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Compiled by more than 100 leading reference professionals at the Spring 2006 Customer Reference Forum.
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"I thought the report was excellent. I have printed it & have yellow highlights covering most of each page! It's very useful information."
Amy Shever, Senior Project Manager, Customer Marketing, BEA
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See how leading reference professionals from many of the top customer reference programs in the world – including HP, Oracle, Kronos, SAP, Intel, Network Appliance, EMC, Citrix Systems and dozens of others:
- Measure the value of a reference program
- Gain executive support
- Recruit customers.
To purchase the report, please click here.
To see the Table of Contents, please click here.
STATE OF THE PROFESSION 2006: A Summary of Best Practices in Three Key Areas of Reference Management
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Conference participants brainstorm solutions to critical issues in reference management.
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"We have metrics around the number of references, but we focus on quality, not quantity." Barb Krasner, Lucent
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Excerpt
A Qualitative Approach to Value
Several presenters pointed out that, in running and evaluating a customer reference program, program managers and their stakeholders may be inclined to adopt a strictly quantitative approach. However, a reference program can deliver value in ways that may be hard to measure quantitatively, but that may nonetheless be tangible proof points. For example, a reference program &ndash especially if you use outside vendors to handle interviews or other tasks &ndash may be able to garner customer intelligence in a way no other business activity does.
Participants offered several questions to get a better sense of a program's qualitative benefits:
- What does it mean for the organization that a number of customers are on record as endorsing its offerings?
- How does the existence of a reference program impact the company's ability to compete and build its brand?
- How do customers benefit from their participation in the reference program and which of these benefits are they willing to share with customers considering joining the program?
- Do customers active in the reference program use the company's services and products in any way differently from the customers who don't participate?
- What can sales and marketing learn from those active customers? Does the reference program help the company understand emerging customer behaviors and market trends?
- How does the reference program simplify and add credibility to sales conversations?
- Does the reference program yield valuable information that can help the product group design product improvements?
- To what extent does the reference program help the marketing department refine how it presents the company's brand and story?
- How does the reference program compare to what the competition is doing with references?
- What new initiatives have been launched by the reference team to increase the pool of referenceable customers?
- How has the program improved the infrastructure and operations of the customer reference business group? Has the program accomplished any of the following:
- Improved the ability of stakeholders to find reference collateral and customers through systems (such as a single source of information), tools, and processes?
- Provided self-service tools to scale activities and focus on those activities with the most value?
- Outsourced any activities or moved activities to shared- services teams to lower costs?
- Driven any company wide standards and practices?
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