike competitors, Office Hours not only allows but facilitates offline collaboration,  enabling Brex to tap into new relationships and maintain them.

Accelerating Insights and Market Understanding

With Office Hours, Brex has been able to successfully connect with prospects outside its initial customer persona,  gaining insights into new customer personas at scale.

Levy recalls that Office Hours significantly expedited a research initiative he led last year, allowing him to engage with 30 financial controllers from enterprise companies in a matter of weeks rather than months. The platform, in Levy's words, "lowers the barrier to finding the truth", providing Brex with an edge in understanding customer pain points.

The platform is now being used by other functional teams at Brex, including Product, and Marketing.

Enhancing Brex’s Understanding of Customer Voice

As Brex continues to evolve and expand its offerings, Levy sees Office Hours as a key ally in understanding the voice of the next customer they aim to serve. The platform's collaborative approach, quick access to diverse insights, and efficient networking capabilities make it a useful tool.

Learn how Brex, a global payments company, leverages Office Hours to meet and gain insights from a diverse set of personas at high velicity.

How Office Hours helps Brex better understand the voice of the customer

Patrick Nelli is the founder and CEO of Aligned Marketplace, which provides self-insured employers access to advanced primary care services across geographies. He previously spent nearly 10 years at Health Catalyst, a leading provider of data and analytics technology to healthcare organizations, in executive roles including CFO and, most recently, President. Learn more about Aligned Marketplace via their website, or on LinkedIn.

Office Hours is building the world's largest and most powerful expert network for technology and healthcare startups. Founders and operators book video or phone consultations with thousands top professionals in technology and healthcare to solve their most pressing challenges, from product or market validation, product feedback, lead generation, competitive intelligence, recruiting, to functional expertise.

After spending nearly a decade rising through the leadership ranks at Health Catalyst, Patrick Nelli decided it was time to branch out and start his own company.

His experiences at Health Catalyst gave him and up close and personal view of the complexities of American healthcare. Specifically, Patrick identified an opportunity to help self-insured employers in the U.S. offer advanced primary care services to their employees, regardless of their geography. Advanced primary care services are generally considered to provide a better patient experience and offer attractive cost savings to the employers who offer them as part of their benefits packages.

It’s one thing to have an idea. Deciding to commit years of your life and significant capital to that idea is another thing entirely.

It's age-old advice for those looking to launch a startup, even for those who have done it before: identifying which problem(s) to solve, and for whom, is the first and most important step in launching a new company. Then, you need to make sure your solution to the problem is something people will actually pay for.

Traditional methods of validating ideas are are time-intensive and often insufficient. Working personal networks, cold outreach to to experts in the space, and doing qualitative industry research can all be fruitful to varying degrees, but it can be hard to trust the quality of those feedback signals. It’s also easy to lose steam and think enough research has been done.

It’s intuitive but bears repeating - sourcing the broadest array of perspectives will dramatically increase a founder’s odds of success. 

How Office Hours streamlines idea validation via access to expert perspectives

In Patrick’s case, he needed real-life perspectives from key decision makers overseeing health benefits strategy for major self-insured employers in the U.S. with over 5,000 employees. Was there an appetite for this sort of offering? Are they already offering advanced primary care? Are any competitors deploying a similar model?

Office Hours has built a network of thousands of knowledge professionals and a software platform to help startups seamlessly access their perspectives. We also have a team of client services professionals in San Francisco and New York whose sole mission is to find and recruit the exact experts our clients need.

Between our existing network and our team, Patrick had conversations on our platform with 14 advisors, including CHROs, Chief People Officers, and Heads of Benefits from major companies like Honeywell, Ralph Lauren, GitHub, Better.com, Allegiant Air and others.

All-in-all, these conversations cost Patrick a total of ~$5,000.

Insight gained via Office Hours consultations, coupled with countless hours of research and groundwork work Patrick invested, ultimately gave him enough conviction to take the leap and launch the company.

Expert calls helped Patrick accelerate the first phase of Aligned Marketplace’s journey and move on to the real work of building a successful company.

As startups grow, their need for expertise grows exponentially. Following launch, Office Hours helps startups access functional expertise on-demand, and can even help startups find new customers.

We’re standing by to put you in touch with the people you need to validate your idea and maximize your chances of success.

Do you or your team need efficient, cost-effective access to expert perspectives? If so, let’s talk, or sign up for free to explore our network.

Learn how founder Patrick Nelli tapped into expert perspectives via Office Hours to validate the idea for his recently launched startup, Aligned Marketplace.

How Office Hours helped a seasoned healthcare exec validate and launch his own company with confidence

At Office Hours, we have the privilege of helping a fantastic roster of customers easily access expert perspectives. That roster includes some of the world's foremost advisory firms and consultancies, venture-backed startups, venture capital firms, and many others. 

In this series, we'll be profiling many of our incredible customers, and explaining how the Office Hours network and platform help them efficiently access the perspectives they need.

Rock Health Advisory is a digital health strategy group that helps enterprise companies understand and act on opportunities, craft novel solutions, and succeed in an evolving healthcare landscape.

As part of a recent client strategy project, the Rock Health team wanted to connect with healthcare executives with experience in the payer and specialty clinic spaces.

Leading network of advisors in healthcare and technology

Office Hours has thousands of experts in healthcare and technology available on-demand, including payers, physicians, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and digital health strategists.

In this case, Rock Health Advisory was able to complement its industry-defining research and data by leveraging Office Hours’ network to quickly connect with the right advisors across a range of health plans and specialty clinics. 

Dedicated customer success team & easy-to-use platform

Our dedicated customer success team supported the Rock Health team by searching for relevant advisors outside the platform and bringing them into our network. 

The platform's scheduling tools simplified logistics so the Rock Health team could stay focused on getting as much value from their conversations with advisors as possible.

Ultimately, the Rock Health team was able to connect with multiple current and former senior executives from leading payers and service delivery organizations. 

Perspectives from these hard-to-access experts helped the team to develop robust recommendations for their client.


Curious to learn more about Office Hours? 

To learn more about how Office Hours can support you and your team, please schedule a demo or drop us a line at sales@officehours.com.  

How Office Hours helps a leading healthcare advisory firm efficiently access expert perspectives

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