Virtru is the data-centric security platform trusted by 6,000+ customers, including healthcare organizations, law firms, school districts, and financial institutions. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Washington, DC, Virtru protects millions of emails and files every week for organizations that share sensitive data while maintaining control and auditability.
Megan Leader, Director of Brand and Content, leads the team that produces Virtru's case studies and voice-of-customer content. Kevin Joshi, Senior Manager of Revenue Enablement and Development, runs enablement across sales, marketing, and customer success, and manages Virtru's SDR team.
Virtru chased customer proof by hand
Before adopting Peerbound, Virtru's process for surfacing customer proof was heavily manual. The marketing team relied on customer success managers (CSMs) and sales reps to identify advocates, requiring them to remember positive conversations and follow up with introductions to the marketing team, a process full of friction and delays. Without recorded calls, customer quotes were filtered down to secondhand summaries. A CSM might relay what a customer said, but without exact words, the marketing team couldn't confidently use those sentiments as proof points.
Getting Gong in place was the first step toward a more automated customer proof system. Using Gong made relevant customer conversations easier for authorized Virtru teams to search and review. But, turning that data into usable customer proof still required a person to listen back to one call at a time, with little automation available to flag the good stuff. The case study remained the only real format for proof, each one costing hours of work and weeks of approvals. Plenty of praise for the Virtru product and team still went unheard in the noise. Gong gave Virtru more raw material, but it didn’t solve their content creation and proof delivery problems.
In early 2025, Megan, Kevin, and select teammates were tasked with evolving and scaling an already solid voice-of-the-customer program. Customer proof was the area they decided to focus on first.
Virtru picked the platform that paid off fastest
After a very thorough evaluation process, Virtru narrowed its options.
"We looked at other competitors in the space," Kevin says. "I think the thing that we really liked was the ease of Peerbound. It did not feel as complex as some of the other tools." That resonated for the Virtru team: "One of our internal values and differentiators here at Virtru is ease of use. So it felt like a well aligned choice for us."
"We could see how using Peerbound would provide almost instant value," Megan says.
Virtru weighed building it, too. Their Marketing Ops team is strong on AI and already built custom dashboards aimed at some of the same questions. "Our internal team had the skills and tools to build a solution for us, but it would have come at the cost of other business priorities," Megan says. "Deploying Peerbound was just so much faster."
As a data-centric security company, Virtru is passionate about maintaining customer privacy and trust. External use of customer names or other identifiable information remains subject to Virtru’s applicable customer approval process. Peerbound’s platform allows the team to quickly and easily request customer approvals for external-facing testimonials.
One customer proof system does three different jobs
With Peerbound’s integrations, Virtru’s archive of recorded conversations became a working library instead of a storage silo. It also gave marketing and sales access to a shared library of proof, and the ability to put proof to work in different ways.
For Content, getting proof published became faster.
"Peerbound allows us to not only identify good candidates for our Voice of the Customer program, but also helps us turn around customer proof more quickly. Before, every asset was a long-form case study. It could take weeks to identify a good candidate, gauge their interest in participating, and schedule an interview. Then, writing a good case study can take several hours,” Megan says. “Now, we can much more nimbly find, approve, and use customer quotes."
It also changed how she asks her CS counterparts for support. Instead of arriving with an open-ended request, she brings a name and a specific conversation. That allows her to be more proactive and prescriptive, and relieves her colleagues from having to do yet another task between customer calls.
For Sales, using proof became easier because the proof found them
Kevin's team spent February running enablement sessions built per audience: account executives, sales directors, and customer success managers: "Tool fatigue is very real. Sellers and CSMs are being asked to do a lot of things with, in some cases, a lot of resources. And as such, it can be overwhelming for them," he says. Virtru focused on providing the exact queries each team needed to find value with Peerbound right away.
The feature that really made Peerbound click for reps was the one that asked nothing of them. Proactive Proof emails land in the rep’s inbox after a call, with relevant customer quotes already attached. For Virtru, those emails have an open rate of 83%. Reps said the emails made follow-ups contextual and quicker to send.
For Marketing, the website became where fresh proof gets seen.
With customer proof flowing, they knew they needed to get customer-approved quotes onto their website as fast as possible. So they deployed Peerbound for AEO, which lets you showcase an up-to-date, fresh feed of customer proof directly on your website.
Their web developer built a configurable HubSpot module from Peerbound's documentation so Megan can place filtered quote tiles on any page without a new dev request each time. “The Peerbound for Web implementation was easy and the documentation for building filters and CSS overrides was CRYSTAL clear. I got it up and running in an hour,” says Connor Byram, Senior Frontend Engineer at Virtru.
They placed that module on over a dozen webpages, highlighting the most contextual, customer-approved proof for each industry or segment — healthcare, state and local government, finance, and many others. A school district evaluating email security does not need to land on a page of enterprise logos and conclude Virtru is not for them. "That just helps to build trust in the brand and accelerate the sales process," Megan says."Those Peerbound for AEO tiles really elevate the heart of what our customers are saying in a way that we didn't have before. And it automatically updates with fresh, customer-approved content and reviews every day."
Virtru turned customer proof into a weekly habit, not a quarterly project
A year in, customer proof is embedded into Virtru's workflow thanks to the 1,754 (and counting) Moments already found. Every week, the team receives automated notifications with customer praise and competitive clues. Megan also carves out time to share highlights from Peerbound with the sales team — sometimes a competitive win, sometimes a customer praising a specific teammate by name.
"A customer can say something really lovely directly to a Virtru team member. But their boss doesn't hear that compliment, and other people don't see it," Megan says. "So it is a really great way to give them a shout out and highlight exceptional work that might otherwise go unseen."
Overall, three things changed in how Virtru leverages customer proof across the business.
Positive sentiment stopped getting lost. "Now that Peerbound is part of our tech stack, we admins can easily find those golden moments of connection and problem-solving with our customers. Before, those stories might have just remained buried in a sea of transcripts," Megan says.
New products and nascent personas found earlier advocates. "When we have new products come out, and there's not really heavy usage yet, we have been able to get these indications of how the rollout is going," Megan says. "How is the beta program shaping up? Are people happy with the product? And then, who can we look to to be our first public case study for this new product?"
Call recordings become more useful: "Peerbound helps us organize customer feedback so we can easily act on it. Having a tool like Peerbound that makes sense of that data is really helpful," Kevin says.
What's next: Highlighting authentic customer voices to build trust
As AI-generated content floods LinkedIn, email, and news feeds, it can be increasingly difficult to know if content is trustworthy. Peerbound surfaces authentic testimonials directly from customers, allowing Virtru to capture and act on valuable feedback, in real time.
For Megan, that's the whole customer marketing bet. "It's a really crazy time to be a marketer. Search is changing. Behavior is changing. The way that content is produced is changing," she says. "And I think the authentic voice of a customer — in their own words, in a verified way — builds credibility. That’s going to become an even stronger advantage in this new era of marketing."
