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Hi all! My team is wanting to put together a plan for group reference calls, sort of like a gated customer panel. We find that a lot of our prospects ask similar questions, and we're working off of a very small reference base for some of our products, so scheduling more of a small group setting once a quarter would help cut down on reference call requests. Does anyone have experience doing this? I'd love to hear best practices, strategies, etc. How many questions do you try to gather beforehand? How do you go about gathering those questions? Do you cap the number of attendees? What's a good number of reference panelists? Do you use a webinar format or regular Zoom call so the references can talk directly to the prospects?
We've done this with one client. We called them customer reference forums. It was invitation-only. The reference team would identify speakers from over-requested accounts and schedule a call. Sales reps were responsible for submitting questions from their prospects and registering them so an opportunity id was provided. We typically had one customer for 10 -15 prospects. The speaker would give a quick 15 minutes overview of their challenges / solution / results and then take questions - first the submitted ones and then from audience if anything was unanswered. We used a simple zoom. Calls would last 30 to 45 mins. The recorded calls were available for private sharing but not posted externally and customer expressly agreed to allowing us to use the recording in this form.
this is a brilliant idea. @Diana Gabroveanu was the event successful? did you see a positive impact on pipieline velocity and close rate?
Yes, we were able to keep an eye on those opportunities and had very good result in both time to close and close rate for the opportunities where prospect contact was on a reference forum when compared to company averages. it wasn't a single event, we had monthly calls like this for years (maybe they still do but we no longer work with the client - our marketing contact was part of a RIF late 2022) and it was overall a very successful program
I did this at my previous company; we called them Customer Roundtables. Each month we would work with the sales team to identify a handful of deals within a specific criteria (industry, use case, org size, etc.), and would invite them to an informal Zoom meeting with 2 customers that also fit that criteria
I would moderate the discussion with a set of questions to guide the conversation, and then open it up for more Q&A from the prospects. We did not record the meeting, and I was the only person from the company in the meeting — we intentionally put the customers front and center and wanted the company (me) to be more in the background
We found this to be a slightly more scalable way to do reference calls, and saved internal bandwidth to coordinate 1:1 reference calls for really high-value deals