I was hired in January 2021. I had previously managed and helped build out a program at a Microsoft partner, much like the one at CentralSquare.My current boss, the CMO at CentralSquare, was super adamant about having a program to drive these marketing efforts as well as support the Sales team. She had joined CentralSquare six months prior to me, and was in the midst of building out our entire Marketing team from scratch. The program was definitely her idea; she really understood the importance of a program like this, and she had worked with ReferenceEdge in the past, so she was familiar with it. They told me in my interview, ‘Hey, we want you to come start this program; we would use ReferenceEdge.’We've had really good luck here with buy-in. I just think a lot of programs have an issue getting that Executive Leadership team buy-in, and I think it all comes down to relationships for me. That's something I worked so hard on at my old company; I had really close relationships with my Leadership team and I really advocated for myself and it came a lot more natural here just because I had practiced so much over the years.

As far as stakeholders go, we work mainly with our Sales and CSM teams. The Sales team isn't going to lean on you if they don't trust you; they're going to continue to use those pocket references or reach out to people who they have really good relationships with and maybe aren't willing to give up to us. I feel like you have to prove yourself to the Sales team. You can't be ‘too good for that;’ you just have to go into it knowing I have to prove myself to the Sales teambecause I need this trust and symbiotic relationship with them.I would say in the last six to eight months, we've really started leaning heavily on our Services and Support team as well, to learn where our happy customers are. As an added detail, I think we have about 1800 employees, so that was a huge, I don't want to say roadblock; but it definitely was a lot to take on, learning who everyone is within an organization does not come easy, especially when you're working remote. Even today, I had someone say, ‘Hey, you should reach out to the Cloud team and ask them this question,’ and I had no idea who was even on the Cloud team. So, even over the last year and a half, I've continued to learn who people are. I continue to come up with reasons why this program is important to them no matter who they are and what their goal is in this organization. If you give me a happy customer, we're able to sell more of your product which is good for you as a product manager or support person or really anyone, right?Honestly, every single person in this organization is either important to me or important to some process that we're trying to figure out.

The first challenge was that I just don't think things were getting done previously. When I started, the CSMs were managing reference requests. There were two of them managing the reference process, and because of the workload, the reference requests were just sitting for months, oftentimes going unfulfilled. Sales was probably turning around and using a pocket reference just to get what they needed within a limited period of time. I don't think it was the fault of the CSMs, it was just thrown at them. But I think because they didn't have a built-out process or a built-out program, requests just sat a lot.The second challenge was tracking the references. I’ll put a quote around 'tracking;' because itwas done in a Smartsheet and through emails. In my mind, there wasn't appropriate trackinghappening. We didn't know what customers were being used, we didn't know how often they were being used. It was just an email. Someone would get an email saying, ‘I need a reference,’ and they'd throw it in this spreadsheet with the criteria that was needed and then, if someone had time, they would go in and look at it. There weren't due dates, it was sloppy. That spreadsheet probably had a hundred references that were never fulfilled. So, we did some cleanup, and then we moved those that were still applicable into ReferenceEdge.The final challenge was that the health of the references was being tracked in a custom object that was created in Salesforce. We noticed right away that records weren't being updatedregularly. I'm not sure how the reporting worked or how the tracking worked on that. When was I supposed to be updating this? Was it a two-month cadence? Was it a six-month cadence?Depending on what level they were at? And there was a lot of information missing or a lot of information in different places, so not being tracked correctly in Salesforce, and that was makingreference fulfillment basically impossible in my mind. I really don't know how they even did 50% of what they did because it was such a mess.

I think the biggest thing is we have actual processes in place. Prior to go-live, we were able to quickly train our Sales team, migrate our data, and then flip the switch. Now we're able to see what we have going on in the queue, which is super important. And when questions arise, we're able to easily look back and see why we did something, the way that we did, and answer questions concerning why we did something the way we did.Another huge change in my mind is that we are no longer overusing our customers, we're notover asking. You know, if we used them once this month, we can't use them again for another month. That's really helped not only for tracking and reporting, and proving what we are doing, but it's also helping us build relationships with our customers because they're not like, ‘Hey, quit calling us all the time.’The level of trust between our team and the Sales team has also changed. I don't think that was necessarily there before when it came to references, but we have an amazing reference manager who fulfills hundreds of reference requests each month in a timely and organized manner, and I think the relationship that she's been able to build with our Sales team is second to none. That's been important for the health of the program, us moving forward, us continuing to make changes to help our Sales team. We have this super close relationship where we can throw ideas around and talk about things.

As far as reference fulfillment goes, with everything in a single queue, our reference manager knows exactly what needs to be done by when. Reference activity is out of email and now in ReferenceEdge and Salesforce, where we can see exactly what's happening, very different than how things were running before.We have a customer reference dashboard that we use to see what our customers have helped us with, who the top players are in our program; we're able to provide them with some extra love from time to time. We check in with them more often as we build these relationships, that are a lot like friendships. We go onsite sometimes to do videos and case studies or we're at events with these people and it's just nice to be able to know who they are. I can look in my dashboard andsay, ‘Oh, Johnny from XYZ who has done so much for us, he's actually going to be at this event.’ Being able to thank them face-to-face has been great.I want to mention, although we can't really compare what was happening in the past to what we're doing now, with the reporting that we have now, we can see that we have fulfilled over a thousand reference requests in our first 18 months with ReferenceEdge and influenced millions of dollars in revenue. We just know we're making an impact, right?

Lots of good feedback; mostly they just keep allowing us to do what we're doing, so we knowwe're doing a good job. We have really strong relationships with our leadership and ExecutiveLeadership team; they've been impressed by the results we’ve delivered. Having the reports andbeing able to show them proof of our work, it gives them the confidence to push us into new projects with our customers and get us involved wherever they have seen fit, which I think is really cool.ReferenceEdge gives us the ability to prove ourselves and our program. You can't do that with a spreadsheet. They're so proud of us, proud of what we've been able to do. We’ve decided to make this a public-facing program to really prove to customers that we're a big enough organization to have a program like this. This is something our leadership suggested. They asked, ‘Why aren't we talking about this publicly? This doesn't have to be a secret program, you know?’ We want these people to know that they're very important to us.

I would say definitely reporting is the most valuable asset. Again, internally we're able to prove our worth as a team and it's been so cool to watch us grow and be able to quantify that. We can look at it quarter by quarter, and see the times when we're a lot busier and ask, ‘Do we need a second person to help fulfill some of these things?’ And that's really great to see. And we have a great 360 view of what our customers are doing for us.Reference Workspace allows us to see all activity in one place and sort it in different ways, by the deadline or who requested it or opportunity, it just makes our reference manager’s job soeasy. She goes into it every morning. She knows what she needs to get done for the day, and who to reach out to if she has questions. It's such an easy tool to use and it makes her job so seamless.Reference Search is huge for us. The ability to tag what our references are open to speaking about; products or is it cloud; a specific population such as firefighters, EMS, police officers,different cities. There are so many different things that we can track, and all those mapped attributes [meta tags coming from Salesforce fields] are great because we don't have to worryabout updating that information.I've started loading our content into ReferenceEdge and that's more a 'me' thing; so we can reallyfigure out where our gaps are and fill those with new content. I'm not sure our Sales team will beusing it out of ReferenceEdge yet, but being able to tag our content at least I have the ability tofind it super quick, super easy, and can send them a link or the download.

We measure program success by the number of deals we're touching and the number of referenceable contacts we continue to add to our program. So those are the biggest things that we're consistently talking about. We send those numbers out across our company. We talk weekly about what new reference contacts we have, and I think that continues to drive all of the teams, Sales, Services, and Support, to continue to provide us with new contacts. They get little kudos in our weekly newsletter which I would love to think at least 50% of our employees read on a regular basis.We always look at the number of deals we're touching and the ARR. Initially when we started our program, we looked at the contract value, but our company focuses on ARR, so we startedtracking our references by ARR influenced.

In my past job, I was working with our internal team and we had this custom-built application and it was everything we needed at that time. With ReferenceEdge, this drag-and-drop app inSalesforce that I didn't have to spend months or years building out, I was just super impressed with what has been built based on working with hundreds of other customer advocacy and reference professionals to really understand what it takes to be this perfect software. I spent so much time building out the perfect custom-built application that worked for me. Having to spendyears doing it again wasn't feasible here. So, once I saw ReferenceEdge, and how the companycontinues to build it out, taking our suggestions through a Trello board, well, it's just been really great to see.But I personally think the biggest pro to working with Point of Reference has been our accountdirector. We have weekly meetings, which is amazing, but on top of that, we get service from heras needed. She's been there through absolutely every hurdle and success that we've had. She'sbecome a member of our team; she keeps track of us, she checks in with us, she provides software updates, she encourages us to put our requests for new projects on the Trello board. But the biggest thing is that she's filled this void of networking that I don't necessarily always have time for, so talking to her is like networking with other customer advocacy and referenceprofessionals because she hears about all these things all the time from the other organizationsthat she's working with and she can provide us with new ideas based on what other organizations are doing or their experiences. You know, from that standpoint, this has been the best relationship that I've ever had with a vendor. All the hotels I've worked with and all of the events that I've set up, I have not built this sort of relationship. I really believe in the software and she's definitely got me there. I mean, I've loved it from the beginning, but there were some things I felt were missing. As I’ve worked with it and as I continue to grow our program, I just completelyunderstand where Point of Reference has come from with everything that has been done with the software, and I think it's a great application and a great relationship.