#8-references

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 💙

I think everything you've outlined there is great! We also surface win slides/quotes etc from successful calls run, or experiences working with our team which is great when you get up and running. Having a central place where they can go for how to work with your team has been great for us, as well. We have a brief learning path through Lessonly for them and then a confluence page with all the expectations/how to's etc that's really helpful for new hires especially. We also join enablement sessions and team syncs to keep our services top of mind for them! I think especially while starting up surfacing new references (use cases, persona, successes etc) helps encourage participation, too. I got a ton of traction when I shared close rates of our top references, as well. We had one who had a 90% close rate for a period of time and everyone wanted him! We also built an easy track references process for sales people who were already using their own book so we could at least have eyes on what was happening and grow the relationship with those references for future usage.

I am planning to begin launching this in early April and having regular comms/touch-points for at least the first 6 weeks. I have two internal champions of Deeto already on the team (a sales rep and the sales manager), which will be a huge help, but I want to make sure I'm intentional about getting them up to speed. This is a completely new muscle for them. I think I can/should make this first effort high touch

Candidly, the marketing org does not have a ton of trust from the sales team — before my time, our last reference tool was "launched" with hardly any advocates or training, so it got very little use. They are wary/skeptical, but I have been spending the last couple of months building a foundational pool of customer advocates, so when it launches, they will have a sizeable cohort of advocates to choose from

Hi everyone 👋 I am beginning a soft launch of our customer reference tool (Deeto) with our new biz sales team. This is a small but mighty team of about 7 people.

I'm working on an implementation strategy and workback plan, and would love to either get a gut check on what I have, and/or to learn from you what you've found successful. It is currently a mix of:
• On-demand content (video/written)
• Comms channels (emails, Slack)
• Enablement sessions (joining team meetings bi-weekly to support with finding references, monthly trainings with the broader enablement team)

How many references were you fielding on a monthly basis?

Wow! Love that you had a full team supporting this. Definitely jealous. Myself and one other colleague are doing all of the above!

@channel I know a lot of us are mighty teams of 1 or 2. Let's talk scale! What are you doing to scale your reference program? And what has been most successful?

Yep, definitely a problem we have as well. We mainly lean on Onboarding and CSMs to provide us with qualified advocates. Sales will provide us customers who have agreed to marketing clauses in their contracts, but we haven't had success with them delivering really quality references since the relationship they have with the DM isn't usually who implements the product and would be the reference in our experience.

Christine raised a great point! Anyone have any tips they can share on how they get sales to stop "back pocketing" references?

Ours is very similar to this with a couple of tweaks that I think have changed the game.
For #3 - If they are in our advocacy program, we don't have to reach out to CSMs anymore. We get enough facetime with them that they know us, they expect us to ask them to be a reference, and if the answer is no because they're not happy, they're honest with us. We only ask if it's okay to reach out if we happen to be asking someone not in our program - which is rare.

For #5 - I set up a google sheet that auto sends my email templates through Zapier - that way I don't have to manually fill in an email template - it just does it for me

For #6 - Whomever requested the reference in the first place is CCed on our emails and once a customer accepts, we say thank you and then the requestor does the connecting. We actually ask them to help coordinate an actual date/time so that the call actually happens. If the customer/prospect are left to do it themselves it tends to not happen.

Hi Rose, your process is pretty typical in a more "managed" reference program - at least in my experience. You can use a software or set up the settings in SlapFive to be more of an automated "unmanaged" program where sales essentially self-serves but I know in this scenario, then reference mgrs struggle to close the loop and ensure the reps mark that the call happened, etc. You probably know all of this already but my point is to basically say you're not alone 🙂 Personally, while it's never fun to be in more of a service role, I always get a lot of satisfaction from providing a great reference call and being a part of the deal. But it's definitely time consuming. IDK if this will help or if you've already tried something like this. But in my last company, I got a LOT of pushback about the reference program from our 1500 person sales team - some account execs were grateful for the help and easily understood the value and how they could help. Others, it was like pulling teeth and they really didn't trust me / marketing in general right off that bat. I went on a pretty long road show where I met with every single regional leadership team (so the regional VP and their District Managers) calls and presented a deck that explained everything customer marketing is responsible for and then showed examples of how we make our customers look good (basically the WIFM for the customers who participate in advocacy) and then gently reminded them that reference burnout was real and our pool of references was only as good as what they were giving to us - like hello this is a synergistic type of relationship 😉 I got the VPs to basically have their AEs fill out a nomination spreadsheet over the course of a month and then they got to brag to their leaders about how they were working with marketing to provide reference nominations - it totally fueled a good number of customer stories, speakers, webinar folks, etc for the year and really helped us all work together better. I provided leaders w/ updates on what we'd done w/ their nominations so it didn't just seem like all their trust in nominating went into a vacuum. Sorry for this long story book but anyway, maybe it could help. If not you, someone else who is struggling w/ getting buy in from sales. I ended up building a lot of good relationships w/ them and then I tripled the number of reference requests so they started working w/ us versus coveting their "back-pocket" references.

great idea; the ratio should be 1:1 😂

A lot of times I will surface requests in our community groups and newsletters to get volunteers. It is helpful when they self-nominate and has introduced me to references who are extremely solid I hadn't selected in the past! It's also quick and our sales team loves knowing they've specifically volunteered/signed up for this request based on their expertise. I've created some campaigns in the past encouraging participation (12 days of Torch was one I did) and some of the most frequent participants were people I'd never personally worked with since our advocate network is so large and helped create a great relationship for future ref usage.

Totally agree! Sales and Marketing are insatiable!

I didn't realize Champion could manage references. That's great.

I think Amanda's frustration has more to do with sales references being a hungry machine—that always needs to be fed with new advocates and compelling stories to encourage sales to ask after those advocates—versus a tracking issue. With a tool like Champion, I'm confident that Amanda's reference tracking is probably quite sophisticated!

One play I like to try is mining win reports to determine which new customers are likely to address similar pain points to my most sought after advocates. I also like to try to "carrot" these new references with higher value opportunities like speaking opps to get their story out there in a broad form before asking for them to dig into 1:1s.

yes we track references already @Sarah McCoy

How do you keep the reference pool fresh, @Sarah McCoy? Continuous recruitment?

@Amanda Peacock I highly recommend tracking references by the advocate taking them so you don't end up with them saying no to everything eventually because they're so burned out by the requests. That's just my 2 cents and lesson I've learned. I've also been scolded by account managers or partners for going back to the same person repeatedly. I guess where I am going w/ this is don't be afraid to say no and keep your reference pool fresh. Hard to do depending on the company and dynamics of your customer base....