125 Reference Pros Exchange Ideas in Berkeley

Fast Facts

Where: The fabulous Claremont Resort.

When: April 23-25, 2007

Who Attended (repeat attendees): Included HP, EMC, SAP, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, Citrix, IBM, Novell, SAS, Dell, Network Appliance and many others.

Who Attended (first time): A&R Edelman, ADP Canada, ADP National Account Services, BEA, BMC Software, Callidus Software, Entrust, Extreme Networks, Infor, Juniper Networks, Nortel, Open Text Corp., Postini, Inc., Rackspace Managed Hosting, Riverbed Technology, Siemens and Teradata.

Please click here to see the full list of attending firms.

Who Presented:

Presenters included:

Ben McConnell, co-author of Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message, and the Church of the Customer Blog.
Billie Abrams, Director, HP Reference2Win Program, Hewlett-Packard Co.
Stephanie Porter, Director, Customer Programs, Amdoc
Jeremiah Owyang, Director of Corporate Media Strategy, PodTech.net
Holley Garmany, Senior Manager, Customer Development, Network Appliance.

See the full Agenda for who presented.

Knowledge Shared and Captured:

During our Small Group brainstorming sessions, reference pros developed strategies and best practices to address 5 critical issues in reference management:

Getting your most prized customers to participate in your reference program
Getting customers to reveal measurable benefits
Integrating with sales
Making better use of customer intelligence
Developing customer communities (customer advisory boards, online communities, user groups, etc)

We’re developing a report of their findings. Please click here to be kept informed when it’s ready.

What the Blogosphere is Saying . . .

My takeaways
These trends were evident in Berkeley among the reference community:

A strong spirit of collaboration.
A strong sense of strategy and business results.
Steady growth of the profession.

See more on these at my blog.

Reference Programs: the Roadblocks and How to Clear Them
While watching the exchange of ideas In Berkeley, the astute Steve Ellis observed that reference programs aren’t rocket science. Smart reference pros are figuring out the aspects needed to execute these programs well “and the forum is a brilliant place to hear and learn about them.” But there are some major roadblocks — they just tend to be internal and organizational, including:

Reconciling the demands (confusion) caused by operating in matrix organizations, often without a definitive mandate
Building reference-ability goals into the personal objectives (and remuneration) of sales
Creating a 360 degree view of the customer, and the people and budgets that touch customers
Connecting the dots across the organization between sales, marketing, product support (even product development too, for Early Adopter Programs)
Getting an incremental multi-year investment commitment
Linking to core IT systems for reconciling customer data, reference activity and revenue values

See Steve’s blog for more.

Customer Reference Programs to Adopt Social Media
Jeremiah blogs for an expanded audience of people interested in how social media can help businesses reach customers. He’s introducing his audiences to customer reference programs in a big way. This post also links to Jeremiah’s presentation at the event, and his well respected white paper on reference programs and social media.

See Jeremiah’s blog for more.