HashiCorp Engages Prospects with Instruqt’s Hands-on Virtual Labs to Boost Sales Pipeline
Customer Overview
HashiCorp, The Infrastructure Cloud™ company, helps organizations automate multi-cloud and hybrid environments with infrastructure and security lifecycle management. Their suite of products — built on projects with source code freely available at their core — underpin the most important applications for the largest enterprises in the world.
The company is based in San Francisco, California, and software practitioners downloaded its products at companies like Indeed, Airbnb, Wayfair, Samsung, and ADT more than half a billion times last year.
Challenge
Before Instruqt, HashiCorp’s sales team would store all their sales and field enablement content in GitHub repositories. Additionally, solutions engineers and technical staff were responsible for creating the technical boilerplate for environments and providing step-by-step instructions for their most popular use cases in READMEs. The team encountered numerous challenges over time:
- Buggy homegrown virtual lab learning platform - HashiCorp's virtual IT lab needed to be faster, more reliable, and more engaging. Additionally, it had to scale to support go-to-market activities like boosting product adoption, growing product engagement, and fueling lead generation.
- Unproductive workflow - It became challenging for instructors in large workshops to debug issues on participants’ laptops and cloud accounts. Issues around cloud policies, misconfigurations, and variable operating systems created a frustrating experience.
- High cloud resource costs - HashiCorp’s products are directly tied to cloud outcomes, and deploying them to those environments is fundamental to their enablement effort. To reduce friction, they created dedicated training cloud accounts for their trainees, which created a heavy operational burden on their team.
- Unscalable processes - As its learning catalog grew and internal priorities shifted, HashiCorp needed help maintaining consistency across its content and reliability by implementing a testing framework.
Solution
“With Instruqt, we can reduce the barrier to entry for our content to almost zero.” — Lance Larsen, Solutions Engineering Manager at HashiCorp
HashiCorp redefined their virtual labs for workshops and demos by maximizing Instruqt’s intuitive web interface, cloud account provisioning, and ability to integrate into existing workflows:
- Seamless, browser-based access - The team praised Instruqt’s frictionless user experience as the key to reducing bounce rate and learning abandonment rates. All learners need is a browser to start learning quickly.
- Access to cloud environments - HashiCorp’s solutions engineers and technical staff can offload the creation and management of their cloud enablement sandboxes to the Instruqt platform.
- Framework testing - Instruqt’s testing feature lets HashiCorp’s team know that their content is working correctly by integrating directly into their pipeline jobs to test all content nightly and when changes are made.
“Participants love learning in a familiar cloud environment, and we get security and cost control completely out of the box.” — Lance Larsen, Solutions Engineering Manager at HashiCorp
Results
Two quarters after implementing Instruqt to transform their virtual labs, HashiCorp saw over 3000 unique product workshop participants, generated a 15% increase in net-new sales pipeline, created over 15 on-demand productworkshops, and received a 90+% positive workshop experience rating.
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