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If you run a Customer Reference program, where have you typically found bottlenecks? And then, if you’ve identified them, how did you go about solving those to make the process work more efficiently for you? I’ve found bottlenecks to be in the follow up and fulfillment for whether or not the reference call happened. Anybody got tips for you’ve solved this in the past that worked well for you? Feel free to also comment on my post asking the exact same question!
Ive had the biggest challenges with follow up and sales marking the reference call happening within salesforce (so tracking).
I don't really have a solve. I think some of these new automated tools could help, but I didn't have the capability to use them. It really was always me being dilligent in keeping things tracked on my sheet and chasing answers.
Would love to hear how others have solved for these challenges
ohhhh I solved this by adding more work on my plate i set up the calls , kick off the calls with quick intros and then make my advocate the host before i hop off the call
A bottleneck we have is that we don't have a traditional CSM team (only for our subscription services) and we don't have a way to easily get accurate use case data. So, all I have to go off of is what the account team notes the customer is using our products for at the time of the sale - so it's just "intent" data. Trying to navigate who can pull a backend user report, etc - it's time consuming and I waste a lot of time reaching out to the account team to see if a customer is actually doing what they said they planned to and then whether or not they'll take a reference call. We should be getting Gainsight soon so hopefully it gets better.
I also have a challenge where the customer says "Yes, I'll do a call" but then the account team doesn't follow up who made the request and then the customer is left dangling - not a great experience for your advocates who are willing to take time out of their day to talk to a prospect.
It's a lot of manual effort to follow up and close the loop.
Yes, they did! We run our entire reference process through salesforce and so if the reference attached to the opportunity is not marked as one of the final statuses (completed/did not run/cancelled etc) it will give them an error when they try to close out their oppty