Live Customer References: The Dilemma

“We're beating up our best customers with constant reference requests.”

“Reference coordination is taking way too much time away from selling.”

“Lack of reference availability is slowing down sales.”

“Reference 'hoarding' isn't serving the greater good.”

If you're hearing or experiencing too much of this, you've hit the limits of conventional reference management, that is, satisfying requests for customer references exclusively through live, one-on-one reference calls. Managing the continuous demand for customer references “the way it's always been done” to meet the needs of all parties involved, is no longer achievable, or at least sustainable. Sales always needs more customer references, and earlier in the sales cycle than is typically practical. References push back, for good reason: they have day jobs. And marketing is caught in the middle trying to appease everyone, but with low odds of being successful.

Unconventional Reference Management
A new, creative solution to an age-old problem is required; one that transforms an often unregulated, haphazard, back channel model into a customer leverage system that expedites sales. Our TruPoints solution allows reference program managers and salespeople to allocate just a fraction of the time—minutes versus hours, days or weeks—currently spent on reference-related activities. Trupoints are in-depth, unscripted due diligence interviews chock full of credible, candid customer viewpoints. The meteoric rise of YouTube has validated that we can actually handle, even prefer real to manufactured. Point of Reference has been doing real since 2003. These audio and video recordings are hosted and maintained in our secure online reference center, an integral part of ReferenceStor. Your sales team can now grant prospects immediate access to independently-conducted, intuitively-organized interviews including complete written transcripts. You're on to closing the deal while your competitors are still trying to coordinate the first reference phone call.

For prospects:

• 24/7 reference insight availability
  
  
• Secure, invitation-only access
  
  
• Complete interview transcripts
  
  
• No additional plug-ins required
  
  

For salespeople:

• Intuitive, but sophisticated search interface
  
  
• Delivery of reference interviews to prospects in minutes
  
  
• Event messaging including detailed email alerts following site visits
  
  

For program managers:

• We do the hard work. Minimal time required to build a compelling collection of recorded sales assets.
  
  
• Granular interview categorization by geography, solution set, product, etc.
  
  
• Full reporting capabilities on interview usage activity
  
  

Customer references are only as good as their relevance and usefulness to your prospects. Conditions change on a monthly, if not weekly basis. We address the dynamic nature of customer reference management through our ongoing account review process, and by providing you with comprehensive, intuitive management and ad-hoc reporting capabilities.

Content sources
Customer reference advocacy comes in many forms. We believe unscripted and unrehearsed customer experiences, the literal “voice of the customer,” have the credibility to influence decision makers and reduce live reference calls. As part of our solution we will work with you to build and host a library of reference interviews from a variety of sources including one-on-one interviews, reference forums and a variety of client captured sources categorized by, for instance, industry, solution set, product, geography, etc.

• Our Solutions
• > ReferenceStor™
• > TruPoints™
• > Point Services

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