Each year we survey customer reference leaders: that is, the practitioners who either run their company customer reference program, or have responsibility for an autonomous part of the firm reference program. We presented results of this year's survey of 75 reference leaders at the February Forum in Berkeley. I thought I'd share with you some of the results, particularly those that indicate interesting trends in this profession. For example, reference program budgets appear to be increasing (through last year), outsourcing to vendors is on the rise, and the capacity of reference management systems to provide more information is growing. See below for more information.

All the best,
Bill

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

OUR NEXT CAB EXCHANGE SUMMIT
Early registration has opened for our next CAB EXCHANGE SUMMIT. This is for professionals who manage Customer Advisory Boards/Councils, and will take place July 21-23 in San Jose. We'll also be starting a newsletter for CAB professionals. If interested in attending the summit, please click here. If interested in subscribing to our CAB newsletter, please let me know by replying to this email with "subscribe" in the subject line. If you know of colleagues in your organization who might be interested, please feel free to forward this email to them.

LOCAL REFERENCE MEETINGS
Bay Area Reference Professionals Group will meet next on April 28. If you are interested in attending please email Amy Shever at amy_shever@yahoo.com or amy.shever@sap.com for more details

CUSTOMER REFERENCE POSITIONS: WHO'S HIRING
Red Hat, NetApp and Projectline Services are currently hiring for Customer Reference Professionals. For more information on these jobs click here.

We can let our community of more than 500+ reference pros know about your position opening. To post a job (for now, this service is free), please click here.

ADVICE
Check out our BEST PRACTICES REPORTS for tips on critical issues like: getting marquee customers to participate in a reference program; getting customers to reveal measurable benefits; developing customer communities; integrating your program with sales; gaining executive support, and more. For more information, please click here.

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2008 CUSTOMER REFERENCE PROGRAMS SURVEY
Highlights

The yearly survey of more than 70 reference programs looks at how they:
- Are organized
- Allocate budgets and headcount
- Establish growth targets
- Interface with and incent sales
- Reward customers
- Measure the value of their programs
- Design and implement the reference management system they use

. . . and more. Here are some of the trends we noticed:

- PROGRAM RESPONSIBILITY. Reference program responsibility moved a bit this year, away from the purview of Corporate Marketing (down 8%) and toward Sales Support / Operations (up 10%) and, to a lesser extent, PR (up 4%).

- BUDGETS. Annual budgets for reference programs may be increasing. The number of programs with budgets less than $100,000 fell 10%, while the number of firms with higher budgets all increased. Programs with budgets between $500,000 and $1,000,000 increased the most, 7%.

- OUTSOURCING. Spending on outside vendors and contract resources is increasing. The number of programs spending less than 30% of their budgets for such resources decreased, while those who spend over 30% increased 18%. This may reflect growing maturing in reference program management, as these programs understand what their core competencies are and outsource the rest.

- PARTICIPATION BY SALES. Sales people are getting much more involved in recruiting references (up 14%).

- METRICS. Reference program metrics are tending more toward impact on sales (up 11%) and less on reference quotas (down 6%).

- REFERENCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS. The big change here is that the number of programs tracking reference requests is up a whopping 47%. More programs are also tracking the reference pipeline (up 14%) as well as competitor information (up 10%).

- CUSTOMER PROGRAMS. The number of firms who've implemented other forms of customer programs are up in every area surveyed: User Groups (up 30%), Advisory Boards (up 24%), Online Communities (up 16%) and Executive Councils (up 10%).

- NEW CHALLENGES. The top 5 most important challenges faced by customer reference leaders had three new issues this year: Integrating with Sales, Communicating Program Metrics to Senior Executives, and Applying Social Media Tools.

To purchase the survey results, please contact Cindy at cindyp@customerreferenceforum.com (note that survey results are available free to attendees of the 2008 Customer Reference Forum).

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.