best-practices from San Francisco

One of our most ambitious - and I think, successful - efforts during the San Francisco Customer Reference Forum was to divide more than 100 reference professionals up into small working groups. We called these Birds of a Feather sessions, and we had them address the three most important issues facing reference programs, based on pre-event surveys. The issues were:

Measuring the value of a customer reference program

Building executive support for a customer reference program

Recruiting customers into a customer reference program

The working groups were facilitated by nine leaders in the profession from a variety of companies and programs. The groups then presented their findings back to the group as a whole, and we worked with one of our sponsors, Washburn Communications, to pull together and summarize the results in a single, comprehensive report. Washburn did a terrific job of digging through and pulling together the information from the notes produced by each roundtable group, transcripts, and individual notes from participants in addition to the formal reports back to the full group.

We captured the collective wisdom and hands-on experience of some 100 reference professionals who provided real-world solutions for addressing these issues. If you want to know how your peers at other companies are addressing these issues, this report- titled, “STATE OF THE PROFESSION 2006: A Summary of Best Practices in Three Key Areas of Reference Management,” is for you.

I'll be sending the report out to those who attended the San Francisco event, free of charge, in the next few days. We also have plans to make it available shortly, for a reasonable fee, to those who were not able to attend (a discount will be available to those who've attended previous Customer Reference Forums).

Meanwhile, please see below for one of the more interesting excerpts from the Report, on assessing the value of a reference program.

Best,
Bill

STATE OF THE PROFESSION 2006: A Summary of Best Practices in Three Key Areas of Reference Management

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-especially if you use outside vendors to handle interviews or other tasks-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 companywide standards and practices?

End of excerpt

Reference Point is a Customer Reference Forum newsletter about reference programs and how to improve them. To subscribe, please contact me (contact information is below or just respond to this email). To unsubscribe at any time, just reply to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject line. This email list and your name will never be made available to anyone else, not even to others on the list, unless by mutual request and agreement.

Contact Information

_____________________________________________________

email: bill@customerreferenceforum.com

web: http://www.customerreferenceforum.com

_____________________________________________________