Zuberance lets companies turn their customers into volunteer salesforce

November 24, 2008 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

In most companies, among the highest-paid employees are sales people. In an economic downturn, a company needs ways to trim the costs of its sales team.

Enter Zuberance, which sells software to companies to help turn customers into a volunteer salesforce. It has just raised $4 million in a first round of financing from Emergence Capital Partners.

Zuberance, based in Palo Alto, Calif., works as follows. Take the example of an unnamed consumer electronics company that recently used Zuberance’s software. The Zuberance software awarded the customers for writing reviews online about the consumer electronics company’s product, by giving those customers “points.” The customers then redeemed those points by getting free products and a donation to Red Cross in their name. In less than a day, the company signed up 2,500 of their customers to write the reviews. Within a week, it had more than 5,000 customers who wrote reviews, according to Zuberance chief executive Rob Fuggetta.

Zuberance helps publish the positive reviews to places like Amazon.com, CNet, TripAdvisor, YouTube and Facebook.

Pricing depends on the amount of usage, but the Zuberance product generally costs between $5,000 and $10,000 a month.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Unimpressed Client
    I’ve looked into Zuberance for my company, a prominent San-Fran corporation, and was unimpressed. They basically create a loyalty program that they’ll host for you and charge you to communicate to your own customers. Minimum cost is near $100k. We could do this already on our own with our existing assets at a fraction of this price.

    They’re alot like a SaaS version of smarmy, stealth/buzz marketing agency, Bzzagent: the main reason for users to enlist & buzz is to get rewards.