#8-references

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.

Wow, I haven't heard of it. What do you think?

Has anyone explored using Agentforce for customer references? I’m building a reference program using our internal tools and just got off a chat with our VP of Data about whether Agentforce could help sales reps self-serve references or at least speed up the process of finding the right one. She mentioned it would be a super simple build. It could also help reduce the time spent digging through Salesforce notes to find a match, especially when you have a reference need that is not in your program.

Let's talk about sales! What metrics are you sharing with sales leaders to demonstrate reference impact?

Are there any great AI prompts or softwares you have been using (outside of the softwares you're already using) to improve/support your reference program? Share which ones and how you're using them in the comments!

Hi All 👋 My team is building our company's first formal customer reference program in Q2. We're moving away from an informal system and towards a structured program. I have built and managed programs in the past (been a couple years). We all know B2B best practices are constantly changing, especially in 2025. I'm eager to learn from this group's recent experiences.

⁉️ If you were to start a reference program today, what essential steps, experiences, or "guidelines" would you establish initially?

Things I am thinking about: rules of engagements (give a reference to get a reference?, opp stages/size?) AM involvement - yes or no?, gifting?, fulfillment time SLA?, pilot strategy?

Fun fact: We will build this with Champion on their new SFDC app. Pretty excited about some of the efficiency that will provide.

Hi everyone, hope you had a nice weekend 😊 Wanted to share a recruitment win: my goal in Q1 was to build a strong pool of customer references for our new tool, so that when we launch in Q2, the sales reps actually have a number of advocates to partner with on reference calls

I've run two experimental outreach campaigns over the last week, and essentially doubled the number of references we have in our database. This was a slightly manual lift, but resulted in highly curated, small lists — resulting in >30% conversion rates to what I would deem pretty cold (but high propensity) leads

To reward or not to reward? Let's do a quick poll!
There's a lot of debate in references about whether to just recognize or reward your references. Which side are you on? Use the below emojis to vote
🎉 - Recognize
🎁 - Reward
And drop your thoughts about why in the chat!

Yep 100%!! My world changed once I was able to grow relationships with the AEs. Even 4 years later I'm still getting reference requests mostly from the AE's I have worked with for a while, or hearing from new AE's "XYZ sent me and told me how to partner best with you" so they become your internal advocates, too!

I think "serializing" our presence (joining weekly/monthly meetings) is so important to ensure long-term success. Sale reps are pulled in so many directions, the best way to stay top of mind is to always be there 😉

This is so great, thank you @Emily Smith for your insights 💙