The status of “reference” or even “advocate” fluctuates. Today’s promoter may leave their job, become a detractor, or have engagement parameters that should be respected. The most up-to-date information about customers is in Salesforce; our sellers “live” in Salesforce.When reviewing solutions available in the marketplace, ReferenceEdge stood out as a true Salesforce-native solution. There isn’t any export to a different user interface. There isn’t any restriction to data latency of how current that export is.ReferenceEdge leverages the muscle of Salesforce’s vast data, reporting UI, and overall familiarity for the Salesforce and advocacy managers to accelerate how sellers and advocacy managers want to work.Our prior solution was a standalone product based on periodic batch data exports. The day after an export, we didn’t know if that advocate detail was still accurate.The solution also had a different UI for the salespeople and the advocacy managers and administrators. This created a learning curve for user adoption that doesn’t exist for ReferenceEdge. New salespeople using ReferenceEdge don’t even know it is a separate solution from Salesforce. It has the UI look and feel of Salesforce, and information appears in the familiar Opportunities tab, where salespeople are already spending their time.As Salesforce advocate contact data ebbs and flows and as opportunities close with dollar values, this is reflected in ReferenceEdge’s reporting; other products were challenged to have this seamless existence.

Being Salesforce native is huge. The flexibility to fulfill requests in a peer-to-peer or managed model makes ReferenceEdge scalable. With a large organization including advocates for small deals or multi-million-dollar sales, there are times when an accelerated peer-to-peer program is preferred and times when you want to engage your most recognizable logos without burning them out. An advocacy manager’s insight considers their preferences. ReferenceEdge can accommodate both models.References and advocates are people with a wide variety of preferences. ReferenceEdge considers the advocate’s preferences to ensure they have an experience that aligns with what they want from the program, including how frequently they engage, who they want to engage with, etc.I like the calendaring capabilities of ReferenceEdge in setting up the conversations. When a program scales, allowing a prospect advocates to schedule themselves is excellent as it eliminates the ping-pong emails of other people involved.

Prior focus included wrestling with identifying who was a current advocate and their status. We had multiple methods for salespeople to submit requests. Some used an older reference platform, and others used Salesforce requests. Neither user experience was as intuitive as an advocate request. ReferenceEdge reduced headaches around the advocacy administration, requests, and conversation scheduling elements and allowed the company to better focus on overall engagement and advocacy strategies.

ReferenceEdge is an essential element to the overall tech stack that allows program expansion and immediate insight into seller adoption, requests submitted, revenue influence, and real-time insight into who is a potential referenceadvocate at thismoment.