Customer reference management is definitely a great area to apply Marketing Operations discipline and tools.
If you didn’t get to attend our live webinar this week, here is a link to a recorded archive: A Marketing Operations Approach to Customer Reference Management, with Josh Horwitz of Boulder Logic and yours truly.
Josh and I were having fun during the discussion and time got away from us. Since we didn’t get to all the great questions we received, we decided to post the Q&A below. Enjoy!
Q: What could be customer incentives to participate in the program?
A: There is a lot of debate on this topic and there was an earlier Boulder Logic blog post on points that you might find interesting. Generally the incentive for customers comes from their appreciation for a successful partnership with you as a vendor or service provider. A desire to see their success communicated externally is a personal motivator. An effective program typically has elements in place to reinforce these factors and augment them with other benefits. Benefits that have a direct monetary value risk the perceived integrity of the testimonial and open legal and accounting issues. Some of the most successful programs tap into the customer’s relationship with your business and products by offering VIP input to product roadmap and access to executives.
Q: Do you have any other numbers to elaborate on the impact of references on sales/revenue?
A: One of the really nice things about customer reference management is that it is so closely tied to revenue. One way this is done is linking specific sales opportunities to deals that were impacted by customer references. There have been a few folks that have published numbers related to their results, including a nice write up by Abby Atkinson of Infor. Boulder Logic will be publishing a recording from another webinar shortly that walks through the calculations at a very detailed level. Stay tuned!
Q: We do have a reference program and we are moving into an indirect channel and it’s proving to be difficult. How does one engage the indirect channel more?
A: Organizations with an indirect selling model do have additional challenges because the customer relationship is typically owned entirely by the partner. In these cases, it is very important to have an executive sponsor that promotes the importance of the initiative directly and through the executive responsible for the channel relationships. From a marketing perspective, you should apply internal marketing techniques to bring visibility to partners that do engage an awareness to all. If possible, secure the opportunity for your channel to apply co-marketing dollars to their own customer reference efforts. After all, they are both the producers and consumers of an important resource.
Q: Any tips on how to get seasoned sales executives, who may be used to a culture of guarding their reference customers and “keeping them in their back pocket,” to adopt a sales reference tool/process and be active contributors? How do new customer reference programs build trust?
A: Your question acknowledges that it is all about a trust relationship, which is great. Trust is achieved in steps where expectations are set and consistently met. Acknowledge and respect the relationships that exist. Break down their concerns about overuse and the lack of other available references by sharing how your program will work. Leverage your executive sponsor and ensure that sales management is involved so they hear that the initiative is being supported. And when you see success, promote it and whoever made it happen!
Q: What kind of applications can be used for customer reference management?
A: It isn’t uncommon to start with using Excel, however the challenges of sharing access, defining workflow , data quality, and tracking details for reporting make this a challenge. Many organizations ask their IT department to build something; however there are specialized tools for managing an enterprise customer reference program available as a stand-alone or integrated with your CRM system.
Q: How do you get marketing & sales execs to understand reference management (the need, the processes, the business case, best practices, etc.) when you’re given 3 minutes to present AND you’re also trying to describe the status quo of our particular situation internally to get them to fully understand the problem? They say “we need more references” but won’t stand still long enough to understand how else it can be done…
A: Wow! That doesn’t sound very fun, but your situation isn’t actually so uncommon. Customer reference management is surprisingly difficult and organizations fail to realize that the solution and the responsibilities need to cross groups. I’d set aside the 3 minute presentation until you’ve secured an executive sponsor that will help. If that isn’t easily obtained, follow the advice of one of our clients: “My advice to organizations considering managed reference programs is to rally their salespeople around the idea first. Having your sales team champion the need for a managed reference program can make the difference between getting executive buy-in and funding or not (see ShoreTel case study blog post for a good example). This isn’t easy and requires good planning and communication but when you can get sales to say, ‘I can generate more business with references’, somebody high up in the marketing organization is going to take notice and back the venture.”
Q: To your point about skill sets: I have the process & operational mindset — the marketing execs holding the money do not. :-( How can I break through that?
A: If your executive audience doesn’t think with an operational mindset, I wouldn’t advise trying to convert them to a different way of thinking. Know your audience. Keep your business justification focused on the business benefits, high-level execution plan and your resource requirements. If there isn’t a real process today, it shouldn’t be too hard to highlight lost opportunity or business problems. If they are more apt to listen to sales reps, follow the guidance from the answer above and solicit input to sales about how the topic impacts their ability to generate new business.
Q: How often do you see customer management programs successfully integrated with existing CRM solutions?
A: The successful integration between Customer Reference Management with an existing CRM solution is a pretty consistent part of the customer reference program vision. Obstacles typically include other IT priorities, budget and limited adoption of the existing CRM. To answer your question, we see successful integration about fifty percent of the time.
Q: Good idea of integrating these very interesting topic(s)! Nice slides ;-)
A: Thanks for the positive feedback. Marketing Operations fits pretty easily with customer reference management.
Q: Is it important to monitor the use of references by the sales force [to prevent them from] using a reference too early in the process?
A: Good question. I think it is very important to understand the different phases of the sales process and consider how some form of customer testimonial should be applied in each. By presenting this back to the sales team, they’ll be more inclined to use what is appropriate for each phase.
Q: Where are/were the customer references for Boulder Logic in this presentation?
A: Ha! Who planted this question? Seriously, we decided to avoid too much self promotion. Here is a page with a few of Boulder Logic’s client references.
Q: What are some successful strategies for motivating hesitant customers to participate as a customer reference?
A: We talked a bit earlier about what incents a customer to participate as a reference. When customers are hesitant, it may be because they don’t understand these benefits, don’t believe them to be relevant or have external pressures affecting them. Your effort to overcome these should be based on the importance of their participation, but some of the approaches would be: 1) working through individuals that have the closest relationship, 2) showing them others like them that have participated, 3) starting with something small like providing a quote, or 4) redefining how they participate, such as doing an anonymous case study.
Josh and Gary
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