One key to winning the cooperation of sales in running your Customer Reference Program is to provide real value. And doing that requires knowing what sales needs. To keep on top of this, regular surveys should be a part of your process.

Here are some tips for productively surveying sales, gathered from Rhett Livengood’s President’s Award winning presentation at our last Customer Reference Forum earlier this year. Rhett is Chief Reference Officer and Director of Enterprise Customer Programs at Intel:

– Surveys should assess the value of all sales tools and collateral, not just references.
– Have a sales executive send out or sponsor the survey, to ensure good response rates.
– Ask a combination of closed and open-ended questions.
– Use the compiled survey responses to identify key action items — and communicate those to the field, along with your plans for working on them.
– Make survey results available to product and services marketing teams.
– In addition to surveys, meet with field sales people to gather direct feedback and build support for references from sales.

Rhett’s teams conduct sales surveys twice a year. As a result of a recent one, Intel stopped producing expensive customer videos because they were not garnering much awareness from sales. Now they are using much less expensive YouTube-style videos, which are far easier and less expensive to create, and ironically, have a bigger impact because they seem authentic.