#8-references

We tried to implement oppty size but found our smaller deals actually asked for references as much, if not more, than our large deals. We do require a specific stage

Our deal cycles are extremely fast, so our time SLA is 4 business days, but when I was at DocuSign it was 2 weeks. I think base it on a percentage of your deal cycle!

I require AM involvement to schedule (but that likely won't be needed with the champion scheduling component). I actually prefer they don't attend or get too involved unless they're asked for. I know some people opt for them to join the call to make intros, but our customer base doesn't need that.

As far as pilot, I'd recommend creating a transition function for your sales team who has been doing this "themselves". They have relationships etc and in my experience they weren't eager to let it go. We created a form where they could tell us reference calls they were running ahead of us facilitating it at all so we could at least start building the relationship with high reference using sales members and the references they used.

The opp size is very interesting! noted.

Four business days is impressive! I like your idea of basing it on a percentage of the length of the deal.

Out of curiosity, how did you discover the sales reps who were making so many references? We have no idea it was happening.

We basically just looked at that form to see who was using it the most and then I also ran a report of all opportunities and did a keyword search in any notes fields for reference to see if they were noting usage.
There are some AE's I've never worked with, and others I work with weekly! I also buddied up with all the sales leaders cause they typically had a pretty good idea of who on their team were using references. The game changed for us when we got extreme buy in from sales managers. Once I had reporting to demonstrate deals with references had a 65% close rate, they were sold.

When redesigning our process, we also did a straight survey of all the AE's asking for info on how they use references and got info from that, as well

love that stat! Congrats on the big wins! I am going to put it in my deck. One company saw a 65% CW with references. Are you okay with that?

I also like the idea of a survey. LIkely the route we may need to go.

A few things I've learned with references -
1. Only fill a reference if the deal is in a certain stage - for us it 03 when there had been a "tech win". If possible, make it not even possible to request the reference until the deal is in that stage.
2. Build up your list of customer references (at least 50) before launching the program and be able to share the account info & title w/ sellers
3. Make a very clear fulfillment time SLA

Yes, feel free to use 🙂

I just wanted to chime in about reference requests and stages. Totally agree that the deal has to reach a certain point to merit a reference call. I’m guessing you’ve thought about this. But since it hasn’t been explicitly mentioned… To help build relationships and trust with sellers, I also still help them in earlier stages with “name drop / content” if they are pitching to a new industry or maybe are trying to build up a specific region. So I’ll share customer story slides for pitch decks if we have them, for example. Or I’ll pull a report and see which customers we have in a region who might be referencable in the future, etc.
while you can’t tie these requests to an opportunity, and there’s no potential influenced revenue $, it’s still worth capturing and doing. Those same folks will bend over backwards for you down the line when you need their references because you’ve spent a little time with them. So I have a request type that is name drop, content, story assets for reference selling etc.

Love that, @Sarah McCoy! My team is doing a lot of that that but like the idea of making it a more formal "request" process vs lots of Slack 1-offs.

Yes then at least you can report on it, etc

Thank you all so much for this dialogue! It is giving me a lot of things to think about.

Sarah - along with this, we are starting to implement Peerbound, which I hope builds some excitement on another channel to get customer proof at scale. For example, it will auto deliver like quotes/case studies/etc. every Monday to reps that are relevant to open opps that they have. With that said, you give us something thinking about on how to support the "lil" opps while we have a program for the larger opps.

@Jaz Cuevas 👀 👀 👀

@Jenna Feldman^ 🙂 Good thread to reference for our project.