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.

Lisa, Emily, and Holly will show how they have methodically raised the strategic importance of Adobe’s reference program. First step: they developed a robust self-service reference web portal and reporting tool that gained wide acceptance with internal stakeholders, which freed up their time from filling routine reference requests, allowing them to focus on increasing the strategic value of their program. Their next step: they sharpened their focus on recruiting and developing only strategically important customer references – those who’s stories would align with sales, marketing and branding objectives. Third was to build trust throughout the stakeholder community — sales, PR, events, Analyst Relations, etc. - that the reference customers and content they provided would be high value. In the process, Adobe’s stable of references not only made dramatic improvements in strategic relevance, but also achieved significant increases in actual number of references, reference recruitment and size of the reference pipeline.