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References question - does anyone give prospects a self service interface to find and connect with customer references? Does a product like this exist? What if we sent a link to prospects, let them search and filter, then reach out to schedule a call with a customer who met their needs for a reference? Tell me what you love and hate about the idea.
The closest thing I've seen to this is Deeto and I loved it. The only difference is the AE puts in the prospect info, gets served up the best matches based on the criteria he/she entered, they select those or can search for others reference options, those selections are sent directly to the prospect and the rest of the process is managed between the prospect and reference customers the prospect selected (but you still have full visibility on process). I also love this approach because what I know working from AEs that they always want a customer who is an exact match of the prospect (aka the needle in the haystack), when you let the prospect search on their own I suspect they'll be a lot more flexible when they see the options they have.
@Ciana Abdollahian - totally separate note but would love to hear about your experience with Deeto. Just starting to look at their offering.
@Maria Braune I just saw two demos but there were a lot of pros in my opinion. It's heavily focused on reference management so if you want a one stop shop probably not the best option. I was okay with that because I personally feel managing Marketing request workflows and Sales request workflows in one tool is tough (although ideal for reporting to have a single source of truth). Maybe Base/Orca/SlapFive handle marketing requests better but RefEdge doesn't work for us. Marketing team members don't have the ability to give us all the details we need, we can't have a back and forth dialog with them about their requests and there is no visibility into where we are with their request.
My teammate and I really liked it but we've put a lot of investment in RefEdge and just renewed. They are very new so there is risk there, but in my opinion with how buggy RefEdge is, might have been worth trying. To be completely fair, our SFDC team makes a lot of changes (without telling us) that causes some of the pain with RefEdge.
Love the concept - when a reference is handpicked obviously there's some selection bias since the vendor is picking it, and everyone knows that. Providing a lot of options (even if all of those are somewhat handpicked) where the prospect feels agency over who they talk to is definitely more impressive and builds a lot of credibility. You need to build a big bench of reference volunteers tho in that case, but if you can, you should :)