#8-references
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It has varied by company. In L&D ppl wanted swag as gifts and didn't care about the money.
But in previous companies, we'd offer $50-250 depending on the level and priority of the ask. To be clear, I'd never give $250 for a reference call. That was usually 50-75.
Haven't had to here at my current company
me to the customers
anything you want
Hello! I reviewed the docs in the resources section on the community website, but I wanted to ask in here as well. Do you have a landing page about your advocacy program? If so, would you be willing to share a link or a screenshot of it? We started doing interviews with advocates about joining the program, and it's becoming clear that some of our customers could use a little education on what certain advocacy activities are, like a reference call.
👋 Hey All - is there a way to conduct a quick survey amongst CM professionals to see the average number of reference calls you provide on a yearly basis to your sales team? I can't seem to find an average to compare my number to, and I'd love to hear!
Hi all - wanted to get some input as to how you are all incentivizing participation in your customer reference programs. We are standing up our first ever customer advocacy program and people who join will have the option to select advocacy activities they'd like to participate in. For opting in to participate as a customer reference, our CMO would like to dangle a juicy incentive. I understand the motivation and the value of ensuring our advocates are open to this engagement, but I want it to ensure it's not feeling transactional (or even non-compliant).
Thoughts on how to strike this balance? Thanks!
P.S. We are offering custom SWAG for joining the program in general.
Would love to have this as a discussion topic for next year and see if anyone else has thoughts or tips.
Have any of you created a reference request workflow in Salesforce that is not connected to ReferenceEdge or Infuitive? Is this possible?
Really liked this perspective from <@U09E7QN7R27> on reference calls, reframing them as opportunities, not favors, and highlighting the peer-to-peer value. It made me think: what other shifts (big or small) have you made in how you approach references that had a real impact?
Would love to hear what’s worked for you!
Hi <@U08UZKKA7D5> - Had this request before and found a great solution. Identified a few customers who had churned, and then came back after a 'less than positive' experience with a competitor. Bonus when that competitor is one of the finalists in the opportunity.
Another question, how do you handle situations where Sales pushes for multiple references at once?
My current approach is to build a list of potential customers, then:
• Reach out to the top-choice advocate first
• Give them a full business day to respond
• Follow up the next day
• If no response, move to a backup customer
This way, we don’t overwhelm advocates with duplicate asks, but Sales often wants immediate coverage. Curious how others manage this balance, do you ever reach out to multiple customers at once, or stick with sequential outreach?
For those of you who manage references for sales an/or CS what is your SLAs for sourcing a customer and why?
Beautiful deflection @Sarah McCoy thank you!
another option - I typically use advocates from case studies or in Deeto who we have content from and share name and title and a quote or high level summary (with links) and then have a statement along the lines of "should we be selected as a part of the RFP process, we're happy to put you in touch with a customer. For additional questions, please reach out to our reference team" and we had an email alias for references but no one ever contacted. I think contact details are always asked for and despite privacy regulations being what they are today, RFPs haven't caught up with the times and they still are on the forms but no one actually provides contact info. It would be unheard of in my opinion.
Hello! For those of you that use NPS to source references - can you tell me a bit about that? Here's specifically what I'm looking for:
1. If you just ask those that are promoters (and potentially passives) via the survey if they are willing to be a reference in a yes/no question, can you share the percentage of people that usually say yes? I'd like to see what other companies' results look like.
2. If you don't ask them to be a reference in the survey, how do you go about it?
<@U08UZKKA7D5> sent you a DM!
I'd LOVE that @Ciana Abdollahian!
<@U08UZKKA7D5> I echo what's already been send but my team created a guide to RFPs for Sales at Snyk that covers this if you're interested in taking a look!
Similar to answers above - we had a leadership approved sentence or two that basically pointed them to our published case studies and said that we would be happy to make introductions to customers when the time was right, but due to privacy reasons we could not share customer contact details.
I have. And I was also asked once to provide prospects that decided NOT TO work with the company :D
Hey everyone - We're currently using ReferenceEdge to manage our customer reference process but not super happy with it. There's a lot of admin overhead for both me as the program manager and for our operations team. In addition to AgentForce and Champion are there any other products we should be looking at?
Hi everyone! For those of you who are teams of one, how do you handle reference requests when you're out of office?
I currently report into the head of marketing and don’t have a strong internal backup for managing references while I’m away. Right now, my process is to notify teams in advance, ask them to submit requests proactively, and share a list of available references along with email templates for CSMs to use. I’m CC’d on outreach so I can follow up when I return.
It mostly works, but I’m hoping to build a more seamless OOO workflow that allows me to truly disconnect. If you’ve found a system that works well, I’d love to learn from you!
Oh no @Cara Peterson! Not to pry but was it for security reasons or something else? I know a lot of companies are picky about who they give their data to.
@Jaz Cuevas I really wanted to bring in Champion, the product seemed perfect for what I needed, but I got turned down internally twice 😑
Hi @Cara Peterson! I haven’t heard of it but if you want a tool that can speed up the process, cut out all the back and forth and organize your requests - Champion is great! We just signed with them and so excited to get started.