Resources for Customer Reference Professionals

Customer Reference Forum® is a community of customer reference professionals and customer reference managers from many of the leading corporations in the world.

Bill: Kathryn and Lorie, please tell us a bit about your customer reference program (Kathryn) and your firm (Lorie), as well as the roll you play in each.

Kathryn: I've been with Red Hat since 2003 and am currently the Customer Reference Programs and Communications Manager. I've worked on a wide variety of marketing and communications initiatives and in 2006 I founded what has become a highly successful, scalable global customer reference program with over 250 customer success stories profiling Red Hat customers from around the world. 

Lorie: Eccolo Media is a marketing communications agency providing content strategy and collateral development services to technology companies. Lorie serves as president and chief content strategist.

Bill: Lorie, let’s talk about your research on B2B technology collateral. Then Kathryn, we’ll talk to you about how you used it. Lorie, tell us a bit about the research: whom you surveyed, what you wanted to find out.

Lorie: The Eccolo Media 2009 B2B Technology Collateral Survey was conducted in July of 2009 to 501 respondents at US companies who participated in a technology purchase in the previous six months. In an effort to understand the effect marketing communications collateral has in the technology purchase, the survey queried on the types of collateral buyers consumed while considering the purchase, what they found to be influential, how they chose to consume it, the frequency of use, and what decreased or increased perceived influence. A variety of collateral types were included in the survey, with a subsection specifically querying on common reference collateral: case studies, podcasts, and video. This was the 2nd year that we’ve run the survey.

Bill:  What were the most important results, in your view?

Lorie: There were several eye-opening moments for us when we began to analyze the data, but I think the most important results fell into two areas: 

The first is we were able to really track and verify the ways in which purchase decision makers and purchase influencers differ in collateral use during the buying cycle. Influencers consume reference collateral earlier in the sales cycle and tend to rank overall influence a bit lower than decision-makers do, however they share content with others in their organization more frequently. Decision makers consume more content later in the cycle, they share it less, and they rank all the collateral they consume to be more influential in the purchasing decision. We got quite granular with this, so we were able to see interesting variations in the profile data, such as while the majority of influencers find customer podcast testimonials to be just moderately influential, decision makers find them to be highly influential, particularly decision makers in enterprise companies—very helpful data when you’re planning reference content and the best way to get to your target audience.

The second area that we think is really important is we confirmed last year’s survey results that the majority of all respondents view all content at the desktop, meaning they don’t download, print, or otherwise carry reference content into another format or device to view it. They are interacting with the content right at their desktop, and that suggests a tremendous opportunity to manage all reference content from the digital perspective. Reference professionals should be building hyperlinks to other collateral, other communications channels, and other file types into every html or PDF document. We routinely build links to audio and video testimonials into all the written case studies we produce for our clients, and we encourage them to build in pointers to blog discussions and other social media where appropriate.

Bill: What surprised you?

Lorie: I think the biggest surprise was that respondents told us that written case studies are still their preferred format to get reference content in. There is some discussion in the industry that customer video was taking over in terms of influence and also in terms of frequency of use. While we did see a sharp increase in video usage, our respondents told us that they both consumed written case studies more frequently and found it to be the most influential collateral format by a wide margin.

Bill: Kathryn, what stuck you most about the research findings? Any big surprises or “ah ha’s”?

Kathryn: It was encouraging to see the value that decision makers and influencers alike place on case studies. Written case studies have been the foundation of Red Hat's reference program since its inception. Eccolo's research findings validated that approach, allowing us to remain focused on producing quality, content-rich customer success stories.

Bill: How are you using the findings at Red Hat? What are you changing as a result of the research?

Kathryn: The findings on the difference in decision makers' and influencers' consumption of collateral, combined with the increasing frequency of internal requests for case studies customized for these different audiences, has caused us to consider new approaches for highlighting business and technical information in different formats from a single customer case study. It was also interesting to see that video case study usage on the rise. Video case studies are a key component of our suite of reference materials, however we are limiting video case studies to our most brand recognizable and visually compelling customers.

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