Maria Robinson, the global chief marketing officer of Nitro, has made headlines this month in CMO, a leading B2B magazine published in Australia.
In an extensive interview with CMO editor Nadia Cameron, Robinson explains how since she has joined the company in July she has refocused the firm on a growth mindset and strategic marketing approach that will benefit both the digital workplace productivity suite vendor and its partners as they work towards a ‘new normal’.
“I previously had distributed global teams, so I was often meeting people virtually and was required to build relationships that way,” Robinson was reported as saying.
“Coming into Nitro, I thought about what the key things are we need to build relationships and partnerships. Number one was overcommunicate and with more people than you normally would.”
This has served Nitro and its partner ecosystem well, with Covid-19 representing a real growth opportunity for savvy providers focused on the enablement of distributed teams.
So Robinson took her “overcommunication” strategies forward — conducting more than twice the number of interviews with cross-functional colleagues, canvassing a specific topic, in a similar timeframe.
According to Nitro’s August survey on the future of work, the use of hardcopy printing worldwide declined significantly as the pandemic took hold (as much as 70% in Australia alone). As a direct result, organisations need to ensure they can handle all-digital activities and workflows.
“This has also long been an area of opportunity for businesses as workflows are not up to date. But there wasn’t a push to accelerate it. It became very obvious that Covid was this tipping point,” Robinson was quoted as saying, hinting that this will position the company well for the year into 2021 and beyond.
Read the full interview with Nitro’s Maria Robinson here.
Nitro’s PDF editing and productivity solutions for digital document management can save end user customers significant sums across an organisation, relative to certain competitor offerings.
One example was US top-50 insurance broker Assurance, which slashed more than $100,000 off estimated PDF handling and licensing costs by signing a strategic three-year contract with Nitro.
Jim Maza, VP of IT at Assurance, says in the resulting case study document that Nitro’s team were great listeners and transparent to work with, offering superior licensing terms as well as an interface that Assurance employees actually preferred to the software they’d previously used.
“With Nitro, we have access to real people within the organisation who are responsive, whether it’s picking up the phone or emailing,” Maza confirms. “They’re helpful, attentive, and clearly dedicated to providing a great customer experience.”
Assurance, headquartered in the State of Illinois, serves some 6000 businesses and individuals in the USA. PDFs play a critical role for Assurance employees, who spend much of their time working with and editing policy documents and contracts.
According to investor website The Motley Fool, the share price at ASX-listed Nitro has risen nearly 90% this year by mid-October — representing market response to the company strategy.
“In fact, savvy investors who picked up shares at the height of the Covid-19 panic selling would now be sitting on gains of almost 300%,” writes the Fool’s Rhys Brock.
“Despite Covid-19 causing some disruption to its sales pipeline, Nitro Software still managed to deliver above its prospectus forecasts across most financial metrics for the half year ended 30 June 2020. Total revenue was up 14% against the June half 2019 to $19.1 million, driven by a 60% increase in subscription revenue.
“Annual recurring revenue jumped 57% to $20.2 million, and the company reaffirmed its prospectus guidance for full year 2020 total revenue of at least $40.5 million.”
