I can only speak to what I had heard and what I assumed, that the  initiative started out of a necessity. Previously, the motion was that  if someone needed a reference, they had to fill out a form that went to a Sales Enablement team, which also does other things for our Sales team  to help them during their deals, and this was one part of it, and they  had a spreadsheet and they documented it in there. The volume of which  our requests were coming in were getting higher because our Sales teams  were getting larger, we're a growing company. But also, we needed a way  to better track these and for the reporting functionality of it.  We  didn't know if, let's say I had a reference named Allison and we  continued to use her every time and she was just a terrible reference  for us and then, you know, we're losing all these deals.There was no  reporting that we could do to track that because all we had was an X  beside the reference name for each month the reference was used, and  every time that the Sales Enablement team went to look that up, we just  used Allison again. But, there was no additional opportunity to see ‘Are these references good?  Are they bad?  Did we lose you as a customer?’  It also took out the coaching component for our Sales team of, "Are you  utilizing references? Are you not identifying people that are good at  utilizing references that have a higher close ratio?  Are you  identifying those that are still using references that aren't doing  well?’ It's a coaching opportunity for our Sales team. So, I assume what initiated it was just the magnitude of the requests that were coming in and needing to do some reporting on it and to be able to scale.

Basically, it's Sales, Marketing, Sales Enablement, and that's it. There might be small internal stakeholders as you show in here, like PR and Product. So case in point, just this week someone from our Product team, they're submitting an application for a third-party company to review us and survey people and one aspect of that is providing them references. So of course, I'm the person to come to for references, so those are the kind of one-off requests from other departments. But it's primarily, you know, Sales, Marketing, and Sales Enablement.

When I started, because we hadn't launched ReferenceEdge yet, the reporting visibility wasn't there to understand just how our references were doing or how and if Sales were using them or not.Also, the challenge of the manual aspect, having spreadsheets; that was a big part of it.The third challenge was we wanted to be able to add in a layer of asking the Customer Success Manager (CSM) beforehand. So, we have it set up that when the request comes from a new business for a new business deal, there's a stopgap for approval with either the account owner or the Customer Success Manager who understands the account way better than any of us could and can tell us "Now's not a good time to contact them" or "Yeah, they're okay." So that was a huge opportunity, because the CSMs would get so mad when Sales Enablement would approve or just say, ‘Use Allison as a reference, you're good. It looks like it's the industry you want and it will be good for that opportunity." But if we're not looping in the CSM who's saying "Now's not a good time," that made them angry, too, that their customers were being contacted without their knowledge. So that was a huge challenge that was solved with ReferenceEdge, a big win internally to loop them in as well.

Definitely, the process is more organized with better insights with the reporting, but the added level of, I'm trying to think of the right word for it; when we are bringing in the CSMs, it just looks better that we have the extra checks and balances in place, too, from both sides. From us internally to save face, to not be ‘poking a sleeping bear’ if not necessary, but also from the customer's vantage point, too. If now's not a good time for them, even if it's not an issue with their account, if it's, you know, if the CSM understands that, you know, ‘This is a very busy time of the year for Allison; don't contact her.’ It's just adding a level of personalization that we didn't have in the past.We set the rule that references can't be contacted more than twice, so I think they're noticing a difference with that, that the volume is lower. I think in the spreadsheet, it's hard to really track, so it puts a limitation on references. Also, I set something up this last year that took a lot of time. I worked with a vendor called PFL to automate our gift cards. So, we reward our references each time that they are a reference for us, a $25 gift card each time. Honestly, it took me manually pulling their names each month and sending them gift cards. Now, I am able to automate an integration with PFL so that when a CSM approves of a reference, it triggers an email saying ‘Hey, you're about to potentially get a call about a future customer; here's your gift card in advance.’ So that has been a big game changer. It's not specific to ReferenceEdge, but it works inside it as a timesaver for me when I've set that up. Also, the experience that gives our customers, that instant gratification, to say ahead of time ‘You will be contacted and here's your gift card in advance of getting the call.’I've also put it out there that these customers aren't getting the benefit of the gift card if I don't see that the references are coming through the program. So that's on the stakeholders, and it's funny, because whenever they'll say, ‘I can't find a reference for this’ or ‘I've reached out via chats, you know, for different references,’ and I'm like ‘Cool. Did you put them in the program? Because I'm not giving them the gift card if they're not in there, if I don't see the request.’

Yeah, it saved me significant time. Well, it has saved the Sales Enablement team time; it went from them having to source the references for every single request to not needing to do it at all anymore. They don't source any references. So, that's freed up a lot of time for them. They've been able to fill up that time; it's not a matter of they have excess time, but it was necessary. Workload, absolutely for me. If anything, it maybe added a little bit of work on my part because it's adding the reporting, but what I gain from the reporting far outweighs the fact that I have more time with it. Again, it's not specifically with gift cards, but the gift card and doing the automation, that has saved me probably a couple hours, you know, each month. I've got plenty of other things to do, including trying to get more references into our program.

Leadership has allowed for a lot of opportunities. I've been spotlighted on our Sales all-hands call, which is prime real estate. I mean, we only do all-hands calls once a quarter, so to even have five minutes to tell them about the program and to show them where the training is says a lot about our leaders, because everyone wants to talk on these calls and it's very important because everyone across the whole company is on it.I'm trying to think of a specific sharable quote, I mean, there’s always the standard of "This is neat." "Hey, thanks." "This was easy." "This was quicker than I thought." It's one of those things. When I've had to sit through and walk through anyone the simplicity of a button to find referenceable accounts, and it enables them to filter and seek and make the requests themselves, I think that empowers them, too, and they've mentioned that, because that was something in this, too. They had previously put out the request to Sales Enablement and said ‘Hey, I've got an opportunity in healthcare and the State of California. Whaddya got?’ But they didn’t get to see that list; they just got spouted back to them who the customer, or who the reference would be. So, in this case, it's really enabling them, having the ball in their court where they can have these filters and they can see which customers are available. So, I think that's pretty cool, too.

Being in Salesforce definitely, because that's where sales lives. Any way that we can be living where they are is great. I think another part of that is the access to reporting. Also, the looping in of and having the success and the account owners have a say, that was big. And then for me, being able to track revenue influenced by that. Also, again, the automating of the gift cards is pretty great.Also, nominations. So, we have internal campaigns of saying ‘Whoever gets the most done this week, this month, name the timeline, I'll give gift cards.’ We are doing gift card programs left and right, incentivizing the internal team. But also, we have it integrated into all of our customer marketing and customer advocacy campaigns, so anything I'm already doing in customer advocacy, so user groups, any of our customer exclusive webinars, our community, I'm trying to think of what the other things are, any of the areas we're already reaching out to customers, we're making the ask and sharing about what we call our 'Ambassador Program'. So, they enroll to be an ambassador, a.k.a. reference, as well. So, we've also allowed for our client and success managers to have email signatures that say ‘Enroll in our Ambassador Program’, things of that sort. So, we're trying to do it internally but also cross functionally integrate it into all of our existing customer marketing and customer advocacy initiatives and programs.

I track on a monthly basis revenue influenced, opportunity-to-win ratios, and then the growth of the program membership. Those are the biggest three that I track each month.The reports, we didn't have any reports before. There was no tracking of anything. There was an X beside ‘Allison's’ name on the number of times that we used her in that month. So, the only reporting we had before was how many references we have in our spreadsheet, a.k.a., the program, and how many gift cards you got or how many times, you know, and that's about it. So now there’s so much more visibility, and in advocacy in general, not just the reference program, but in advocacy in general, it's very hard to tie into ROI, and we're rolling up to the Chief Revenue Officer. I think it's important that we align as many of our campaigns and programs as we can to a dollar amount. So, it's pretty huge to show the revenue influenced, the percentage of deals that were influenced, and the number of internal salespeople that we have that are using this program, too.We want to see it tied to revenue. Are they using references more for larger deals, smaller deals? Are they working? Are they not working? And full transparency: We were able to see a trend through one of these reports. We were having a pretty high decline percentage, where the CSMs or the account owners have declined the references, and so currently we’re having a larger conversation of ‘These are people that are part of our reference program, why are you declining? What's going on internally that we're not feeling comfortable allowing them to be a reference?’ So that's something that we would never have been able to see before, to even go to the CSM managers and ask ‘Why is your team declining these? Do we have that many customers that we can't use as a reference that are in our reference program?’ So, it's allowed for those conversations, too.

Point of Reference really helps enable us and empowers us by taking the time and providing us with things that they know we're going to ask for, so recording the videos, all the things that our Sales team was going to need to be successful. And our Account Director, Allie, I can’t say enough amazing things about Allie, where do I even begin? First off, she’s able to bring me up to speed on everything right from the get-go, from day one. She has also been there for all of our training; also provides a lot of training tools that we are able to rebrand for ourselves. She's been amazing and has kind of given me ease of mind in starting through implementation, getting it launched, continuing to grow our program. Actually, she was the one who, when we were doing our reporting, she was the one that helped me notice and helped dig into the data of why we had such a high percentage of declined reference requests. It'd be like ‘Alright, well, that's not good. Let's look into the reasons why.’ She also helped come up with ideas for our internal campaigns and external campaigns to build the references that we have in the program, so she really helped give us some creative ideas for that.