While 2009 was a challenging year – there were still many great ideas out there in the world of Customer Reference Management. I’ve compiled a list of nine great ones that were presented at the 2009 Customer Reference Forum and the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement.
2009’s Nine Best Ideas in Customer Reference Management
1. Tie customer reference requests to performance.
Most advice I’ve seen on how to persuade customers to reference talk about incentives, legal agreements, building closer relationships, understanding how particular customers want to grow professionally-everything but performance! Great performance, great delivery, must be the basis for a customer reference relationship. At the 2009 Customer Reference Forum, dynamic and well connected CIO Patty Morrison-the dream customer reference any IT firm would love to have-outlined a specific process that would be most likely to turn her into a reference. Key elements of that process: agree up front on a quarterly review that starts with performance, acknowledge what’s not working and get it fixed, then look at what’s working well and creating a joint white paper or case study, then turn to reference request. Done well, she’ll not only talk to your prospects but open her own rolodex to you. Biggest turn off: trying to put an agreement to reference in the initial contract for services.
2. Stop responding defensively to social media; engage your customers references proactively in community marketing.
Forrester Research’s Laura Ramos pointed out that social media is evolving into a huge opportunity for firms to engage in an entirely new kind of marketing: Community Marketing. It eschews one way messaging and spin from corporate spokespeople and embraces two way conversations and transparency wherever customers are talking online-whether on your website or others. Firms who skillfully engage customers references in these marketing communities will put themselves in a great position to emerge as winners.
3. Get reference content from “the other 90%.”
Balky PR or legal departments, onerous customer policies limiting their reference activity, customers objecting that “we’re just too busy” to reference. There are a thousand reasons why customers resist referencing for you-even if they love you. Which means you’re leaving a lot of reference assets “on the table” that no one knows about. 3PAR is making inroads in getting effective reference content out of “the other 90%” who don’t reference. They do so by using a specialized platform that conducts surveys of its customer base, gets high response rates, takes the resulting data (such as “78% of 3PAR users say they would recommend 3PAR Utility Storage as a strategic component …”) gets it validated by a 3rd party, completely bypasses customer internal approval processes, and puts it into a form that can be readily posted on its web site, in press releases, and used by sales and marketing people.
4. Establish the value of your reference program by showing its impact on sales productivity.
Infor’s Abby Atkinson marshaled impressive evidence, based on data already available or easily developed at most firms. She showed the monetary value of a customer reference program so effectively that her reference program got a 60%+ budget increase in a year that most marketing programs were being cut across the board. Key facts: every dollar spent on Infor’s customer reference program returns $7 in the form of additional sales and improved sales productivity.
5. Use references to drive lead generation and branding from your social media program.
Intel’s Rhett Livengood showed at the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement that by skillfully integrating customer reference content into its social media efforts-and make no mistake, your the people running your social media efforts are starved for good content-his team helped raised the number of qualified leads generated by Intel’s social media sites from around 20 per month to more than 200 per month, and “hits” on its customer stories from 100 a month to 10,000 per month. One key learning: the most powerful content is videos of customer testimonials no longer than 90 seconds.
6. Look at customer reference programs as part of a larger process of customer engagement.
The second idea suggested by Patty Morrison that made the Best list. She urged attendees to avoid asking customers like her just to reference-not exactly a scintillating value proposition! Instead, offer key customers the full range of possible ways in which they might engage with you, including executive forums, advisory boards, customer or industry communities, and the like. Later at the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement, SAS Canada’s Wally Thiessen and his team showed how they are doing just that, and how those efforts were credited by senior management for a dramatic increase in the firm’s previously declining customer retention rates.
7. Use customer case studies to train sales, as well as upgrade from selling products to selling solutions.
A lot of technology firms want to go from selling products to technology buyers to selling solutions to higher level senior management. National Instruments’ Sugato Deb showed how the firm’s customer reference program played a critical role in the firm’s successful transition. Sugato and his team developed case studies that uncovered the economic value (rather than the technology features) that NI’s products were creating for its customers, and also identified the competencies that leading customers developed that allowed them to get the most value. The resulting case studies were then used to train sales people by giving them the value-based information they needed to sell to a higher level executives, an important key in making the transition successful. Of course, the same case studies are providing powerful sales and marketing tools to place into the hands of prospects and industry influencers.
8. Insert references in strategic planning, such as new product development and launch.
Infor’s Abby Atkinson gets a second nod from last year for the way she won a seat at Infor’s strategic planning table. She got that by showing, with historical data, that when Infor wants to launch a new product, its sales people will need a certain number of references to make it successful, and developing such references will take a certain amount of headcount and/or resources. Further, she can show that providing those resources will pay for themselves many times over, based on improvements to sales productivity and shorter sales cycles. In short, she’s building a sound, data-supported business model for her reference program.
9. Improve the success of your Early Adopter program with key customer references.
Getting customers to accept product upgrades and improvements is an enduring problem: few people want to be the first, and even satisfied customers take the attitude “why fix what ain’t broken?” Kronos’ customer reference program has developed a creative early adopter program to recruit key customer references into product upgrade launches, provide them with incentives to adopt early, and then get them referencing about the upgrades quickly. The result has been dramatic improvements to new product adoption rates.
