| Could you describe your program? | Our customer reference/advocacy program is encapsulated within our Customer and Community Marketing team, which just like our overall reference program is two years old. Our team rolls up to our head of Communications and Content, who then rolls up directly to our VP of Marketing. We’re a team of four people, three of which are dedicated to customer and community marketing and one who leads social media. We support the entire world, one person in Europe and two people in the United States, and we’re storytellers for the company; you know, stories anywhere from putting a logo on our site to a guest blog to short customer spotlights to case studies to selecting, supporting, and prepping anybody who talks about us on any virtual or physical stage across the world. At the same time, that also involves us supporting traditional reference calls and needs for reference proof points.
Mainly for us, our program centers on a lot of internal enablement, so using the long form content we have or the case studies or the conference talks and boiling them down so our sales folks, our go-to-market folks, the people who are talking to anybody out in the market have those references that they can easily put into a slide deck, that they can easily reference on the fly; because it's not just important that we know how to tell stories, we have to make sure that every other person in the company, whether they're GTM or engineering or our executives, have the most applicable reference at any given point. I like to simplify it down and describe our job as helping whatever customer we have internally get from point A to point B faster, and then we let them define what point A and point B are, which depending on the person we are working with internally could be any number of definitions. So, it forces us to remain agile, but also means we get to be selective in what content we work on so that our mighty team of 3 can produce things that have the most bang for our buck across the entire business.
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| Where did the initiative to start the program originate, and why? | I suppose it started when I interviewed with our VP of Marketing, my boss, and our COO who I had to get buy-in from not only to get hired, but for the program itself. But buy-in was all the way up that chain. The company knew this was something that we, as a company, needed to centralize. Before I joined, we had case studies, we had conference talks, we had guest blogs, and other reference content like that, but we didn’t have a centralized team that had identifiable OKRs or the exact person who was thinking about these things 100% of the time.
That person ended up being me, so I was hired to start it. We needed to put structure in place, to lay the groundwork to have this program when we were small. So, when I joined, there were 270 people at the company; we're now over a thousand. So, the investment is very similar to how sales functions invest in early sales methodology. You don't necessarily need to have something like MEDDPICC in place when you only have one hundred people, but it's all about setting the culture and the expectation that this is an ingrained and an important part of who we are and what we do so that we are well-established for the next thousand people who join.
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| Who are your internal stakeholders? | On paper, our stakeholders are the who’s who of GTM leaders (our COO, VP Marketing, VP Sales, etc). But you can’t win hearts and minds with the importance or value of the team by just delivering value to execs. That’s why I’ve always believed our stakeholders as being the entire company. Like I mentioned before, our job is to make it easier for whatever person is asking us for anything to go from point A to point B faster. It means we always look for the context in which the ask is made. For instance, if it's an engineer or developer who's giving a talk at a technical conference and wanting to include a quick example of someone using our stack in the wild, our job is to make sure we have something that is easily available that works for their purposes (you know, highlighting the technical side or perhaps just a slide that has a bunch of logos on it) and not just give them what we would give to a salesperson. The important part here is that we don’t do anything cookie cutter, whether it’s our stories or the way we support our internal customers.
Overall, though, 60 to 70% of the time we work within the go-to-market realm, so we're talking direct sales, SDRs, CSMs, SEs and working in ways that most customer marketing and advocacy folks say is their bread and butter. But that other 30-40% of the time, we’re working on various cross functional projects like working with our COO and VP of Customer Experience to support sessions at our recent Global Kickoff or our PMM organization on proof points for new product launches and enablement, or even our Analyst Relations team on various review programs.
We also have six conference tour stops (spanning 4 continents) that we're working on right now; each one needs at least one speaker. We have our big conference in June where we’ll be featuring 11 external speaker-led sessions. We have a conference in November where this past year we had six customer speakers. We have our Customer Advisory Board and a whole slew of other programs that keep us busy. So, yea, it’s a wide gamut, but it’s pretty fun to run through it all. |
| What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge? | I don't actually know if I had that many. That was the best part about walking into this opportunity. I had done something like this before at a previous company so I came into my time at Grafana Labs thinking 'I'm so excited because I know what not to do first.' I know how I screwed up before, so while I might not know exactly what was right, I certainly know what to do in order to not run into those walls. And one of those things was to make sure I got ReferenceEdge installed, rolled out, and adopted successfully as quickly as possible.
But if I were to pick out one area where I suppose we could say was challenging, I know there really wasn't a formal process for nominations before ReferenceEdge. I mean, it would basically be like "Hey, we have a customer or a user that is willing to speak or otherwise share their story." It'd be kind of ad hoc via Slack or somebody would send an email and, you know, there'd be that. So, there was no formal process and since the beginning, I just pulled up the dashboard, since the day we launched ReferenceEdge, we've had 294 nominations; that includes 152 nominations during our fiscal year that ended in February. |
| Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company's reference practices? | I think the main part is we've operationalized everything. We have a cadence of how you input something into the system. We go through nominations and then we go "Alright, cool, you've nominated them, let's talk about the types of possibilities with this customer." Like I said, we had over 152 nominations last fiscal year and are up to near 30 for this quarter alone, but at the same time our broader team knows that not every nomination that they put in will become a story and they're okay with that because we've set the expectation that these are our leads. And just like how not every lead that a salesperson or SDR connects with turns into a closed won deal, we all know that while our Customer and Community Marketing team will do our due diligence on everyone that comes in, there isn’t that sort of negative feeling like "Oh, I nominated somebody; you haven't done anything with them, so why am I nominating people over and over again?"
Also, our production process is smoother. We have a really great relationship with our Content team and in consultation with them have refined our interview process to make things easier and quicker to get to a final published product. Beyond that, through our monthly cross functional brainstorms, we’ve actually looked at readership, social, and other website data to figure out what type of content we should lean into producing and what perhaps we should give up on. The best part is that we’ve even come up with new forms of content, things that are shorter, more to the point, but filled with all the good nuggets we need to be useful for both our internal and external customers.
The other thing is, as our Customer and Community Marketing team have grown, we’ve put in place a common language and rubric for each one of us determining what lead goes with what type of end content. Credit to our head of EMEA Customer Marketing Gina Lopez as now we can rest assured that no matter who is doing the story qualifying, we’re all looking at things objectively and delivering on the needs of our customers. Further, and to keep ourselves healthy both personally and professionally, we definitely subscribe to the idea of quality over quantity. And how we determine quality is sticking to our belief that we should let data be our guide as to which stories we should prioritize over others. So the way we prioritize, and we say this to anybody we are working with, is actually to look at our open opportunity data and look at where the money is on pace to come from over the next year. That SFDC data allows us to decide, in terms of industry and product, which stories and leads are the references that we need to cultivate in order to help the Sales team close more deals and which ones may have to take the back burner. And then that changes the behavior of the Sales team because then they know if they have an account in this industry with this use case using this product, they’re gonna try to plug that into our team. And so, the quality of those leads ends up getting better, meaning our ability to tell stories that move the needle actually has gotten a lot better since we have launched. |
| Since launch, how has your job changed? | In terms of the way ReferenceEdge is deployed and utilized, I should say it hasn't changed much because this is how I designed the role coming into it, right? The way we have ReferenceEdge designed, deployed, and adopted was the end goal, which was why the first thing I did when I started, I sent an email to you all at Point of Reference saying, "I want to set this up." At the same time, I was pitching ReferenceEdge to our COO, truth be told, I probably pitched him on it when I was interviewing for the role. But, the bigger part here was that this was a tool I knew we needed to put in place in order to get to the goal of centralizing everything, of cutting down the time it took to deliver on reference/content needs, of moving us (as a GTM team) away from going to Slack and asking "Does anybody have a reference for X, Y, and Z or a customer that does this?" and then just sitting there and waiting. So, I wouldn’t necessarily say it changed my role. Instead, I look at it more as ReferenceEdge made my role type of thing.
But if I’m looking at how we’ve set up ReferenceEdge and how it has changed my job, I definitely have a good story to tell there, especially when I look at how I failed at properly setting up and kicking off ReferenceEdge at my previous role. More specifically, I definitely learned that when you launch a program, when you're doing training, when you're getting buy-in, you really only get one bite of the apple. At my previous company, because it was the first time I had ever done anything like this, I was learning on the job. I think I launched, relaunched, whatever you want to call it, ReferenceEdge four times over the span of two years. And each time I did it, we kind of lost the momentum because anyone who was around for each attempt probably asked themselves "Didn't you do this three months ago? Why are we doing this again?" I also knew that having everything; I’m talking in-depth trainings, bite-sized tutorials, and documentation as well as the existing content and referenceable accounts in place on Day 1 was of the utmost importance. Consequently, that’s where I spent my time from the moment we signed our contract in the middle of February to the day we went live on May 1. That is also why I set expectations with our COO, head of Marketing, and head of Sales, with "We might not be producing as many case studies right now as you're used to because we are dedicating our time to making the ReferenceEdge launch the best it can be when we launch it."
In the end, we had this one bite of the apple; we needed to make it right, and it was. When we launched it, we were able to have that full go-to-market team training as well as seven or eight short-form tutorial videos walking through each individual section – how to nominate somebody, how to request a reference, how to send reference content and so on. We also spent time building out content for our various different personas because for us, the SDR team has different permissions than the regular Sales team, so in order to get their buy-in, we needed to make sure we had those trainings ready to go as well. To this day, if somebody's brand new or if somebody just needs a refresher on how to use ReferenceEdge or how to do a specific thing, it's not like I have to send them a 30-minute video; I just send them "Here's a two-minute tutorial; just watch it." And more often than not, their response is something along the lines of "Oh, that's really easy, done." |
| What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership? | I will say one of the best things is when, it was a few weeks back and I had just signed on for the day. I checked into the various different sales channels we have on Slack and some newer salesperson had put out a question like "Does anybody have a reference for 'X'?" And I looked at the thread and one of our SEs actually wrote back, "Hey, you could use ReferenceEdge or just /references in Slack." I think I probably did an embarrassing victory dance and then thought to myself, ‘wow, we did it. Somebody's selling these things internally for us.’
Every time we demo ReferenceEdge, we get the proverbial mind blown…it’s that simple moments. I was talking with our Product Marketing team recently and they were putting together all this enablement for our new fiscal year and they asked "Hey, we have these three sales plays, what are the best references for each sales play?" I said "You know, we actually have all this information in ReferenceEdge for you to find," because we tagged our content by sales play. And now they're using it and sort of cut us out of that loop. And if we’re decreasing the delta between reference question and reference answer for anyone, that’s a feather in our cap.
On a broader ReferenceEdge note, lots of people have never seen something like what we have with the tool in place. And so they're really super excited that we have it in place and even more that they can use it right away and get what they need really quickly.
From a general program perspective, I think they're really stoked that we have all of these different resources. We are up to 124 slides that are public customer references that we have available to them that they can just grab and go. So overall, I think new hires are really impressed with the program, really impressed with the centralization, really impressed with the metrics and business value stories we have for them. But on the ReferenceEdge side, yeah, I wish more people came into the company with "Yeah, I've seen something like this before." Makes me sad that they haven't…
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| What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value most? | From a feature perspective, the thing I value the most is the reference searchability; being able to help salespeople or anybody else for that matter get from point A to point B faster in response to, "Hey, I need a reference for this.” Not necessarily a reference call, but I just need a reference point for 'X.' In prior times, and even to some extent now because some people are still sort of learning, they'll go to Slack and just write "Does anybody have a customer for this?" And then they just sit there and wait, right? They hope somebody helps. And this is how we actually pitch ReferenceEdge when we onboard people. We say "How many people have done this?" Most hands get raised up. And then my response is something to the effect of "How long do you wait? A couple of hours? Well, guess what? In five clicks, you can get this information." And so it’s just the sheer quickness, the sheer centralization of it all that becomes the hook to get people interested and then from there we can show off all the other bells and whistles. For us, those fun features include being able to not only put accounts but also content into ReferenceEdge and tag everything with attributes or keywords, thus allowing all of our team to find the exact thing that they need as opposed to being relegated to the ol “Command+F” technique either in a spreadsheet or on our website.
Beyond the power of ReferenceEdge’s searchability, the other features we heavily rely on are the nominations to help us always have a steady pipeline of references and advocates and the ability to easily upload content (or in our case links to our content) directly into the system. And of course, from a backend managerial perspective, I love the dashboards and reporting that we’re able to do with ReferenceEdge. I have this dashboard that I look at daily that shows me a whole slew of program health metrics, from total nominations, nominations per quarter, how many people have used ReferenceEdge, the amount of content we produced, and even the amount of money in closed won business we’ve affected over time. So, it's super nice, especially working at a company that is centered around dashboarding technology, to be able to have a dashboard that helps track our progress against our quarterly OKRs, keep track of the overall health/usefulness of the system, and finally, see the progress we’ve made throughout the entire history of the program.
Finally, the aspect that is probably the most crucial to getting buy-in from leadership, IT, and our users is that everything about ReferenceEdge is Salesforce native. We don’t have to teach anyone a new interface and we don’t have to require anyone to use a system they aren’t already in just to get a reference or figure out what content they could use. That reduces the barrier to entry and the complexity of continuous use for everyone in the company. And then throw in the fact that we can (and do) utilize the Slack integration and we’ve now made our system native in two of the systems we most rely on as a business.
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| How do you measure program success? | You know, in our line of work and in this economy, this is definitely a question that comes up a lot. Luckily for us, we’re given the freedom to be a bit more abstract in how we measure success, especially as our whole Marketing team adopts the ethos that in any situation it’s not just one thing that causes any one deal to move to the next stage or even close. So who’s to say which touchpoint, which webinar, which virtual or live event, which case study or reference, or even which part of the website led to them moving along. It is a collection of the whole, right? Put that into our context, and our team is not judged on the amount of money that we helped bring in. As an aside, I do like looking at that number as it’s one way to tangibly say look at how much of an affect our work and our team have on the business. I mean, it sounds pretty swanky to say that in the 2+ years our team has been in existence that we’ve affected over $9 million in closed won business. But, on the flipside, I'm not naïve enough to be like "Yes, our team is solely responsible for that amount of money."
So if it’s not the money side that we use to measure success, what is it? That’s pretty basic, my team relies on answering a series of simple questions: Do we produce stories that are valuable to what the Sales team is selling? If yes, then we're successful. Do we help people get from point A to point B faster? If yes, then we're successful. Do we show our customers that we work with, whether it is via case study or putting people on stage or anywhere in between, the respect and give them a good enough time that they want to continue this relationship commercially? If yes, then we are successful.
And anecdotally, I can say for certain that we've seen that. We've seen that people we put up on stage have renewed contracts at higher values. Now again, we can’t claim credit for all that, but we can certainly hang our hats on the fact that we were part of that positive journey that led to a higher lifetime value. |
| How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work? | If you're talking about other vendors in the space, I really have no comparison because I've only ever used Point of Reference, and it's been amazing. I could not do my job without Point of Reference and how y’all help. I think it's a credit to your experience and your awesome team, like I said, I sent the first email on January 19; we got the contract done in less than four weeks and from that point in February, we did everything and went live by May 1. The partnership we had with your technical account director and the account executive was great. They worked with our Salesforce team to get everything we needed in order to deploy it in our sandbox environment and then get it all ready for production. From a data standpoint, they got me all of the import spreadsheet templates that I needed to fill out in order to get all of the existing data we had in one place. Simply put, during that whole pre-production and prep process, you were all great.
And in the years since we went live, it’s been a whole lot more of the same great relationship. I meet every week with my Account Director, Jess, and sometimes, when I'm super busy on other parts of my job and so I haven't really had brain space to think about ReferenceEdge, she would come to our meeting and say something like “Hey, I was thinking about how this type of report would be good,” and then suddenly a lightbulb would go on for me and we’d be off to the races on new reports and dashboards. In fact, that’s how we got started with our conversation about building out custom reports on customer lifetime value as I’m pretty sure we signed on to the meeting and Jess said “Hey, we were talking, we were throwing around ideas within our normal account director meetings and somebody brought up these types of custom reports. Would this be valuable to you?” And the rest, as they say, is history.
The biggest part is, again, I cannot do my job or we cannot do our job without ReferenceEdge; the seamlessness of it, the centralization of it, the fact that it's in Salesforce. I would hesitate to even imagine what we would do without it. But just in case I decide that I want to venture down that rabbit hole of what if, I still have this screenshot of the spreadsheet version of the first reference program I ever designed to remind me how bad it could get. At which point, I snap back into reality and appreciate where we are and where we’re headed with ReferenceEdge going forward. |
When a new client is building a customer reference database for the first time, where do you tell them to start?
