It originated within Customer Marketing. We have a small Customer Marketing team, over 180 in Marketing and 5,500 employees and growing, and we have 10,000 customers. Before using a reference management tool, we received requests through a Google Form, one-off emails and Slack messages, which quickly became hard to track and manage. We realized we needed to scale. To scale, we created a new model—customer marketing everywhere—which would enable every marketer to be a customer marketer. We have developed various toolkits, such as a case study toolkit which includes an end-to-end process guide, email outreach templates, an interview question guide, a writer’s guide, and a story template to follow. There are also toolkits for speaking engagements, blog posts, video development and more.

Our key stakeholders are primarily within marketing: partner, product, industry, and regional marketing teams. Of the 180 marketers, there are about 100 using the tool (not all groups need access). Additionally, about 25 sales leaders in two business units have access to leverage the tool similarly to marketing. They are focused on driving customer blog content and need a way to manage and track the progress.Marketers are generally the main stakeholders, so we needed buy-in from our Director of Customer Marketing, VP of Corporate Brand and Communications, and final approval from our CMO.

The biggest challenge was the number of requests coming in from various channels. Between the Google Form, Slack messages and email, and each request being sent to a different customer marketer, we needed a central view into the requests and who would be managing the requests.Another pain point was reference overuse. Without the visibility and tracking of references, it was difficult to understand when the last engagement was with a customer and how many activities they recently participated in.The third challenge was activity prioritization. In customer marketing, we're looking at it from a global perspective, whereas our stakeholders from the various go-to-market workstreams are looking at it from their respective roles and responsibilities. They might want a top-tier customer to engage in a blog post, but the customer marketing team wanted to prioritize an analyst interview or a video testimonial or a global event. We needed to think more strategically about our advocates.

Everyone has a customer-obsessed mindset. People include customer advocates in all programs, activities, content, etc., while keeping a customer-first mentality; respecting the customer's time, interest, and story they want to tell.From a program management perspective, adoption was a challenge for the first nine months, and in some areas, a work-in-progress. However, every team across marketing has VoC goals that have directly correlated to adoption. As we’ve partnered with various groups, and hosted multiple training sessions, office hours, training documents, toolkits, and more, it has continued to support our adoption goals and reference practices. Although every team is responsible for driving customer stories, we need guardrails, guidance, and processes to ensure a consistent voice. Now, with a unified view of customer reference activities, we are more unified, strategic, and collaborative as we approach customers to partner on various activities.

Since the launch of ReferenceEdge, I’ve increased my focus on enablement, efficiency and scaling our program. I have decreased the number of external facing programs I manage, increased my focus on internal enablement, and continued to scale our customer reference program. ReferenceEdge has given our team visibility into each customer advocate, has enabled us to be cohesive as we work on various VoC programs, and provides a single source of truth. We complete over 150 reference activities each quarter between case studies, blog posts, speaking engagements, and videos globally. Before our reference program, we could not achieve that scale, it has been a true team effort.

All of the feedback we’ve received has been positive. Our stakeholders and leadership team appreciate tool consolidation and efficiency, and with one cohesive reference process, they can quickly gain insight into the reference pipeline. Additionally, we have created executive-level dashboards, which gives them a better understanding of the current state of our reference database and reference content.

The most valuable aspect of ReferenceEdge is the ability to leverage Salesforce fields in reference searches and reports through access to a tool everyone is familiar with. The reports and dashboards are critical to our success. We have created about 15 different dashboards for the various teams to leverage. And for marketing users, the [reference search] page is helpful for searching for accounts, contacts, and content using the pre-defined filters we’ve put in place which map directly to those go-to-market motions.We are also using the integration with Slack, which is helpful and streamlines our workflow. For admins, whenever a nomination or request comes in, our direct reference team can start a thread on the request before responding to the requestor. Once we respond, the requestor receives a Slack notification. Our organization uses Slack heavily, so it’s nice to have the integration.

We measure internal adoption and external output. For internal adoption, we look at how the database has grown quarter-over-quarter by new contacts, accounts, and nominations. We have a goal every quarter that we are measuring against. For external output, we track completed requests, published content, and speaking engagements.

The level of support we’ve received from our account director is outstanding. We meet regularly to strategize on how we can optimize and tweak various processes to better leverage ReferenceEdge. She has really become an extension of our team and is always very responsive. It’s clear that the entire team is invested in helping us be successful and partnering with us.