#8-references

Hi Jennifer, we take the promoters and run a campaign via HubSpot to make asks for reviews, reference program, etc. We also have Deeto so now we run campaigns in Deeto for the reference program specifically and use Deeto for review site requests. At one company, I set up a journey where promoters were invited to leave us a review and we tracked if they clicked on the link; if they clicked they got an email to join our reference program and then if they clicked that they got an email to join the referral program - these emails were staggered of course.

In terms of a healthy response percentage - honestly it has varied for us. Sometimes a list of 500 will yield only 25 references and sometimes it's higher around 50. I haven't had much consistency in that department yet.

@Jennifer Eberhart one tip if you're going to ask a question about references you might as well get some context on what type of reference or advocacy activities they want to do - will be more helpful than a simple yes/no field. E.g. most of our customers at UserEvidence include something like this (image attached).

Re "referenceable rate" - we measure two things - and here are the averages across our 150 clients (which are all generally B2B tech with 100+ employees - lots of enterprise saas/software, IT/security, etc)

1. % of respondents who will be named (vs blinded/anon) - avg = 17% - this can vary pretty widely though. e.g. sales/martech like Gong can be more towards 40%, whereas as enterprise security more towards 5%
2. % of respondents that will volunteer/raise hand for at least one reference/advocacy activity - 23% - note if this were only one choice (ie reference? yes/no) i would expect this to be lower - but when you give people a menu of options they are usually willing to do something. and yea in security you do get people that won't be named (for a testimonial or case study) but will do a private 1:1 reference Hope that helps!

Super helpful, thanks! We are an IT company that works with hospitals/health systems so it's good to think about the context of industry when talking about the rates of participation, since many of our customers are not willing to be named (similar to security). Also, I think that we're going to change the way that we ask the question in the survey - right now it is a yes or no field, which then leads you into a secondary question about which questions people are willing to participate in. However, I think that if we just ask the question in a similar way to how you've phrased it, it allows for less friction.

yea we have some customers that sell IT to hospitals the named rate is definitely lower more towards security. and yea agree condense that 2-stage reference flow to a single reference/advocacy question.

On the not willing to be named piece - while frustrating, the good news from our most recent study of b2b buyers - blinded/anon data isn't much less credible than named content. But - it is important to have some sort of 3rd-party verification/validation layer (e.g. analyst like KLAS/Gartner/Forrester, review site like G2, 3rd-party like UserEvidence, etc) to combat the "hey did you just make this up?" question.

Aggregate data/proof/evidence can be another good way to still show proof w/o names - check out this article - https://userevidence.com/blog/customers-wont-go-on-record-heres-10-creative-ways-to-use-anonymous-roi-stats/

This is great. Thank you!