Customer references are often thought of as reactive. They are there for you when you need someone to take a call or write a case study, but otherwise, they might stay silent. By contrast, your evangelists are your outspoken advocates who will be proactive in promoting and defending your company. Your evangelists might enjoy attending your events or answering more emotive questions than your typical references.
They are great at converting your skeptics to loyal customers. However, they can also seem less impartial, so you might want to opt for a reference rather than an evangelist if you need a quote for a journalist. Communicate Enable new service channels and deliver a unified customer experience. Connect Connect with your customers through each service channel from one smart inbox. Automate Enable advanced automation features and get more done.
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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Customer Centric: The customer is not liable for reference. So, the CRP should be designed to make it easy for the customers. It should be sensitive to their needs, privacy and fears.
Early Move: It would be much easy to convince a customer to be a reference if they are well informed beforehand. They should be made aware that they can used as reference if required but it should not be a compulsion. They are the ones using the customer evidence to close deals and acquire new customers. Browse the definition and meaning of more similar terms. The Management Dictionary covers over business concepts from 5 categories.
What is MBA Skool? Making sure all reference requests flow through the platform is crucial to ensuring that we demonstrate care for our customers and ensure we don't call the same ones all the time and make things smoother and easier for sales.
By working with our team and within ReferenceEdge, we can track usage very closely and honor our customers' requests in terms of how frequently they're contacted and ensure that we're thanking them.
We're using the nominations capability, and we love that. That is definitely a huge win for us. It makes nominating customers to be in the reference program a lot easier.
We can guide our colleagues in sales by saying, "You can make a nomination directly from the contact, and it'll come straight to us. It's been really good. Overall, we've just had great feedback, and, honestly, had no complaints about it.
Our team has received a lot more outreach from salespeople wanting to partner to find a specific reference. We provided a little synopsis of the program around the launch date, and the response was very enthusiastic, that this was a great move. So, I would say that it was very well-received. It also earned a lot of visibility for our team. We're a pretty lean team, but we play an important role in the company, and so having that visibility as a result of this change was great for us.
Having everything in one spot and connected to our CRM is really nice. We're still getting familiar with ReferenceEdge, because we are less than a quarter in. Nonetheless, I think our experience is much better [compared to the previous solution], whether it is the time spent reporting or providing specific data quickly. The metrics that we track focus the number of references provided on a month-to-month basis.
We measure the growth quarterly, and we report that out to our sales teams and our leadership —then we track annually and set goals around that. Included within those reports are the pipeline influenced and also the influence on closed deals.
We also track the number of references in our program. We're always trying to recruit, especially in what we would call 'gap areas. Alternatively, if we are noticing that we're getting a lot more reference requests for a particular product, we would definitely want to increase the numbers there to prevent asking the same people too often. So, those are all metrics that we track and report within corporate marketing on a monthly basis.
Then we report to sales the number of references provided, pipeline influence, and influence on closed deals on a quarterly basis. How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work? You know, I think everybody uses the term 'partner,' but it's so true in this case. We have this weekly call with our Account Director. Doing this migration during Covid and the height of the chaos, it was so nice to have this weekly contact with her. What I appreciated about her is her honesty and dedication to us.
If she didn't know the answer, she never pretended she did. She is really great about saying, "I'm not sure but let me talk to the person who's the subject matter expert and get back with you. And I think that is a real testament to a true partnership—when you can say, "That's not my area of expertise, but I will find out for you. And she's great about surfacing things that are going to be important to us moving forward. What are the next steps for your program? Our Account Director has been working with us on our dashboards, and it's been great, so we're looking forward to getting more familiar and comfortable with doing that on our own.
We are planning to integrate Gainsight because we know that the data from ReferenceEdge will be invaluable to our colleagues in customer success—and they just let me know this week that they've been pulling in the data. We use Influitive's AdvocateHub for our Champions program and are working on that integration as well.
It'll be great to have those two systems integrated so we can see the overlap and unlock all of those capabilities. We are also getting ready to start using the Reference Lead Finder capabilities. I manage the client reference program at Benevity. We launched ReferenceEdge around October We have close to team members with access to ReferenceEdge, including all of our sales reps and client success managers, across all the different time zones throughout Canada and the United States.
Benevity had a reference program before that we called 'BURT'—the Benevity Unified Reference Team, and we managed it through a different software product. We made the business case that we needed a reference-specific software application to manage reference activity at scale moving forward.
We took on the responsibility of doing the research, finding ReferenceEdge, and learning how it would help Benevity streamline our program. We have a cross-functional working group that meets on a monthly basis to ensure our program is functioning well and address any challenges that may creep up.
We really wanted to decrease the number of steps in the workflow because, at times, it would take two or three weeks to hear back from the client success team about whether or not a reference request was approved, and that was just too long. So, streamlining and speeding up the process were big goals for us.
Another challenge that we were hoping ReferenceEdge would help us solve was salespeople going around the process by simply reaching out directly to their client contacts with whom they had established relationships, instead of going through the BURT process.
We wanted to have software that would make the sales reps feel confident that using the application would yield the reference results they needed.
We also didn't have a central place where we searched for attribute data to help ensure that we were connecting a prospect with a client that had similar characteristics, so that was another checkmark for ReferenceEdge. And lastly, reference overuse. We definitely overused a few of our clients, especially some of the larger, well-known name brands, and because we weren't tracking usage very well, we didn't know how often we ended up using some of those contacts.
By using ReferenceEdge, everything is more streamlined because reference requests are going directly from a salesperson to the appropriate client success manager.
We've taken out the client success managers' managers; which was a bottleneck for us in the past. Another major change we put in place with ReferenceEdge is having an automated process to include and exclude clients in the program.
There's much more reporting that we have access to, and because of that, we can clearly identify things that we need to work on, such as decreasing the time it takes for requests to be approved or declined.
Lastly, everything related to references is handled in one central location and, if anyone has questions or needs help, they know exactly who to speak with, which makes things very simple. Those are the things that have really changed and helped us grow the program. I really appreciate that I don't need to spend more of my time working on things that are reference related because I simply wouldn't have the capacity to get everything else done.
ReferenceEdge has helped to save us time. I don't have to be involved in the majority of reference requests because they're going from the salesperson to the CSM using the peer-to-peer functionality, and they don't need any intervention from me.
About six months after launching, I reached out to our folks in Client Success leadership about how they felt the program was running, and they were so happy to be less involved in things. It was a time savings for them, and the general consensus was that the new processes with ReferenceEdge were running smoothly. That was such great feedback and really put me at ease. To start with, I really like the Reference Lead Finder feature. We enabled this pretty recently, and it allows us to find new clients for the reference program who have recently implemented the Benevity software product s.
It's a simple and effective way of getting new clients into the reference program. At Benevity, we are very heavy Slack users, so when ReferenceEdge released the Slack integration, that was another feature that we turned on right away. We've been really happy with how those notifications go to our client success managers and our salespeople. We've also been able to look at how many and which clients are getting used most frequently.
If clients have been used two or more times within the last year, we send them a Charity Gift Card funds they can donate to a cause of their choosing as a thank you for helping us win more business. So that was another report that was really helpful to us. As an added benefit, I would say that I've learned a ton about Salesforce as a result of using ReferenceEdge. I know how to build custom reports, and I understand how data is populated into various fields on various record types.
I'm really happy that I've had the opportunity to work more within Salesforce and up-level my skills there. Right now, we're focused on ensuring that as many reference requests as possible are responded to before their deadline date.
On an ongoing basis, we look at peer-to-peer request outcomes and the peer-to-peer average time to complete. We are consistently working towards improving both of those metrics. Our account director is awesome. She's been wonderful to work with and truly cares about the success of our program. She discusses new features and functionality with us, helps troubleshoot various issues, helps us create new reports and dashboards, and enable new functionality on an ongoing basis.
We definitely appreciate the dedicated support that we receive through Point of Reference. The program itself is located in North America and dare I say Canada because that's where I'm based—but really everything is run out of North America.
Today, we operate under Marketing. That is a very recent change; up until about a month ago, we were under Sales Operations. Even though now we reside in Marketing, our sole focus is Sales. Our program lives in Salesforce because everything lives in Salesforce. Our sales team lives in Salesforce, and that's where ReferenceEdge lives, which is awesome from my point of view. Our program offers three different paths that our sales team can take to find and request a reference.
The easiest path is through the peer-to-peer request feature in ReferenceEdge, where the account executive who owns the reference relationship solely manages the request. Nine times out of 10 times, I do not get involved in those. It's the second path that I get involved in; those trickier, hard-to-find, one-off references for which you really don't have a big pool; you might not have any. So those are the ones that I get pulled into.
We then have the third path for when executive advocates are needed. Our Customer Engagement Team manages this type of reference request. Their responsibility is to foster the relationships that we have with our C-level contacts.
So, our program goes from the simplest—peer-to-peer—all the way up to managing those C-level relationships. And they all factor into what we put into ReferenceEdge. Well, one major challenge was identifying which accounts we could reach out to at any given time, and prior to ReferenceEdge, things were housed in Excel files.
We all know how quickly Excel files go out of date. You keep references in your back pocket and one day, 'Oh, this company's no longer a customer!? And more accurate than that spreadsheet—just sayin. The information that's there is relevant, and it's current. First, we no longer use spreadsheets that become out of date quickly.
The filters within Reference Search allow us to customize each search and provide the current references at the time of the request. We now have a single source of truth for reference information company-wide. And, of course, better reporting capabilities with standard reports through ReferenceEdge, which allows us to report on various factors such as revenue influenced by reference activity.
Since the launch, how has your job changed? When I first joined, my responsibility was really to maintain the tool—so managing the information that was in ReferenceEdge and focusing on the data that the account executives see. Now, my role is more strategic. It also allows me to help with the unique reference requests as well.
We have the buy-in all the way up to my VP level. Their thinking is, 'Yeah, this is it—ReferenceEdge houses our reference information. I know the sales leadership—they get it as well. The tool works for them. I jump on weekly sales calls just as a friendly reminder, 'Hey, remember, the reference team is here for you. You know, we have this tool.
We get you're busy; we're here to help you. I have this, this, and this for you. And guess what? Two of them are in the tool.
So, I'm now going to walk you through how to find this yourself. It's easy. Let me walk you through it. I'm very happy to say that the custom-built API that we've had starting in is now a standard integration within Influitive which allows transparency to our advocates as well as to our sales team. That's a pretty exciting integration for us because we use a points system for advocates.
If you do a reference activity for us, you earn points, and we're always being asked: 'How many points do I have? When it happens on one side, it happens on the other side. For our users, having no additional logins or credentials is key to adoption—everybody's in Salesforce; nobody wants to have to remember another login; nobody wants to have to click another window when they already have something open. The out-of-the-box reporting is awesome.
For me, Salesforce reporting is complicated; I still have a big learning curve. But having those out-of-the-box reports is terrific. I can see the last active date on a specific reference profile and tie it back to revenue or see how many peer-to-peer versus managed requests we have and all that stuff. Another benefit is that ReferenceEdge is entirely scalable.
We went through a pretty big acquisition in late ReferenceEdge was able to scale with our bigger sales team as well as increased reference accounts. I was very excited to see that we could scale, and it really wasn't painful; it just happened. It could not be easier to go in and see, 'Hey, there's a new picklist field I could use in the Search function. Oh, my goodness. Success is definitely assessed by the company in terms of revenue influenced.
We measure how many wins have reference activity tied to them. Personally, I look at how many peer-to-peer requests come in that I didn't have to support. It keeps growing each year. Another thing that we're tracking this year is the number of [reference request] emails that go out—when we see someone send a mass email to All Sales, 'Hey, I'm looking for a reference,' and I think, 'Did you really just send a mass email asking for a reference?
Are you new? Get to training! I know learning new software, whether it be Salesforce or changes to Word or Excel, some people don't take to the change. So, when we see the reduction in those types of emails, that's also a success. My account director is awesome. Every day, she goes above and beyond. When I send her those wacky questions where I think, 'I feel I should know this, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I have worked with the executive team for different things, most recently related to our integration with Influitive.
The team, as a whole, is phenomenal. I've said this many times, and I'll keep saying it, that they're not just a vendor; they're really a partner. And you know, my success is their success is my success again when I suggest a product enhancement and they're like 'Yeah, that's pretty cool,' and then it makes it into a release.
They listen—it's awesome. Honestly, sometimes, even when a situation isn't a ReferenceEdge issue, they still step up and provide suggestions. I hadn't, because Salesforce is huge. They help me, when a technical situation comes up, they put it into terms that I understand so then when I need to go to a Salesforce admin, I can ask intelligent questions.
And not very many vendors will do that—if any. My experience with other vendors has been, "Oh, well, sorry—we don't handle that.
What are your future plans? We're always looking for 'How do we make it easy? How can we make it easier for our sales team? We're turning on ReferenceEdge content functionality within the latter half of this year, and really, truly giving our account executives that one-stop-shop. We are creating Reference content packages for use in Sales presentations.
They will include talk tracks and links to any case studies or videos we may have with that particular customer. Our company-wide content is housed in Seismic today, and there is a lot of information to sort through. Sometimes all that is needed is the story of why an account chose Genesys. This content will give that information to the AEs through a platform they are in every day. By using the reference content feature of ReferenceEdge, we will be able to set review dates for each piece of content.
This will allow us to keep the content current. In , we are looking at doing more with ReferenceEdge through the Salesforce mobile app. It hasn't been our focus, but I think once we get past the content initiative, I think the adoption of the mobile app is just going to skyrocket. Our customer reference program is primarily a sales enablement function led by the marketing team. It is focused on helping our mid-market and enterprise sales teams find the right customer references easily and making sure that we're tracking our conversations and interactions with those customers.
We have a twofold mission: one is to make the lives of the account executives AEs easier, and the second is to be able to track our interactions and the impact of those interactions on the deal cycle on the back end. The initial idea came from my supervisor, who is the marketing manager, and her colleagues on the sales side.
It grew out of Samsara's desire to grow the sales organization. They saw how quickly our sales team was growing and that we needed a better way of scaling our reference process to match. The question we faced was, "How can we enable our global sales team, and can we give them tools that are going to increase their efficiency and drive deals to close quicker?
We have multiple stakeholders beginning with our marketing leadership. The stakeholders we really try and align with all the time are sales leadership. We want to make sure everybody on the sales team is aligned and understands our KPIs for the quarter, the program outcomes, and how they are going to benefit their organization.
Mid-market and enterprise sales leadership are our significant stakeholders there, and additionally, we're looking to create an ongoing dialogue with managers, directors, and VPs. One challenge was efficiently responding to reference requests, which we had previously handled through internal messaging channels.
The customer reference program automated and streamlined the process. Samsara has a large sales team, which required a more streamlined process with an actual database. Our second challenge was tracking our interactions with our advocates because, a we don't want to overuse them, and b we also want to make sure we are using good advocates who might not have been used before.
And then our third challenge was tracking our impact on sales. Enterprise sales is a company-wide focus. Reference calls happen on almost every enterprise deal, and we had no existing workflow to systematically track the outcomes of those. As the company was growing its enterprise sales business, we realized that enterprise sales are significantly affected by reference calls.
Leadership wanted to understand the impact of the deals on end-of-quarter numbers, end-of-year numbers, etc.
How did you launch your program so successfully? We had a pretty big launch with global events. We made it an event because it's obviously a major work shift. Our approach to our sales teams was, "This is going be your new best friend, and this is actually going be a gamechanger for you.
We've also created a program so that each time a customer takes a reference call, they get a reward—which is another big incentive for our reps to use the application. We've gone from a message thread culture to a ReferenceEdge culture for customer references. Now the default is to go to ReferenceEdge first and then work backward if you can't find anything.
I think the biggest changes have mostly been about streamlining our process. We're saving AEs quite a bit of time on finding a reference.
AEs can search for a reference based on specific attributes like integrations, previous camera provider, previous telematics providers, etc. Our mid-market team has been loving it; they like that they can go in right away and select somebody instead of waiting on somebody to respond in a large message thread.
We're a pretty fast-paced culture overall, especially with sales; they want to get their deals done, and they want to get them done quickly. I think they love that it takes less time to find a reference, and more importantly, they love being able to filter references on use case. Being able to create search filters around use case, geography, and segment has been the most helpful; that was our number one request from the sales team.
Since we have so many products, having a centralized database where you can filter on products and all the other attributes is just so important. We want to set our prospects up with customers that have a similar use case or are in their same geography or same size. Before ReferenceEdge, there was no real way to do it; now we can.
Our AEs go into ReferenceEdge, and they're pretty much guaranteed to get one or two references coming back with a 'yes,' so they can just set their prospect up with them right away.
Another thing is figuring out and being able to better track and understand who our top advocates are, and then being able to leverage them for other activities too.
A big part of customer marketing is figuring out which customers we want to leverage for a specific advocate opportunity. Having all this information now in one place allows me to see when they've been used, how they've been used, what they've influenced more systematically.
We position ReferenceEdge as a sales tool, but it's also been great for events and for marketing communications because those teams are able to request happy customers for their activities too. Now everything is streamlined, so ReferenceEdge has been a benefit for these other groups as well.
Our initial goal during rollout was to get a certain number of advocates into the database and requests processed through ReferenceEdge; we met our initial goal this quarter. We also now have an enterprise focus, so we have specific KPIs for that. We try to measure everything, and we have pretty extensive dashboards. To measure program success, I have an executive dashboard that gives a high-level overview of the program.
We have an enterprise-specific dashboard that shows how we are engaging with enterprise reps, enterprise leadership, and marketing leadership. Our account director has been great. We had a couple of issues with some attributes and reporting prelaunch, and we were able to get the right people on the phone immediately to figure those out; that would have delayed our entire launch had we not figured it out.
Point of Reference is very responsive in that way. What are your future plans for your program? We have big plans for what we can do with the advocates, and we want to get them as involved as possible. In addition to the sales team, our marketing communications team is starting to become more involved because ReferenceEdge has a referenceability type for press activities. Our marketing communications team was not an initial stakeholder, but they're finding that it's been really helpful to request time with the AEs to figure out which customers would want to participate in press activities.
We can also see how using ReferenceEdge may be a tool to help our product management team figure out which customers Samsara might want to be used for beta testing. Moreover, our product marketing team uses ReferenceEdge all the time to identify customers for case studies, webinars, etc. Our marketing team has also partnered with our legal team to start using ReferenceEdge to track which customer logos we can use for marketing purposes and which ones we can't.
These examples are not our primary use cases right now but definitely have an impact. Could you describe your program? The customer Reference Program is part of our marketing department. My title is Customer Marketing Manager, and I handle our ReferenceEdge program, our customer community, and our customer story writing. AvidXchange works with real estate, construction, HOAs, and other vertical markets to help automate their payments and accounts payable. We sell different solutions to make it easier and more seamless when they're making payments and processing invoices.
So, our references have to address those specific verticals and products. The groups who use ReferenceEdge and or customer references include Sales, Product Marketing, our PR and social media team, and other various departments.
Our Customer Success or relationship management people are also deeply involved. We didn't really know how often customers were being used or if they were being used at all.
We couldn't see if salespeople were actually even contacting these references that they pulled. It was a hot mess. Over the last year or so, references have been a very hot topic at AvidXchange. There's just been such a need for them across the board. I was hired specifically to get ReferenceEdge and customer marketing off the ground. I've only been here for a year, but our company has had ReferenceEdge for years.
Unfortunately, nobody truly owned it; it was just sitting there. I think there were waves when people would put references in the system, but then it would just kind of sit there. Neither the references nor ReferenceEdge was being used effectively. That history is to explain that this last year has been about starting from the ground up to build the customer data and educate the reference users.
We had to meet with the sales team and educate them on how to use ReferenceEdge. Then we met with our customer success team, who are the ones approving and maintaining relationships with those references. We put rules in place to incentivize customer success to put references in and remove old contacts from ReferenceEdge continually. They are now keeping that pool fresh and current so that whenever a salesperson dips into ReferenceEdge, they're not just coming to the same exact references that they saw last time; there're always new ones available.
My job's changed a lot. I don't have to be in ReferenceEdge or involved with finding references as much. I'm also doing less data entry because our customer success staff is now coming in to make sure that our reference contacts are updated.
Going forward, ideally, we're not going to see as many cases where I need to be involved. Part of this change results from training sales on how that they can find references for themselves, and they don't have to click the button to ask for help from me. Educating them on how to use the system for themselves has made my job a little bit easier.
The leadership is constantly telling me how important this program is. Since I've gotten here, it's been easy to get executive and higher-level backing, so that's been a blessing. When I first started, I met with a lot of the sales leaders and they essentially said, "You got passed a hot potato because ReferenceEdge is complicated to work with.
Then, they realized what ReferenceEdge would actually do that for them, and so it's been cool to see how supportive people have become of it.
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