Opting for Human Engagement Above AI with CABs

by Allison Hughes | Sep 13, 2023 | Customer Marketing | 0 comments

After reading David’s blog post Preserving Humanity in Customer Marketing, I was struck by the parallels in my own work. As a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) consultant, I’ve spent the past two years interviewing customers, executives, and VPs of Product and Product Management about vendor and customer relationships and communication. They had a lot to say about the magic of human connection. David kindly asked me to share my thoughts.

Full disclosure, back in the early 2000s, I was a Point of Reference (PoR) customer. Early on, we saw David and team were solving labor-intensive issues. PoR helped me manage my time at Riverbed, and I had the opportunity to create a global reference team, thanks to the addition of three full-time contractors.

AI Everywhere

The business world is turning to generative AI and all its possibilities. David’s blog summary will be created in ChatGPT and will be added to CRMs and messaging systems. Startups are popping up and implementing CRM and Messaging APIs to offer a solution for faster growth and scale. These systems of workflows and chatbots will send messages to customers after combing through the data. The issue is AI isn’t that sophisticated yet; it won’t understand the context or nuances of the data. Plus, it’s still not easy to capture true data from humans, even with drop down or multi-pick list fields in CRMs.

For all companies, getting sales reps to document discovery calls and purchase reasons is a constant challenge. But this is the core data we need to do our jobs. Sales operations leaders now make purchase reason fields mandatory so a rep can log their opportunity in a CRM. Even with this standard, sales provides bare minimum data because they need to focus on engaging and closing deals with real humans. Sadly, the data is only good if there is more of it or you’re putting tens of thousands of hours into AI machine learning.

While writing my book, I interviewed a Senior Engineering Manager in fintech, and she shared that her company was zealous over data. They effectively used the data sets to make user interface decisions. “In our app, we saw areas of abandonment,” she shared. “We took additional data from our NPS surveys and support tickets and came up with a new design and feature to reduce abandonment. Sadly the product manager didn’t interview customers or even run a focus group. Engineering built the new feature to reduce abandonment and voila, it flopped. They just took the data and realized there wasn’t enough context,” she confided. “The surveys provided only a few sentences of feedback.” She wished that her engineering team would have talked to customers before they spent weekends and nights pushing out the new design and feature.

She approached me for a “bare bones CAB.” Her goal was for her team to talk to customers, ideally before putting in long hours to build a useless feature that didn’t decrease their abandonment rates. It was a refreshing change that an engineering manager wanted to connect with customers, not just resort to a product requirement document. We came up with what I call a “bootstrap CAB” for her to engage with her customers.

Human Connection + Reciprocity

David’s blog knocked the nail on the head when he said, “customer marketing done well is relationship-intensive.” That’s different from labor-intensive, which can be largely solved by practical, intelligent automation. The question in relationship-intensive fields is: How do we deepen, expand, and elevate relationships? Many responses came to mind, but it simply comes down to number one: human connection, and number two: reciprocity.

The one positive of the pandemic was that it was easier to ask a customer to hop on a video conference meeting. Being able to read expressions and gauge if a customer would be open to more than reference activities is impactful. But video conference solutions don’t bring us closer, it’s a vehicle. It’s not how we humans naturally connect.

As customer marketers, before we call a customer reference prospect, we’ll do a Google search and read their latest press release. Next, we will study their LinkedIn profile and check YouTube to see if they’ve done any videos for vendors. This helps us build background and rapport with a customer. We’ll recall that their youngest is off to college in September and ask how they are doing. We show we care and a connection is created.

We then dive deeper. We listen to their deployment stories and offer them a way to be heard, to be seen as technologists, not just represented by Jimmy Fallon’s IT skits from Saturday Night Live. We become protective of our customers, it’s reciprocation in action. We have become their advocate, we want to promote them as thought leaders. The customer begins to understand our role now and wants to reciprocate as well by taking more reference calls or being happy to be listed as a reference for the yearly analyst reports.

Potential Risk & Reward

As a customer marketer, we’re just as protective as account reps are when it comes to our top customers. We’re wedged in the middle; protecting, asking customers last minute to take a call to help win a big deal. This can’t be done with a “chatbot” or AI. I mean you could, but your company’s brand would get a bad rep and customers will feel badly taken care of, and even used. Soon the company’s brand will create the impression that they’re only interested in growing their profits. Their measurements of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) will have the opposite hockey stick effect; they’ll experience churn, and negative G2 reviews from customers will start to pop up. Remember 10+ years ago when NationWide Telco had so many angry customers? It’s not a coincidence that they decided to add a chatbot a few years ago.

Don’t get me wrong, automation is great and needed. I welcome automation for our workflows, prompting us to set up follow-up calls or emails to thank customers, with alerts to remind us to to copy the account rep, customer success manager, and the executive. Automated reports are also helpful and efficient tools. Automation for high touch in general is what we need for customer marketing to scale. It’s what gives us time back to focus on our annual or semi-annual user conferences and Customer Advisory Boards.

AI for our community, when used in the right way, would give us time to focus on the two keys to deepening relationships: connecting in person with more customers and reciprocating. These tools can help us focus on the customer and provide alerts or updates to other teams: the account team, their rep, SE, PS and CSM on how we are in communication with a customer on a video or speaking engagement. That’s when technology works, when we are all on the same page, respecting our customer’s time and keeping the communication going internally about the customer relationship.

Human connection is our mantra, it’s the business of relationships and reciprocity. With the advent of AI, we now have the opportunity to invest more time in human connection. This will open the door for more innovation, more partnerships and more possibilities for mutual reciprocation.

Guest Blogger Bio

Irene Yam

Irene Yam has 24 years in product and customer marketing. Her experience includes leading CABs for Riverbed, Joyent, EMC, and RingCentral, and consulting for companies of all sizes. She won three awards for customer advocacy: the EMC excellence gold award, RingCentral marketing MVP, and strategic alliance MVP. Customer Advisory Boards, Build Deeper Relationships and Validate Strategies, is her first CAB book. Irene graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a B.A. in Asian American Studies, and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Strategic Marketing Management and Digital Marketing executive program. She also has a Culinary Arts degree from the French Culinary Institute and was winner of the 2001 Grand Marnier culinary competition.

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	A CONVERSATION WITH... Colette Chavalia Sr. Customer Marketing Manager Databricks
Could you describe your program?	ReferenceEdge enables the marketing team at Databricks to scale the customer reference program. We leverage ReferenceEdge to track, monitor and report on all reference activities pertaining to marketing (all types except for peer-to-peer references). We have over 180 marketers serving more than 40 different go-to-market motions and strategies—each needing voice-of-the-customer (VoC) content to support the various campaigns, events, programs, messaging, and more. When the Customer Marketing team designed the formal reference program, we wanted to give the rest of the marketing organization the tools, resources and ability to drive their customer content and programming, empowering all marketers to be customer marketers. Before deploying a reference management tool, we used a Google Form and found that most requests were on a first-come, first-served basis. We knew we had to become more strategic, organized, and respectful of customers’ time. The Customer Marketing team needed to have a complete view into each customer—including any advocacy activities in motion and new requests—and couple that with which activities the customer was well-suited for and wanted to participate in to ensure we were offering them the most relevant and beneficial activity for them, and for Databricks. Now, we have everyone on one platform, and each marketer submits a reference request for their various needs; whether a case study, blog post, webinar, PR opportunity, etc. As an example, if eight marketers are looking to use the same customer, the Customer Marketing team processes that information and works with the project owners to either consolidate the requests or prioritize the requested activities, and we look at which activities match the customer’s advocacy preferences. This process gives us the ability to track all activities so we avoid burning out customers and asking too much of any one person or company. After completing each activity, we ensure the output/published content is in ReferenceEdge and tagged appropriately. The Databricks marketing team spans many time zones and regions, so having a centralized tool is imperative. It gives us insight into our global customer base and enables us always to be a customer-first organization
Where did the initiative to start the program originate, and why?	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.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	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.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	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.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company's reference practices?	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 launch, how has your job changed?	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.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	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.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value most?	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.
How do you measure program success?	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.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	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.

	A CONVERSATION WITH... Alyssa Vorhees Principal Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager Paycor
Could you describe your program?	I started my role, it'll be two years in July. When I started, my predecessor had already done all the heavy lifting in trying to set up a reference program, so she had the contract for ReferenceEdge ready to sign or I think already signed. It was handed to me when I started, so ‘Here's Point of Reference; you know, here's your contact, Allie, she's great. Figure out what ReferenceEdge is and let's get this program launched.’ So, we had it ready to start in July of 2021 and then we got it officially launched five months later, right before the holidays. And we initially launched it to a very select number of our Sales teams. We actually dangled a little bit of bait and told people that we would only give them the training if they themselves added references, like, they had to meet a minimum threshold as a team of at least five references from their team to even get access to ReferenceEdge. And honestly, they all had licenses, it didn't matter. We just didn't give them the training on how to use it until they at least had five, because that was the biggest part, we needed to get references in our program. They needed to nominate people to it and we were doing things on our end to nominate to it. So that was how that rolled out. And then by May of this last year, we opened the floodgates to everyone else and wrote off the training from a larger sales call, things like that. I’m the primary person supporting the program, but I also have a Sales Enablement contact who continues to make sure everyone is understanding the program, and our Salesforce admin helps as well. Our stakeholders are Marketing, Sales, and Sales Enablement, and we reside in the Marketing Department. And honestly, ReferenceEdge has made it easy enough that we don’t need a full-time person dedicated to it; it might actually be the smallest portion of my job as far as time goes since ReferenceEdge has been launched—which has been very nice.
Where did the initiative to start the program originate, and why?	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.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	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.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	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.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company's reference practices?	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.’
Since launch, how has your job changed?	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.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	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.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value most?	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.
How do you measure program success?	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.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	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.

	A CONVERSATION WITH... Alec Hulitzky Senior Operations Specialist, Customer Advocacy Seismic
Could you describe your program?	Seismic's Customer Advocacy Program is just coming up on its two-year anniversary, which is exciting. I report into our Director of Customer Advocacy and Engagement and then she reports into our VP of Global Customer Education and Advocacy. Our advocacy program is composed of a few different areas; we put on events as well as offer benefits that nurture, elevate, and also support our overall customer experience. So, what does that look like? Things like user groups and other peer-sharing webinars, online community, early access, and thought leadership opportunities. Those are the different benefits that advocates can get by being in our program. Our program supports several hundred stakeholders across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, and executive leadership as well. And that goes across all of our geo regions—so North America, EMEA and APAC.
Where did the initiative to start the program originate, and why?	I wasn't there at the start of the program, but I have an understanding since we were beginning with the implementation of ReferenceEdge around the time I began on the team. That gave me a sense of what initiatives were behind bringing on ReferenceEdge. To give you a little background, we track many different types of data for our Customer Advocates, such as number of enrollees in our program, topics they're interested in, number of activities they’ve completed, etc. We were taking in a lot of this data and tracking it entirely on spreadsheets and that was eating up a lot of our time. So, from an operational standpoint, we really needed a system that was going to help us with that time that was being consumed as well as improve on efficiencies around how our program tracks data. When our program first launched, we saw a good amount of growth, which is a good problem to have, but more growth equals more data to be maintained—so there was definitely a need to implement a system that could help us out with that.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	I would say our main stakeholders would be the Sales and Events Marketing teams mainly stemming from sales reference and speaker requests that I help fulfill—and that's all taken in through ReferenceEdge. We support Product Marketing with sourcing speakers for their webinars as well as securing customers for case studies, etc. So, anytime that they're looking to set something like that up, we also support that organization through ReferenceEdge. Customer Success as well—things like setting up customer-to-customer calls. If they want to learn a little more about a specific use case, just bounce ideas off of another customer, that's another thing that we help out with. So, I would say Sales, Marketing, and CS are the main three.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	I'd say the first challenge that we were experiencing really was around the time taken to easily search advocate data, as well as calculating the revenue influenced from the activities that were supported by our advocates. Another challenge that we were facing was the fact that we were previously leaning heavily on our most reliable advocates for reference calls, marketing activities, things like that. The problem with that is it could translate to fatigue for the advocates. A third one I would mention is—we were previously using a Google form to intake reference requests. That was not intuitive for our users to follow; it took quite a bit of time for them to get through that form and they'd be jumping from system to system.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company's reference practices?	At a high-growth tech company, change is definitely something that we're used to and try to be prepared for at all times. One thing I've noticed since launch: we've now implemented a new streamlined system to intake requests and fulfill references. So, our request process, it can be initiated directly from a Salesforce opportunity and it's much easier to complete; whereas before we used a Google form. So, the requester would be jumping from system to system and it didn't make a lot of sense. Now, we have a much more streamlined system for intaking those requests. We can see how often advocates are being requested to avoid, like I said, that reference fatigue. And given that all the data lives in and flows through Salesforce, we also save time by leveraging the reporting and the dashboards when pulling our data for our quarterly board report. Our quarterly board reports allow us to showcase all of the awesome stats and things that we've accomplished on a quarter-by-quarter basis to our board based on how our program's performed. So each quarter, we report on several different types of advocate data, whether it be enrollment data from our advocate base, revenue influenced from the activities that they've supported us with, registration and attendee metrics from the events that we put on. These are all important pieces of data for us to report every quarter, obviously, because it goes to the board. That's why we wanted to bring on the platform in the first place, to streamline those processes.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	Before bringing on ReferenceEdge, it was a headache for users to jump from platform to platform to submit a request. It was even more of a headache for someone like myself, someone who's administering the software and intaking these requests. It was pretty chaotic with our initial processes. By bringing on ReferenceEdge and having reporting and dashboards sit in one place, our request form is done straight through Salesforce itself—so these are all things that make it easy to intake a lot of different requests at a high volume. Also, pulling data for the board reports at the end of each quarter is a tall task, and there's a lot of data to pull with a huge need for the data to be accurate, so doing that manually was time-consuming; it took a lot of mental energy. Being able to pull those numbers up now at the snap of a finger is definitely saving me time.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	They have given me lots of good feedback on the new processes we've put in place. I think they understood that it wasn't the most intuitive process before, so it's been great hearing from those stakeholders things like: "Really appreciate those user guides that are dedicated to using ReferenceEdge." We got on top of that change management where they were using one system and now, they have to migrate to a new one, but they still need to get through their day-to-day processes. So, they really appreciate the thoughtfulness around the change management, guiding them through a new system, as well as not having to jump from form to form. They can just go straight from their Salesforce opportunity and submit a request that helps them tee up the best matches for references through filtering. So, the feedback from our internal stakeholders has been good. They really express their gratitude for having a new process that's easy to follow. We're a company where there’s a lot of change happening very fast, and it requires us all to be on our toes and ready for anything. Since our Sales team leans on references as a mechanism to support closing their deals, we really wanted to make sure that our internal stakeholders were ready for that type of change and prepared to still continue with their day-to-day with no headaches. Overall, the buy-in from our stakeholders—whether it be Sales, Marketing, or CS—I've been really pleased with that. Everybody is being very mindful of following the process to submit a reference request. Before, it used to be a lot of just sending out a one-off email to the Advocacy team or shooting me a Slack message directly. The way we look at black market references, it's almost impossible to fully eliminate. There'll always be those couple of reps that go rogue and, if they have personal connections and their own network that they leverage for references, sometimes that's impossible to capture. But now most everybody is following the new process and doing it well, so that’s been great to see.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value most?	I definitely value having better efficiencies. When a sales rep needs to submit a reference request and they're not quite sure who the best reference would be, the first part of the process allows them to take a look at our current advocate enrollment with filters at the top of the page that allow them to narrow down who might be a good fit. So, they can narrow based on what activity the advocate is willing to participate in; they can narrow based on the segment that they work in, as well as the different product offerings that we have. It really lets requesters get granular to surface the right reference. So from my perspective, that cuts down on the time needed; they're able to self-service to help source a reference that works for them. Also, the aspect of being native to Salesforce—that's huge. So, not working across all these different systems. It definitely saves time, the fact that we're under one umbrella. To pull data, we were exclusively working out of spreadsheets and there was a lot of manually counting and doing Excel calculations. Now, we're able to get out from under that and we're seeing a lot of progress there. That's been super valuable—not being so time-bound with serving up those numbers. When it comes to pulling data for our board, there're a lot of numbers and a need to make sure that those numbers are accurate. And it’s definitely hard to track them all easily, so that's what's been great about the dashboard capability in ReferenceEdge. Tammy, our Account Director, was great at helping us set those up and giving us a vision: "Okay, you can customize it this way—you can configure a report so it's showing a quarter-over-quarter basis, but also an all-time basis.” So we were able to get really granular and customize our dashboards based on what our board report requires and it's very appealing-looking; it's very easy to read. Also, to track our requests, we use Ref Workspace. We find it to be really easy on the eyes, an intuitive piece of the platform. When it comes to updating the status of a reference request in real time, RefWorkspace has been really nice to use. Let's say I get a response back from an advocate who I had asked to be a reference, they agree to be a reference, and we know what date the call will be completed. I can easily go in, update that status, and put in the call data including what the call outcome was, when it happened, etc. So RefWorkspace has been really nice to use.
How do you measure program success?	A few different ways. One would be enrollment growth of our advocate community. We track that on both the account side but also the contact side. The Customer Advocacy Program is a high priority for Seismic and we've got a lot of eyes on it to make sure that there’s steady growth and the advocates are getting real value from their participation in general, but also on a quarter-over-quarter basis, and how much growth are we seeing across customers with different products that we offer. ReferenceEdge definitely helps us capture those different areas of growth, which is nice. Also, revenue influenced—that's a big one. It's a way for us to show how legit our program is. Being able to report on impressive revenue influenced numbers shows the impact that we have on getting those active deals over the finish line. So that's a big one. We also track event registration and attendee data. So, the events that we put on are a huge benefit to our customer advocates, allowing them to learn more and enhance their experience. We want to make sure that those events and webinars are relevant, that they're meaningful and helpful. A big indicator of that is the data on registration and attendees; we want to see steady growth.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	It's been great. I've really enjoyed the experience. Everybody I've worked with at Point of Reference has been super available to help, really quick to respond, regardless of the time of day that I reach out, so I always appreciate that. Tammy, our account director, is so great; she's always here for us through any problems that we might be facing, but also helping us reach success. She’s so knowledgeable about the platform, as well as her other customers. So that helps us realize the success that we wanted by bringing on the platform. So it's been a great experience. We really enjoy working with Tammy as well as everybody else at Point of Reference.

	A CONVERSATION WITH... Daniel Palay Senior Manager, Customer Advocacy Grafana Labs
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.

	a conversation with... Jennifer Ells Manager of Customer Advocacy Ceridian
Could you describe your program?	Our reference program resides with the Community and Advocacy team which is part of the Customer Success department. We are a team of two full time professionals and one intern. Our team is responsible for four different systems and programs. The reference program specifically supports our Sales, Marketing, Analyst Relations, Product, and Customer Success teams around the world. Any department that wants to proactively communicate and gain feedback from our current customers often starts with us to narrow the options. We strive for our teams to have a self-sufficient reference program with minimal involvement from us. We are fully deployed in North America and EMEA and are working on APJ right now.
Where did the initiative to start the program originate, and why?	I’m not sure the history of the program. I have been at Ceridian since 2017 working directly with customers as part of our Customer Success team. At that time, the reference program was owned by the Marketing team, but I have no recollection of how we did references prior to launching ReferenceEdge in 2019. In 2020, the reference program was taken out of marketing and moved to the Customer Success team. And the expectations were different. As such, the Community & Advocacy team was created in 2021. My direct leader moved into this role mid-2021, and I joined as reference manager in 2022. We both came in with years and years of customer success experience working directly with customers, understanding their needs and other things from a customer perspective which was a difference from how it was before. Also, because I was on the customer success side, I had worked with Sales a ton, so I had automatic credibility with that team. I knew ReferenceEdge from the CS side, but I had no idea from the Sales side. I didn’t know what they saw or what the gaps were. So, when I came in, the first mandate I gave myself was to stop the bleeding, talk to the Sales team, understand where the reference program was failing them because that's what was causing many downstream impacts. If we can understand the problem from a seller's perspective and solve it, then that will have a trickle-down effect and resolves the several other issues. That's how I discovered we needed to do a relaunch—and it wasn’t a relaunch on the ReferenceEdge technology or functionality, but an internal relaunch—we have new leadership running this program; we're making new training, new splashy stuff, new documentation. It's all new, it's going to run differently, let's move forward.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	I feel as though I have stakeholders from nearly every area of the company. As mentioned before, any department that wants to connect with our customers proactively to gain feedback often starts with us. We have a menu of advocacy opportunities ranging from Sales References Calls to Charter Programs. Sales Reference Calls are most common as there are new Sales happening every day. But we also work directly with Marketing, Analyst Relations, Product, and Customer Success employees.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	I can speak to the top 3 challenges I identified when I came into this role which resulted in an internal relaunch: credibility of the program, accuracy of the data, and user adoption. Previously, the program was being run on points and clicks, and relationships were not being built with stakeholders to achieve credibility. These challenges resulted in inconsistent experiences for the reference contacts and our internal teams. As mentioned, I knew the customer success side of ReferenceEdge but I didn’t know the Sales side. I sat with several people from Sales to better understand the gaps and why they weren’t using the program, mostly around data and lack of responses to requests. We closed some of those gaps, cleaned up a ton of data and relaunched seller training. We also created audits, reports, and dashboards to keep the data clean and show success. From there it was a PR campaign to show the ease of use and value. It was also critical to be highly responsive to requests to regain the credibility. Additionally, we’ve had a lot of new sellers join our company and their previous employer didn’t have a robust reference program. We spent extra time working with them to drive home the process and how different it is from where they came from. Soon we noticed more sellers starting to use the system consistently which resulted in a more cohesive experience for everyone. Last year was very much focused on relaunching the program to the sellers, while this year is focused on customer success and expanding globally.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	Since the relaunch, the program is much more organized, and the experience is more consistent for everyone involved. The biggest change is for our advocates who are getting the recognition they deserve. We use the ReferenceEdge/Influitive integration, and Influitive gives points for doing the references; the points are allocated when the feedback form is submitted. That process is being followed more consistently and we have an audit to ensure they are not missed. We are also rebranding our advocacy program and creating a new program specific to our uber advocates so those in that very top tier, they're going to get special benefits—that would have been really hard to track before because the data wasn't there. We are also rolling out a few other things this year where we're sharing influenced ACV (annual contract value) more readily to our CS team so they can have a call (with an advocate) and simply say "Hey, thank you so much for participating in that reference call—it closed this month." "Because of you, we got a deal closed—you did it—that's amazing!" That wasn’t done before; I never knew how my customer's reference panned out—so, in turn, they never knew either. We're trying to close that loop, too. Reporting on the program success has also become easier. There are less fire drills. Additionally, there is a higher percentage of closed-won deals with references than there was before the relaunch.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	When I first took on the role I was advocating for the program and helping sellers identify references nearly every day. I felt like 75% of my day was spent on the phone with sellers helping them use the system. Since we relaunched, we're able to push them to a location: "This is where the training is; here's the process guide." We're currently creating short videos—we're calling them “FAQ videos,” which are six 30-second videos that show the most asked reference search questions, this will enable us to point the teams to those mini trainings to get the information needed. Now, I probably talk to a seller maybe once a day if it's a busy month-end, quarter-end, something like that—but otherwise, I don't hear from them as often as I did, so I'm able to be more strategic; spend more time focusing on other initiatives like nurturing the accounts, expanding to other regions, and assisting other areas of the business in connecting with our advocates more proactively.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	Prospects want to hear from our current customers. They NEED them to help validate their decision to move forward with us. The fastest, most efficient way to find those happy customers is through our reference program. I’ve had numerous occasions while talking to sellers where they say “this is really easy; I had no idea! I wish my old company had this.” I even had a seller send me a holiday card…in the mail! That’s the impact the program has made for him. The more our Sales team is successful, the more our company can be successful. At Sales kick off this year, our Chief Revenue Officer stood on stage and said, “big things are happening in the Reference Program.” Later, directly to me he said this program is “a hidden gem helping our company be successful.” I think the first thing in getting executive buy-in is understanding what is most important to them, and most of the time it’s listening to their team. If their teams are saying the reference program sucks—the executives aren't going to believe us when we challenge that—we didn't have the data to prove it. I had to roll up my sleeves, talk to sellers multiple times every day. Truly understood their pain points, actioned them and slowly got them to believe. Soon I was able to start reporting positive data while also acknowledging the data behind their sentiment. That data is now driving strategy through KPIs and how we're moving forward. So as much as I like to say "You have to focus on the executives"—which you absolutely must do—you also have to get into the nitty gritty with the people that are using the system, because their feedback goes straight to the top. If they're not getting what they want—you can't change the mind of an executive if their own team is telling them something different.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	As we fully utilize Salesforce, having ReferenceEdge work so seamlessly is essential. Many people don’t know where Salesforce stops and ReferenceEdge starts. That is so important too because it helps us keep the data updated. Another big benefit is the Influitive integration. We're making it almost an onboarding platform for our customers—they get onboarded right away when they sign a contract, understand how to be a good Ceridian customer, and start earning points. This is also where we plant the seed of an advocate journey. The reference search is super important because our prospects need very specific criteria, and we must make sure we have that search criteria available. We use both peer-to-peer and managed processes, which is very important because the size of our customer will determine how our Customer Success team interacts, so the flexibility to accommodate both is wonderful. This also makes the Workspace vital for our setup. It would be impossible to keep track of everything. If you haven’t noticed yet, we are very data-driven so reporting is key. Without metrics, we have no way of identifying our success and areas that need focus. Without having those numbers easy to pull from the system, it would be very difficult.
How do you measure program success?	There are several ways we are measuring success. The one that I really like is what we call the “attachment rate”—it’s the percent of new Sales with references attached to them. That's a good indicator of how well our program is, both how it’s being adopted and how successful it is. The attachment rate is now one of my KPIs. This also validates another thing—how important references, and ReferenceEdge, are to new sales. If 65% of new deals require a reference, we must have someone to manage that as well as a system to help with it—that's a no-brainer! Another way we measure is percentage of book-of-business that's referenceable. This is a CS team KPI. Before, it was an overall number that needed to be referenceable, now we're switching it to a percentage.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	Our Account Director, Tammy, is phenomenal. We speak every week, but she never hesitates to jump on the phone if I need it or follow up with the tech team when required. Our program would NOT be as successful without her! She is a true partner for us. Because I come from her world—I’ve been in customer success for 15 years—I understand what's important in her job and I know what customers need and want from someone in that role. We were able to build a super great working relationship immediately. Her expertise in the system is essential. For us specifically, reporting—I really needed help with that. I never touched reporting in Salesforce before taking this role, it was so valuable to have her—without her, we would not be where we are today; we would not be as successful! I really feel like she's a true partner for us; I feel like she's almost an additional arm of my team, only sitting with Point of Reference.

	a conversation with... Maria Sturgeon Director, Peer Advantage, Customer Advocacy, Global Marketing, Teradata
Would you describe your program?	Peer Advantage is Teradata's global reference program launched back in 2001. We've always reported into global marketing. We support marketing activities and sales references for all global regions. It's a pleasure to work with our salesforce and marketing constituents because they really value the program and appreciate the work we are doing to drive revenue and support our corporate strategy.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	The Peer Advantage program started a couple of years before I joined Teradata. It's the longest-running program within our marketing organization. Our execs and stakeholders have always seen the value in the program because we know that peer-to-peer conversations are consistently the number one or two criteria for selecting a vendor. Analyst research from firms such as Gartner and Forrester has consistently shown that year-over-year. In addition, peers instill trust in the buyer that they are making the right decision.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	The program supports our sales organization with one-to-one calls and meetings at Teradata events and arranging site visits. We also help marketing stakeholders, like our PR team and analyst team, fulfill key media interviews, analyst reviews, and critical analyst evaluations such as the Forrester Waves and the Gartner Magic Quadrants. Within the last two years, we've also expanded into supporting references for our alliance team because they help manage our partners, who also help drive our revenue. I also work closely with our user experience team to help them find customers willing to provide feedback and complete surveys based on our products.
What was the catalyst for moving to ReferenceEdge?	When Teradata decided to switch the CRM system to Salesforce® a few years ago, our homegrown reference management system, which was part of our former CRM system, no longer worked to the capacity needed, mainly due to integration issues. As a result, we were spending lots of time with our help desk trying to understand and resolve the problems, and it became clear we needed a more compatible tool with Salesforce. We also had a member enrollment website where the platform was not being supported anymore, so we needed to switch platforms for that as well. It really made sense to go into a vendor selection process to find a reference management system that met our needs and integrated with our member website and Salesforce.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	Even though our old system was great for many years, we could never successfully track revenue influenced and the opportunities we supported unless we did it manually. Additionally, nominations were completed with a Word document, and we captured all of the profile and attribute data from those nominations into an Excel spreadsheet. Those were the main challenges that we were never able to meet with our prior system—and now we are with ReferenceEdge. Ultimately, it was a very long process in terms of the solutions we looked at and why—and we were able to get a cross-functional team internally with our marketing ops folks, IT, and our Peer team to look at our needs. We put together an extensive user requirements document, and in the end, we just felt that Point of Reference and the ReferenceEdge tool could best deliver what we needed as a program to move forward.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	As a result of launching ReferenceEdge, the main change is that our stakeholders are now able to conduct a little more self-service and research on the best customer for their client or activity since reference search functionality is available. This takes some of the responsibility off us to do the leg work. In addition, the nomination process is automated within ReferenceEdge, and profile data is captured in Salesforce for all of our stakeholders to see. We also worked with our learning team to design learning modules around requesting a reference, nominating a reference, and updating attributes. As a result, we've elevated the overall training experience for our new hires. I'm able to assign a license to the appropriate person and send them some of the training modules simultaneously. Since we have modules available for all aspects of ReferenceEdge, it's easier to get new hires on board with the tool and up to speed with Peer Advantage. Also, since everything now is done in Salesforce and that's the primary system they work with daily, I believe that's very helpful.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	I spend a lot more time on reporting since I can now leverage more automated reports. With so many reports at my fingertips, I am now doing them weekly to make sure we're on track to meet our KPIs. We also just started building out the dashboards, so we hope to increase the visibility at the executive level. My team has spent more time with the account executives, engaging them on how to update attributes of their respective advocate companies. It's been great since there are a lot of new account executives, and we can educate them about Peer Advantage and the supporting processes. We hope to automate the profiles more in the future for them to update but working with the account executives during the last year has been really good for relationship building, especially with COVID and not being able to see them face to face. Since our program is unique in how we reward customers with business rewards, we have a new liability process with corporate finance, so I also spend a lot of time around liability reports. The reporting in ReferenceEdge really, really helps me do that every month.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	We consistently track feedback about Peer Advantage by reaching out to the account executives to make sure that the references fulfilled their part and that the requesting prospect or customer was satisfied. For example, I just received feedback from an account executive who said that Peer Advantage is one of the key tools that he leverages to change perceptions of Teradata. Of course, we get plenty of feedback from customers, too—especially those who attend our webinars. Like last year we did one with our Utah Jazz customer hosting it, and we had one of the attendees say, "the insights were great in helping us with our evaluation process." Obviously, with switching to a new sales tool, you're likely to have pushback from those folks who were used to our previous methods, so it was an education process. ReferenceEdge is really easy to use in terms of submitting a request or nominating a new member company. Often, we do have quick meetings with the account executives or the marketing person completing the request to walk them through it, and after they see it, they're like, "Oh, you're right—it's super easy." I think they do appreciate it being within Salesforce.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	For me, it is definitely the automated reports and the ability to flesh out a complete reference profile: what they’re referenceable for, activities they’re amenable to, etc. As I mentioned, I'm in ReferenceEdge daily and weekly doing reports just because it's become so critical to proving the value of our program. We're constantly refining our reports and attributes as needed to align with our program and corporate goals. When we introduce a new product or solution, we can quickly modify the nomination form to ensure that we know the best references who can speak about that product or solution and that reference search results are accurate when searching on the new solution. Our ability to also track within the profiles if a company is on caution for some reason is also critical in delivering the right reference. For example, last year with COVID, we saw many members not wanting to complete references. With ReferenceEdge, we're able to update that and keep that information accurate as well.
Tell me a little about your use of ReferenceEdge Group Events.	One of the Peer Advantage program's core strengths is organizing webinars and events to leverage a customer. I collaborate with our analyst team to create 1: Many events with a customer, an analyst, and one of our key subject matter experts or executives moderating the session. When COVID changed things, we saw the volume of our one-to-one references going down. However, we knew that our customers had a lot of stories to share, and they were willing to share them, so we organized several webinars throughout the last year. We used the group events functionality in ReferenceEdge to help us record who attended those webinars and then associate opportunities with those webinars to track the revenue influenced. One of the great reasons this program has sustained is that we have members of our program that have been here since 2001. So, even though you constantly have new customers coming in and contacts changing, we do have long-term members who know our team. We have a history with them and can—especially at face-to-face events—organize a lot of unique personal touches with those people to recognize them and know that they're valued and appreciated for all their work. We truly enjoy working with them. We make all the contact with our customers, and that's one of the things that Point of Reference helped us customize. When we send out the contact invite, it goes directly to the customer with a copy to the respective account manager just to keep them in the loop. But again, because this program has been so longstanding and has a very good reputation within Teradata, our account executives really trust us to go directly to that customer to make the ask.
How do you measure program success?	Since program launch, we've measured two KPIs: the volume of references, both sales and marketing, and then new member companies because you continually need new advocates as part of your program. But with the capabilities of ReferenceEdge, we can successfully add revenue influence as one of our KPIs. We're just thrilled to be able to add that in terms of the opportunities we track. It allows us to track several areas; one is total overall Annual Recurring Revenue growth and total contract value, and then we're also able to look at a full funnel for the next 12 months to see what the potential ARR growth will be as well as the potential contract value. It is extremely helpful to see how that changes week to week because I provide a weekly report to management in terms of what is influenced.
How does Point of Reference’s service compare with other vendors with which you’ve worked?	I met Point of Reference’s President, David Sroka, at a conference many, many years ago. He has been very gracious in introducing me to many of my peers in the advocacy world. He knew Teradata was not ready to move into a new customer reference system until we switched our CRM platform, so as soon as I knew that we had to do that, one of my first phone calls was to him to say we definitely wanted to consider Point of Reference as a potential solution. I know that our program has presented some unique requirements for Point of Reference, and I really appreciate the staff's ability to customize where needed. I also appreciate the thought leadership as related to best practices. Our original account director was phenomenal—I mean, just phenomenal—and I greatly appreciated her being assigned to our account. We recently transferred to a new account director, and she jumped right in, quickly adding value without skipping a beat. The staff has just been wonderful. We work with the Point of Reference co-founder and CTO a lot, too. He worked with our web agency when we've had integration issues, mostly API challenges with our website. He is always great at looking at the problem, going back and thinking about the issues involved, and then resolving them. So, the overall experience working with Point of Reference has been great. Another thing I've enjoyed is the virtual user group. I think those are phenomenal in connecting their clients. You always learn a lot from other companies, and other companies may learn from you. I provided some feedback on the last one via the chat feature. I've already had several people reach out to me, mostly to educate them about our rewards program and the business rewards we offer, and how we manage that. It's always great to get a new perspective from a peer in the advocacy industry. So, I appreciate Point of Reference in taking the lead in organizing those, and I look forward to participating in more.

	a conversation with... Jill Fox & Evan Sharp Customer Marketing Manager and Sr. Manager of Customer Success Lever
Would you describe your program?	Jill: We have customers all over the world, so the program is international in scope. Sales and customer success are our primary internal clients, but marketing could use it in the future for panel speakers, events, case studies, and speaker opportunities. We have about 25 reps from our sales organization and about the same from our customer success currently using the program. We mainly use it [ReferenceEdge] for reference calls, but we also have different referenceability types within the system to determine if someone is an appropriate contact for product research or cases studies; if they are currently in our customer advisory board, which we host twice a year; or if they are a candidate to be a part of the advisory board in the future. Evan and I both run the program. We tackle different aspects of it, and then there are two reference managers in Customer Success, focusing on other segments.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	Evan: There has always been a need for customer references at Lever that usually manifests as new business account executives requesting referenceable customers to assist in closing new business sales opportunities. However, when I joined almost five years ago, we didn’t have a formal program in place – those requests just took place over Slack or email, or someone would just walk over and ask one of the CSMs. Shortly after I joined, we set up a slightly more formal process between new business and CS that ran uninterrupted, but with many areas for opportunity over the next several years. In various fits and starts, we wanted to see if software could help alleviate some of the friction that was in the process. And then finally, we got really lucky, and we hired Jill, and Jill picked up the effort to implement software in support of our program. And ReferenceEdge came out on top [in our vendor search] and has been running the program really, really amazingly ever since. So, to answer your question, we’ve always had a reference program, but it didn’t work that well. There have always been issues with it, not the least of which was there was no notion of a true peer-to-peer process, and now we have that, and that alleviates one failure point at the top, which we had previously. And now we have a much more robust and scalable solution in place.
What were your top 3 challenges before launching ReferenceEdge?	Evan: I was sort of the de facto manager of the reference program and so let’s take a moment to consider that I go on PTO, for instance, and I become one point of failure. I wouldn’t be actively managing the program when I wasn’t in the office. Or let’s say my bandwidth was really constrained because I’m working on end of the quarter activities. I didn’t really have enough time to dedicate to what was almost a full-time job. So, I think the single point of failure was one thing. Another big thing we had identified as being problematic was reference fatigue. We tended to hammer on the same happy customers quarter after quarter, year after year. And we didn’t have a good way of tracking the volume of requests we were disproportionately throwing at them, our most valuable customers. So, we were looking to solve the reference fatigue issue. And then – last but not least – I wouldn’t have had a term for this during our evaluation, but the thing that stood out to me was how much more seamless the peer-to-peer process is compared to a managed process. And we have a hybrid model now, but the majority of requests are peer-to-peer, meaning that an Account Executive can make a request directly to a CSM without relying on anyone else to put the customer in front of the prospect. It’s just been fantastic. So, those are the three things that come to mind. Jill: One more thing to add is seeing which contacts are referenceable because, from a marketing perspective, we were trying to source customers to speak on our customer conference panels. We didn’t have a single source of truth of which people we could reach out to. So, having that now in ReferenceEdge is super helpful. When selecting a product to run your program, what attributes were you looking for? Jill: So, when I joined Lever, the team had already evaluated a few different vendors. I came on and got a demo with ReferenceEdge. The two aspects that were very important and impressive to me were the native Salesforce ® aspect, to have everything in one spot because that’s where our CS and sales reps live. And then also the analytics and dashboards. I thought the out-of-the-box solution was already great from my point of view, and the ability then to build out different dashboards and views if our leaders or teams needed to see something different. Evan: Overusing customers was a big-time concern for us. So disproportionately, our largest up-market customers were being requested to provide references. This was natural because they are household names. The larger the customer, the more compelling the reference in many cases, so it was difficult to ask the same people repeatedly. And we didn’t necessarily know if they were being asked repeatedly unless we asked the CSM, when was the last time they did this with their customer? So ReferenceEdge is really solving a real need.
How did you kick off your new program?	Jill: With leadership, we had multiple prep meetings to let them know where we were in implementation and the next steps. We use Confluence internally, which is a way for us to post pages and information. So, we had a Confluence page showing the timeline and all the different steps and meetings that were occurring. And then to our CS and Sales team, we hosted a training on the day we launched. We also had multiple email communication going out in advance of the training to let them know it was coming. And then, we also communicated the nomination campaign spiff the day of the training to let them know it was happening, the deadline, and associated monetary rewards they would get for participating. For example, in terms of continual communication and training, we just ran the [ReferenceEdge] Profile Update Minder feature last week, so there were two email communications to the team about that. In addition, we announced the Q1 spiff yesterday, so that was an email and a Slack communication and Confluence pages associated.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	Evan: Certainly, my perspective is that I have a little bit more time back in my calendar. When I think about how the program has changed from a high-level business standpoint, I think our hope is that we can put reference-influenced dollars in front of stakeholders across the business just to prove that this is a really high-impact initiative. So, one of the big areas where we weren’t doing a great of before was reporting. Now we are able to take a look at the efficacy of the program across the board and by segment – slice and dice that data and go to our cross-functional leaders and prove out the value of the program. Jill: I would just add that there’s been enablement between sales and CS in the peer-to-peer process so they can talk to each other about which references would be appropriate and move forward that way, so, improving that aspect of it.
Since launch, how has your job changed? In other words, how is ReferenceEdge enabling you to do your job better or achieve program goals?	Evan: Basically, all roads led to me, which was a single point of failure, which meant that AEs and AE leaders were following up with me – and honestly, I didn’t have the time to prioritize all of that as a full-time job. Now my responsibilities as a reference manager are more streamlined. I can focus on approving nominations or managed requests for our strategic customers, so I think there has been a significant impact on bandwidth, which is much appreciated. One of our key deliverables for our cross-functional team members is whether we can decrease the time it takes to fulfill a request. And I sense that we’ve been doing that because we’ve eliminated some blockers there. My calendar and my time being one. I think that’s been a big shift and a positive one. That’s where I believe we are today. Time will tell if that continues to be the case, or we can continue to improve there.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	Evan: I got some positive feedback from a Sales leader who said his perception was that the reps on his team were in the process a little more. And we’ve gotten some functionality questions and observations from the team with feedback on ways we can improve the program. For example, I just got a question asking me to make sure people couldn’t request a reference from deactivated clients. Overall, we’re pretty new, and the team is figuring it out. I would expect us to have higher-quality feedback in the next 30 to 60 days Jill: I will say that I’ve gotten questions about using ReferenceEdge and functionality. That at least lets me know that team members are using it. The fact that they have questions and are trying to figure out how to do certain things shows that they’re engaged.
What aspects or features of ReferenceEdge that you are using do you value the most?	Jill: I would say that the out-of-the-box reporting has been very impressive so far. So, we have just met with [our Point of Reference account director] yesterday and reviewed our dashboards. We ran a nomination campaign, right when we launched, for two weeks. So, now I just announced a new Spiff to our CS and Sales teams to encourage them to submit nominations and reference requests and do the profile update minder aspects so that we can keep our data clean and up-to-date. We have not yet announced any external rewards to customers who do reference activities. Historically, we’ve given them gift cards, but we are in the midst of looking at platforms to do gifting, so we aren’t doing anything just yet until we have something formal in place. We have the Slack integration, so, yes, we have that enabled to alert anyone internally in the program of nominations or requests. [Our Point of Reference account director]and I looked at the Program Health Monitor feature very briefly yesterday, but I wouldn’t say we’re using it quite yet.
How do you measure program success?	Jill: We have success metrics and goals set around the number of nominations and the number of requests that come through quarterly. And I don’t think we have a formal pipeline revenue goal yet.
What is your experience with Point of Reference as a vendor?	Jill: We’ve had a great experience with our account director so far. She was with us from the very beginning and helped out a lot during the implementation. Since we’ve launched, she’s super responsive and very knowledgeable. Evan: It’s kind of interesting because I lead a team of customer success managers whose roles are in part very similar to what our [Point of Reference account director]) does. My observation of her working with us is that I feel like she is delivering a rather bespoke and proactive up-market experience for us even though we are a smaller customer. I asked her what segment we were in, and she said we were on the smaller side, which I expected, but we never felt it, which is exactly the type of customer experience that we want to create for our customers. So, we’ve definitely felt well supported by her. I think the thing is that she’s just always available, and she’s very proactive and she drives the agenda, and she has recommendations. So, it’s almost like Customer Success on offense with her, which is definitely our goal. So, it’s been great.

	a conversation with... MaryAnn Rains Customer Advocacy Marketing Manager NAVEX
Could you describe your program?	NAVEX began a customer advocacy program in 2019 when the business scaled to the point where the team needed a proactive, rather than a reactive approach. Customer Advocacy and Events is on the Corporate Marketing team and is comprised of three members. We have key administrative stakeholders in Sales Operations, Business Systems, and our International Marketing team. One of the motivators to start a formal customer reference program was to support the bandwidth of our Sales Operations colleague who was pulling custom reports for sellers upon request. This wasn’t efficient or effective for any party involved. Sales Ops had to change their focus on a dime to prioritize requests, the seller didn’t know if the customer could say yes or would be available, and the customer wasn’t sure what they were saying “yes” to. We transitioned to ReferenceEdge in 2022 to help us run a more data-informed program that’s Salesforce-native to help with adoption. We had a phased approach for our implementation, first training our recruitment stakeholders (Customer Success, Product, Marketing), then onboarding our Sales team.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	We have a robust ecosystem of stakeholders to drive recruitment and adoption throughout the organization. We invested significant time building out relationships around the organization to ensure the program is aligned and mutually beneficial. Sales - Managers & Leaders: reinforcing process and seller accountability - Leadership & Development: training support - Account Executives: reference requesters and nominations from Farmers - Retention Account Managers: connectors to renewing customers - Sales Operations: supports the matching process for managed reference requests - Solution Engineers & Product Specialists: reinforcing the program in conversations with sellers and customer nominations Customer Success - Customer Support Managers: nominate and manage requests for their customers - Professional Services & Implementation: connectors to happy, knowledgeable customers Marketing - Product Marketing: alignment on product strategy - Marketing Analytics: support with dashboards Business Systems: support in configuring ReferenceEdge within Salesforce Product - Product Managers: nominating customers who are a part of Early Adopter Programs or advisory boards
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	1. User Adoption: We had a challenging time getting our requesters to utilize the processes and systems, opting to connect with one another directly to find references instead 2. Seeing Gaps: We didn’t have a good pulse on where we needed to run targeted campaigns to address gaps in our current customer references, making the program reactive to last-minute requests 3. Influenced Revenue: We couldn’t speak to the ROI on our program and efforts
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	ReferenceEdge is very accessible for our stakeholders, given the seamless UX with Salesforce. We benefit from having our CSMs more involved in reviewing and approving reference requests, given their strong relationships with customers. We’re also able to see program activity through reports and dashboards to drive our team’s strategies and build momentum and competition among our users. We’re empowering team managers with curated dashboards so they can see who is using the system with a leaderboard and who isn’t. Thanks to the dashboards, we can also speak to our KPIs and influenced revenue more accurately, which is getting more visibility than we could have imagined prior to implementing.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	Since implementing ReferenceEdge, I’ve had the opportunity to focus my role more on strategy and training to support our Customer Reference Program and other sales supporting activities. Where I used to spend my time reactively responding to requests or pulling data from various sources, I can more easily provide that same level of support for requests while also freeing up time to think and work proactively to strengthen our program. In addition, peers and leaders across Sales and Customer Success see the program as more user-friendly and engrained into our existing processes. As a result, we are now seeing improved success in training and adoption compared to our previous solution, especially when nominating customers for the program.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	A few of the testimonials we’ve received from stakeholders: Retention Manager: “ReferenceEdge allows RAMs to identify happy customers upon renewal, providing Sales with a trusted list of well-vetted references, while delivering world-class customer service. The Customer Reference Program shows how cross-department collaboration drives NAVEX’s success.” CSM: “ReferenceEdge makes it simple to nominate customers with just a few clicks of a button. CSMs can quickly review and approve a reference request from Sales, and I love that we can track how often they’ve been contacted or when they were last utilized. This is a great value add for our collaborative efforts!” Executive Sponsor, Sales: "As executive sponsor for the Customer Reference Program, I see the ReferenceEdge tool as a strategic advantage for selling at NAVEX. There's an immeasurable value behind prospects hearing from their peers that NAVEX is the real deal, in addition to hearing it from us. Using this system in a timely way and sharing nominations to continually fill the reference pipeline that supports all of our deals enables us to remain customer-centric." We recently gave our first presentation on ReferenceEdge to our executive team and they were impressed with the customer-centric approach and dashboards.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	To date, we have dedicated a lot of our time and training to educating our sellers on how they can help fuel our Customer Reference Program through nominations. By utilizing the nomination feature and automated notifications that encourage sellers to consider nominating customers after an opportunity has closed, we’ve seen a drastic increase in the number of nominations received and the quality of nominations. We have not yet run campaigns for nominations, but intend to in the future. By using the Peer-to-Peer capability to enable CSMs to review reference requests, we have not only freed up bandwidth of our Reference Managers but have also strengthened the bridge between our CSMs and AEs. By bringing CSMs into the reference request review, we’re able to more accurately judge and review reference requests by using their deep insight into the customer’s experience. This improvement has been very well received across our leadership as well.
How do you measure program success?	Our formal KPIs are based on influenced revenue and the number of approved nominations. Informally, we’re looking at overall program activity; including the number of nominations submitted, the number of requests submitted, and the average time for reference request completion. We’re in the process of developing our baseline, which will help us be more sophisticated in our success measurement over time.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	We can’t say enough about the implementation process and ongoing support. When looking for a customer reference solution, we were looking for a tool as well as best practices advising. We’re grateful for the responsiveness to inquiries, the support as we learn and our program grows, and best practices guidance to ensure we’re on target. Our account director is incredible! She is so responsive to our questions and shares helpful feedback to keep us progressing. We meet on a weekly basis to ensure we’re utilizing the right features and reports. While implementing, our Business Systems colleague mentioned this was the smoothest implementation she’d experienced, thanks to the very knowledgeable team. We are so thankful for the dedicated support.

	a conversation with... Alyse Chiariello Sr. Director, Customer and Events Marketing NICE InContact
Could you describe your program?	Our program is a global reference program that supports both the sales and marketing organizations in all geographies. I’m the Sr. Director, Customer Events and Marketing and I have two reference managers that roll-up to me. NICE InContact has had a reference program, at least in name, for five or six years.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	Initially, before my time, the program was housed in the Operations department. It was called the Reference Desk. Operations didn’t have the bandwidth to manage the Reference Desk anymore. It was Operations part time focus. Marketing was given the opportunity to own References. Since I had built a Customer Reference Program in the past and had a passion for references, I was asked by the CMO if I would be interested in taking on the program. I jumped at the opportunity to build it from scratch.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	A huge issue was that no one believed in the old Reference program at all. As a result, the program was a shell. The program needed a department to fully focus on making it a success. We had maybe, a couple of dozen customers in the program. The data was a mess: old and unreliable. Everyone did their own thing when it came to finding a reference. Some of our salespeople had never logged into the old reference system. They were using their own networks of contacts. We didn’t have customer content. The program had no real relationship with customers, there weren’t customer advocates.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	Everything. Both our salespeople and marketing believe in the program and know it is there to support them. Everyone knows they are supposed to go through the Customer Reference Program for customer references. We’ve added hundreds of customers to the reference program. We didn’t have much content and now we have global customer content that we can use for advocacy and marketing. We’ve gone from no one using the program to significant user adoption. For our sales references, like reference calls, most of our salespeople now use the peer-to-peer functionality. Our marketing users’ requests often require a more in-depth conversation with the customer, so those needs are handled in a concierge service by our reference managers.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	When I inherited the program and brought it into marketing, I basically ripped out the old program and replaced it. This transition happened at about the same time that we moved from ReferenceStor to ReferenceEdge. In the beginning, my role was building relationships both internally and with customers. I set up QBRs [quarterly business reviews] and created training manuals. I still continue to actively promote the program and do our own PR. To have a successful reference program you have to do internal and external advocacy for the program. Now we have two Reference Managers that handle the day-to-day fulfilling of marketing reference requests, building advocacy, growing the pool of reference-able customers, etc.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	Positive feedback. Sales is happy with the program and Sales leadership supports using the Customer Reference Program for references They see the value and promote it to the sales reps. The CMO is a big supporter. He keeps the program in front of the C-level executives. If someone complains to him that they need a specific type of customer for a reference use, he’ll ask them, “have to gone to the References team? Did you reach out to this group for help?”
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	The P2P [peer-to-peer] reference requests are great. Tracking customer use is very helpful. The new help wizard is a huge plus. It helps people remember how to use ReferenceEdge if they haven’t been in it for a while. The integration with Salesforce helps us keep up to date on our customers.
How do you measure program success?	We use several measurements. We report on the program's growth by both contacts and accounts. Our sales team is broken-out by different segments, so slicing the data by segments helps us to gain support from the segment leaders to get more nominations. We produce various types of customer content to use in sales and marketing initiatives. We track the number of pieces of content created per quarter. We also evaluate where we have gaps in content types or subjects. Just like the pool of reference-able customers, you can never have enough customer content. Then we track bookings with reference use to show the number of references used per request to identify if we are using too many references for an opportunity. Many times, Sales uses additional references than needed. Measuring this element enables us to determine if too many references were used for small deals, where one reference would have been sufficient. Finally, we measure Peer-2-Peer vs. Managed requests. Our goal is to grow the percentage of P2P reference requests. Therefore, we track reference requests by P2P vs. Managed per quarter and evaluate progress toward achieving our goal by comparing year-over-year.
What is your experience with Point of Reference as a vendor?	The support is beyond beautiful. Our account director is wonderful. We’ve had a weekly call with our account director from the start of the program. She helps us in so many ways whether it is how to do something we want to do or how the product works. She has a real gift in translating the technical aspects of ReferenceEdge into something anyone can understand. We couldn’t have this program the way it is if we didn’t have the support.

	a conversation with... Lisa Kaspari Global Customer Reference Program Manager Genesys
Could you describe your program?	The global customer advocacy program supports Genesys’ global Sales organization, including LATAM, APAC, and EMEA. The program itself is located in North America and dare I say Canada because that's where I'm based—but really everything is run out of North America. Today, we operate under Marketing. That is a very recent change; up until about a month ago, we were under Sales Operations. Even though now we reside in Marketing, our sole focus is Sales. Our program lives in Salesforce because everything lives in Salesforce. Our sales team lives in Salesforce, and that's where ReferenceEdge lives, which is awesome from my point of view. Our program offers three different paths that our sales team can take to find and request a reference. The easiest path is through the peer-to-peer request feature in ReferenceEdge, where the account executive who owns the reference relationship solely manages the request. Nine times out of 10 times, I do not get involved in those. It's the second path that I get involved in; those trickier, hard-to-find, one-off references for which you really don't have a big pool; you might not have any. So those are the ones that I get pulled into. We then have the third path for when executive advocates are needed. Our Customer Engagement Team manages this type of reference request. Their responsibility is to foster the relationships that we have with our C-level contacts. So, our program goes from the simplest—peer-to-peer—all the way up to managing those C-level relationships. And they all factor into what we put into ReferenceEdge.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	As far as our focus, it’s Sales. We also have stakeholders within Marketing—PR, analyst relations; and the RFP team. For example, the RFP team itself does not use ReferenceEdge, as we made it the responsibility of the account executive to find references for RFPs. If they can’t find what they need through a Reference Search, the RFP team can come to the reference team, and we will work together.
What were your top challenges before ReferenceEdge?	Well, one major challenge was identifying which accounts we could reach out to at any given time, and prior to ReferenceEdge, things were housed in Excel files. We all know how quickly Excel files go out of date. You keep references in your back pocket and one day, 'Oh, this company's no longer a customer!?' I was still seeing that back in 2016 when I first joined in this role, and I said, 'Wait a second—why do you have an Excel file when we have this really awesome tool that's in Salesforce based on information that account executives and the Sales teams put into Salesforce?' People were like, 'Oh, well, we don't know how accurate it is.' I said, 'Well, it's as accurate as the information you put in. And more accurate than that spreadsheet—just sayin.' The information in ReferenceEdge is continually updated. The information that's there is relevant, and it's current.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	First, we no longer use spreadsheets that become out of date quickly. The filters within Reference Search allow us to customize each search and provide the current references at the time of the request. We now have a single source of truth for reference information company-wide. And, of course, better reporting capabilities with standard reports through ReferenceEdge, which allows us to report on various factors such as revenue influenced by reference activity.
Since the launch, how has your job changed?	When I first joined, my responsibility was really to maintain the tool—so managing the information that was in ReferenceEdge and focusing on the data that the account executives see. Now, my role is more strategic. The majority of reference requests are peer-to-peer, which allows me to focus on getting new accounts into the reference program to help take the burden off of those customers that are the “go to” accounts for everyone. It also allows me to help with the unique reference requests as well.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	We have the buy-in all the way up to my VP level. Their thinking is, 'Yeah, this is it—ReferenceEdge houses our reference information.' So, when anyone, anywhere in the company, looks for reference material, this is where they find it, and this is the team they come to; they come to the reference team. I know the sales leadership—they get it as well. The tool works for them. I jump on weekly sales calls just as a friendly reminder, 'Hey, remember, the reference team is here for you. You know, we have this tool. We get you're busy; we're here to help you.' When a request comes in, and an account executive says "Hey, I'm looking for this third-party integration", I can say, "You know what? I have this, this, and this for you. And guess what? Two of them are in the tool. So, I'm now going to walk you through how to find this yourself.” They’re hesitant at first: “Oh, but I've never done it before." I tell them, “It's okay. It's easy. Let me walk you through it." And then realize, "Oh, it actually is easy." I use these opportunities to foster relationships with the account executives.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	Beyond the peer-to-peer request feature, another unique point is the Influitive integration with ReferenceEdge we’ve had since 2015. I'm very happy to say that the custom-built API that we've had starting in 2015 is now a standard integration within Influitive which allows transparency to our advocates as well as to our sales team. That's a pretty exciting integration for us because we use a points system for advocates. If you do a reference activity for us, you earn points, and we're always being asked: 'How many points do I have?' Having Influitive integrated completely to ReferenceEdge, there's no having to do anything twice. When it happens on one side, it happens on the other side. For our users, having no additional logins or credentials is key to adoption—everybody's in Salesforce; nobody wants to have to remember another login; nobody wants to have to click another window when they already have something open. The out-of-the-box reporting is awesome. For me, Salesforce reporting is complicated; I still have a big learning curve. But having those out-of-the-box reports is terrific. I can see the last active date on a specific reference profile and tie it back to revenue or see how many peer-to-peer versus managed requests we have and all that stuff. Another benefit is that ReferenceEdge is entirely scalable. We went through a pretty big acquisition in late 2016. ReferenceEdge was able to scale with our bigger sales team as well as increased reference accounts. I was very excited to see that we could scale, and it really wasn't painful; it just happened. I have tell you, the mapped attributes—100% valuable. It could not be easier to go in and see, 'Hey, there's a new picklist field I could use in the Search function. Oh, my goodness. Mapped—done.'
How do you measure program success?	Success is definitely assessed by the company in terms of revenue influenced. We measure how many wins have reference activity tied to them. Personally, I look at how many peer-to-peer requests come in that I didn't have to support. It keeps growing each year. Another thing that we're tracking this year is the number of [reference request] emails that go out—when we see someone send a mass email to All Sales, 'Hey, I'm looking for a reference,' and I think, 'Did you really just send a mass email asking for a reference? Are you new? Get to training!' Everybody's set in their ways sometimes. I know learning new software, whether it be Salesforce or changes to Word or Excel, some people don't take to the change. So, when we see the reduction in those types of emails, that's also a success.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	My account director is awesome. Every day, she goes above and beyond. When I send her those wacky questions where I think, 'I feel I should know this, but I'm going to ask it anyway.' She'll never come back and say, 'Oh, well, on page 20 of the user guide…' No, she gives me the answer, she gives me a screenshot—it's awesome. I have worked with the executive team for different things, most recently related to our integration with Influitive. The team, as a whole, is phenomenal. I've said this many times, and I'll keep saying it, that they're not just a vendor; they're really a partner. And you know, my success is their success is my success again when I suggest a product enhancement and they're like 'Yeah, that's pretty cool,' and then it makes it into a release. They listen—it's awesome. Honestly, sometimes, even when a situation isn't a ReferenceEdge issue, they still step up and provide suggestions. They might say, “Did you think of looking at this or looking at that?" And you know what? I hadn't, because Salesforce is huge. They help me, when a technical situation comes up, they put it into terms that I understand so then when I need to go to a Salesforce admin, I can ask intelligent questions. And not very many vendors will do that—if any. My experience with other vendors has been, "Oh, well, sorry—we don't handle that." The fact that Point of Reference is there to support us is phenomenal.
What are your future plans?	We're always looking for 'How do we make it easy? How can we make it easier for our sales team?' Providing the best tools for Sales to have easy access to success stories, to the database, to be able to sell and sell quickly. That’s our program in a nutshell. We're turning on ReferenceEdge content functionality within the latter half of this year, and really, truly giving our account executives that one-stop-shop. We are creating Reference content packages for use in Sales presentations. They will include talk tracks and links to any case studies or videos we may have with that particular customer. Our company-wide content is housed in Seismic today, and there is a lot of information to sort through. Sometimes all that is needed is the story of why an account chose Genesys. This content will give that information to the AEs through a platform they are in every day. By using the reference content feature of ReferenceEdge, we will be able to set review dates for each piece of content. This will allow us to keep the content current. We are also able to control if we need to pull a piece of content based on the customer’s reference status. In 2020, we are looking at doing more with ReferenceEdge through the Salesforce mobile app. It hasn't been our focus, but I think once we get past the content initiative, I think the adoption of the mobile app is just going to skyrocket. Then they’ll have the tool at their fingertips anywhere.

	a conversation with... Allyson Crowell Evidence & Editorial Group Lead, Brand Strategy Blackbaud
Could you describe your program?	Our reference program originated around 2013 and has gone through a few changes over the years. I've been managing the Customer Evidence & Advocacy team for a little over a year. We are part of the Brand Strategy team within Corporate Marketing at Blackbaud. Customer Evidence & Advocacy covers three distinct components: references, champions (advocate hub), and customer stories. We have customers who participate in all three areas, and some who participate in only one. Our reference customers tend to be more senior in their careers. Our champions tend to be more mid-career, looking to connect with other users—but there is a lot of overlap.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Our larger teams serve the entire organization, so we'll get requests from sales team members, product marketers, and customer success managers—it really runs the gamut of our colleagues who are requesting different types of customer evidence and advocacy, but references specifically are a sales-driven need. We have several hundred active ReferenceEdge licenses for our sales teams.
What’s a big focus in your references program right now?	In recent years, one of Blackbaud's big initiatives is to ensure our advocates' happiness and express our gratitude every time they participate in an activity. That's something that our team feels passionately about. Part of that standard of excellence means that we track our references and don't overuse them; we always abide by the cadence they've set and express how much we appreciate them every time.
Why did you decide to move to a new platform?	We had some dissatisfaction with our previous reference platform because it made it more difficult to achieve those goals. Our director was steering that ship to look at new vendors and partner with IT and others within corporate marketing to look at what it would take to move to a new platform.
What were your top challenges before ReferenceEdge?	Reference data health was number one. It was critical for us to have a reference platform where customer updates were seamlessly integrated into the system and didn't require a big manual effort. This capability was crucial to save our team significant time and effort and ensure that the platform had our stakeholders' confidence. Number two was the platform's reliability—the old platform was kind of glitchy; there were little intermittent outages of different capabilities or functionalities, and we wouldn't have clear answers as to why. The third pain point for us was program reporting. The senior references manager would spend hours manually sifting through our old platform for any comprehensive reporting.
Tell me a little about the transition to ReferenceEdge.	We decided to go with ReferenceEdge toward the end of 2019. We started the transition in February of 2020—and as you know, everything changed in March when our entire company went remote. Quite honestly, it was the perfect storm to do a platform migration under these circumstances. We'd already set a pretty aggressive timeline that involved departments across Blackbaud to pull it off, including different teams within corporate marketing to IT to procurement, and, of course, the buy-in of sales and sales enablement. But Blackbaud really values our customers who serve as references, and ensuring we had the right platform to serve them was a cross-organizational priority – so, with a big team contributing, we got the job done! We officially launched ReferenceEdge on May 8, 2020, right in the middle of the chaos, but it was seamless. I credit our Account Director for her advocacy and ensuring we got to the finish line in the best way possible.
How did you launch ReferenceEdge internally?	We were really thoughtful about how we approached the launch, in terms of socializing the program to the company. We convened this group of high performing sellers who hadn’t previously been significant users of our reference program and invited them as our beta testers. While we were finalizing the migration, we invited them to test ReferenceEdge and provide feedback. We incorporated that feedback into the rollout, which I think was very effective in spreading the good word. These stakeholders were able to credibly share with their own teams, "Hey, the customer evidence team is collaborating with us and meeting our needs. We have a common goal here." Our Point of Reference Account Director was fantastic, because she attended these sessions and answered any questions that my team wouldn't have had the background to answer. We had the opportunity for a lot of facetime with sales and to solicit some suggestions from them. They also had to take a mandatory seven-minute training with us on how to use ReferenceEdge, then got a license. We joined a lot of all-hands meetings and sales enablement meetings. The awareness skyrocketed, and it was just a great opportunity for us to share what our program could help them achieve. The people who used it were seeing great results, and so we had the opportunity to socialize with a message of "Look what your hyper-successful colleagues are doing—let us help you as well."
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	Our sales team is consistently using the platform rather than touching off email chains where they're just asking their colleagues directly for help. Making sure all reference requests flow through the platform is crucial to ensuring that we demonstrate care for our customers and ensure we don't call the same ones all the time and make things smoother and easier for sales. By working with our team and within ReferenceEdge, we can track usage very closely and honor our customers' requests in terms of how frequently they're contacted and ensure that we're thanking them. We're using the nominations capability, and we love that. That is definitely a huge win for us. It makes nominating customers to be in the reference program a lot easier. We can guide our colleagues in sales by saying, "You can make a nomination directly from the contact, and it'll come straight to us." It makes it easy to receive and track them because the process is a lot more seamless and takes out a lot of manual work.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	It's been really good. Overall, we've just had great feedback, and, honestly, had no complaints about it. Our team has received a lot more outreach from salespeople wanting to partner to find a specific reference. We provided a little synopsis of the program around the launch date, and the response was very enthusiastic, that this was a great move. So, I would say that it was very well-received. It also earned a lot of visibility for our team. We're a pretty lean team, but we play an important role in the company, and so having that visibility as a result of this change was great for us.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	Having everything in one spot and connected to our CRM is really nice. We're still getting familiar with ReferenceEdge, because we are less than a quarter in. Nonetheless, I think our experience is much better [compared to the previous solution], whether it is the time spent reporting or providing specific data quickly. I think there's a lot less left to the imagination because it’s real-time and native to Salesforce, which is the platform we use to manage our sales process. And that’s what you need."
How do you measure program success?	The metrics that we track focus the number of references provided on a month-to-month basis. We measure the growth quarterly, and we report that out to our sales teams and our leadership —then we track annually and set goals around that. Included within those reports are the pipeline influenced and also the influence on closed deals. We also track the number of references in our program. We're always trying to recruit, especially in what we would call 'gap areas.' If we have a new solution that launches, it would be a priority for us to recruit new references in that area. Alternatively, if we are noticing that we're getting a lot more reference requests for a particular product, we would definitely want to increase the numbers there to prevent asking the same people too often. So, those are all metrics that we track and report within corporate marketing on a monthly basis. Then we report to sales the number of references provided, pipeline influence, and influence on closed deals on a quarterly basis.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	You know, I think everybody uses the term 'partner,' but it's so true in this case. We have this weekly call with our Account Director. Doing this migration during Covid-19 and the height of the chaos, it was so nice to have this weekly contact with her. What I appreciated about her is her honesty and dedication to us. If she didn't know the answer, she never pretended she did. She is really great about saying, "I'm not sure but let me talk to the person who's the subject matter expert and get back with you." She always gotten back very quickly. And I think that is a real testament to a true partnership—when you can say, "That's not my area of expertise, but I will find out for you." She is always really receptive to our concerns and makes great suggestions on what might be next for us in terms of "Hey, you know, let's talk about Lead Finder" because that was high on our list before we jumped in, and then you get caught in the weeds. And she's great about surfacing things that are going to be important to us moving forward.
What are the next steps for your program?	Our Account Director has been working with us on our dashboards, and it's been great, so we're looking forward to getting more familiar and comfortable with doing that on our own. We are planning to integrate Gainsight because we know that the data from ReferenceEdge will be invaluable to our colleagues in customer success—and they just let me know this week that they've been pulling in the data. We use Influitive's AdvocateHub for our Champions program and are working on that integration as well. It'll be great to have those two systems integrated so we can see the overlap and unlock all of those capabilities. We are also getting ready to start using the Reference Lead Finder capabilities.

	a conversation with... Liv Schichtel Customer Marketing Manager AvidXchange, Inc.
Could you describe your program?	The customer Reference Program is part of our marketing department. My title is Customer Marketing Manager, and I handle our ReferenceEdge program, our customer community, and our customer story writing. AvidXchange works with real estate, construction, HOAs, and other vertical markets to help automate their payments and accounts payable. We sell different solutions to make it easier and more seamless when they're making payments and processing invoices. So, our references have to address those specific verticals and products.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	The groups who use ReferenceEdge and or customer references include Sales, Product Marketing, our PR and social media team, and other various departments. Our Customer Success or relationship management people are also deeply involved.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	Our sales team was pocketing their best customers in their “little black books,” which they went to whenever their prospective customers needed a reference, not really wanting to share them for fear that their contacts would get overused. We didn't really know how often customers were being used or if they were being used at all. We couldn't see if salespeople were actually even contacting these references that they pulled. It was a hot mess.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	Over the last year or so, references have been a very hot topic at AvidXchange. There's just been such a need for them across the board. I was hired specifically to get ReferenceEdge and customer marketing off the ground. I've only been here for a year, but our company has had ReferenceEdge for 4-5 years. Unfortunately, nobody truly owned it; it was just sitting there. I think there were waves when people would put references in the system, but then it would just kind of sit there. Neither the references nor ReferenceEdge was being used effectively. That history is to explain that this last year has been about starting from the ground up to build the customer data and educate the reference users. We had to meet with the sales team and educate them on how to use ReferenceEdge. Then we met with our customer success team, who are the ones approving and maintaining relationships with those references. We put rules in place to incentivize customer success to put references in and remove old contacts from ReferenceEdge continually. They are now keeping that pool fresh and current so that whenever a salesperson dips into ReferenceEdge, they're not just coming to the same exact references that they saw last time; there're always new ones available. ReferenceEdge wasn’t being used a year ago. Now Sales, Customer Success, PR, and other teams are using it—and it isn’t just me working in the system.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	My job's changed a lot. I don't have to be in ReferenceEdge or involved with finding references as much. I'm also doing less data entry because our customer success staff is now coming in to make sure that our reference contacts are updated. Going forward, ideally, we're not going to see as many cases where I need to be involved. Part of this change results from training sales on how that they can find references for themselves, and they don't have to click the button to ask for help from me. Educating them on how to use the system for themselves has made my job a little bit easier.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	The leadership is constantly telling me how important this program is. Since I've gotten here, it's been easy to get executive and higher-level backing, so that's been a blessing. When I first started, I met with a lot of the sales leaders and they essentially said, "You got passed a hot potato because ReferenceEdge is complicated to work with." They were nervous that it would distract their team. Then, they realized what ReferenceEdge would actually do that for them, and so it's been cool to see how supportive people have become of it.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	I definitely love the reporting and the dashboards; they're extremely helpful. We have gamified the customer success team's incentive to nominate references. We’re able to pull a report or a dashboard easily—like their leaderboard—to see who's in the lead for the number of accounts they've put in per quarter. I also like the peer-to-peer request management a lot because it's pretty intuitive, reference requests go straight to the customer success manager for approval and I typically don’t have to intervene.
How do you measure program success?	When I came on board, our biggest goal was to get as many contacts and accounts into ReferenceEdge as possible. So, last year I was getting measured on upping the number of references in the program in general. I think we probably had maybe 150 contacts in ReferenceEdge when I joined, and we more than doubled that number this last year. We’re now measuring on revenue, or to put this in easier terms, closed/won opportunities—how many of those deals had a reference attached. Where we want to take the program this year is more about how many people are using it. We'll be tracking Sales, and other customer facing teams that actively use the references that we're collecting. Something else that's important to point out is that customer marketing is not a one-way street. We don't want just to be using references to close deals. Yes, that's a piece of it, but it's also to make sure that we're taking care of our customers. These are our happiest customers and biggest advocates, and so we want to make sure that we're thanking and rewarding them accordingly as well. Our reference contacts are real people, and they enjoy the service that we're providing, and so we want to acknowledge that and their participation. The functionality within ReferenceEdge has been awesome to help us do that. There's a place where we can track how often somebody's being used as a reference and then be able to reward them accordingly, whether it be with a swag gift or a gift card or just a fun surprise gift. It's just nice being able to celebrate them and surprise them.
How does Point of Reference service compare with other vendors with whom you work?	It's been amazing. I would do anything for our Account Director--she's the easiest person to work with. I've had a lot of other customer success managers on other platforms that I've used who haven’t been responsive—one just completely ditched me and sent me to their support page on their website and a generic email. With Point of Reference I meet with my account director twice a month and it's just very easy. She responds to emails so quickly. She'll jump on a phone call whenever I need her. I don't think I could have done a lot of what we've been able to do with ReferenceEdge if I didn't have the support from them. Probably my favorite part about having ReferenceEdge in general is their customer service.

	a conversation with... Sandi Montour Senior Customer Program Manager Mitel
Would you describe your program?	The Mitel global customer reference program currently resides within the sales enablement team in marketing. For the past nearly four years, I've been administrating our customer reference program. Our global program supports all products and geographies, including the Americas, EMEA and APAC. ReferenceEdge is the software tool that tracks and manages the overarching, strategic program, called the Mitel Ambassador Program. It’s in four languages—English, French, German, and Spanish—and provides public-facing information on the benefits and process.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	The initiative started as a massive data integrity project with the reference system that ShoreTel had at the time. With the Mitel acquisition, the team took a fresh look at all of our systems, including our customer reference database. We considered the options and chose to replace the former system with ReferenceEdge, primarily because it’s a Salesforce native application. Since I was a Point of Reference customer for four years at a previous organization, moving to ReferenceEdge felt very comfortable – both with the technology and the business relationship. For the ReferenceEdge launch with the legacy part of our business, we cleaned up the data, decided what would be moved to ReferenceEdge and what fields to map to. Those stakeholders were relatively familiar with the concept of a customer reference database system and just needed to learn how to use the tool, which had a renewed sense of trust and excitement because of that data clean-up project. For the other part of the business, the legacy Mitel part, having a customer reference database system was brand new and very exciting. Internal surveys and feedback had shown that finding a reference was a top pain point for sales. Having a tool to solve that pain point was a big leap forward.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Our stakeholders include sales, customer success, executives, training, product marketing, field marketing, brand and corporate marketing, user groups, PR, AR, and IR, product trials, and the RFP and activations teams.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	The problems across legacy ShoreTel and Mitel were ultimately the same: no metrics, no central hub for all information and activities, and no scalability.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	There's a greatly improved understanding of who our reference customers are and what they're doing with us and for us. We’ve seen a decrease in that scramble for references, especially for new salespeople who may not yet have a complete understanding of our customers. There's improved coordination amongst departments, like with the RFP team, product trials and the activations team. It has also increased our value to partners as an additional way for us to collaborate and help each other.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	Based on our self-service model with sales and customer success managers owning the reference process, my role is to manage the customer reference system and the program framework, training and tools to support it. For example, I’ve created customized how-to documents, videos and a learning management system course. This also includes my favorite practice of kaizen, which is the concept of continuous improvement. By connecting with and listening to my internal customers – primarily sales, customer success and marketing – and through the great insights of our Point of Reference Account Director and the constant innovation of Point of Reference, we’re always looking for – and implementing – ways to make the system serve our stakeholders even better. Our model also allows me to strategically develop and manage other programs such as the win reports and lead other special customer and partner-related projects.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	There have been a lot of positive responses. A colleague in content marketing said, "I love how you are bringing structure to this very important part of our business." Also, a territory account manager, wrote, "Thank you for providing me an overview of ReferenceEdge last week. It was super-informative and helped me understand how powerful ReferenceEdge truly is. As many of our prospects usually ask for industry, size, location, and product-specific references, this tool is very efficient, easy to use, and will be a competitive advantage. In my career, I have not seen a reference tool like ReferenceEdge." And, after I met with a sales team and sent a follow-up email with resources, a sales vice president said, "I just happened to be on the phone with a salesperson when you sent this. She has one that should close this quarter and will be a nice success story. One cool thing about it is that she was able to move them forward based on references from our reference program." Based on the reports I send to leadership every month, they love seeing the increase in program adoption and the objective, hard data. In essence, the program adoption equates to more opportunities to showcase our customer’s success and our ability to quickly match our customers to the reference activities that are of interest to them. It’s the quintessential win-win. Leadership also appreciates the decrease in those urgent emails trying to find a reference, and the more efficient and focused process via ReferenceEdge.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	First, that it's a native application to Salesforce, so there isn't an additional or different login. We meet sales, our key internal customers, where they already are. Another one is the Gainsight integration. We’ve set up automated processes around the Net Promoter score, contract renewal date, and the overall health score. Based on the numbers reported in Gainsight, we automatically set a customer in ReferenceEdge to 'caution' or 'inactive.' With the contract renewal date, we automatically set a customer back to 'active' when they renew. The customer success managers have especially loved this because it doesn’t distract them with reference requests for customers who may not be currently appropriate. The Gainsight integration further streamlines our processes – and based on our own data and criteria, which increases the trust and confidence in the system. For the overall health score, on a monthly basis the customer success managers and I receive and review a report of the scores. The customer wellness score is based on a variety of internal indicators and provides us with evidence-based, valuable leads for our reference program. Another function that I value is Reference Lead Finder because it streamlines and automates the process of identifying customers who may be appropriate for our reference program. It saves time and harnesses the beauty and power of software. No one needs to keep a list or remember which customers closed 'X' number of months ago. It automatically prompts us to check on a customer’s readiness and provide the option to send the notification to somebody else who may be more appropriate to answer the question. With the reference content functionality, along with case studies, we've also added our win reports. These are internal only reports that provide additional sources of insight that may help win business, and they're searchable based on the same criteria as reference contacts. We’ve also enabled advanced request routing. With the Advanced Request Routing capabilities, supervisors can respond to reference requests for team members/account owners who are out-of-the-office, which keeps the process moving forward at a critical time in the sales cycle. And, of course, the customizable reports and dashboards show all of the objective, hard data needed for the reports to leadership -- in a single place.
How do you measure program success?	The primary ways we measure program success are revenue influenced by the month, the year, percent increase, and by the number of new references. As of July 2020, our revenue influenced is more than 122% higher than all of 2019.
What is your experience with Point of Reference's service?	Our account director is a true business partner. She’s always thinking of how to improve the tool for our unique environment and needs. She's responsive, creative, patient, knowledgeable about the tool and the industry, highly professional, and an absolute joy to work with. She's made the overall experience with Point of Reference a very positive one by taking a keen interest in our business and how ReferenceEdge can help. She relates well to all stakeholders—so beyond me as a reference manager to include our representatives from IT and Salesforce support and anyone she interacts with. Our ReferenceEdge implementation and our program would not be what they are without her.

	a conversation with... Jessica Thomas Technical Solutions, Analyst, Benevity
Could you describe your program?	I manage the client reference program at Benevity. My title is Technical Solutions, Analyst, and I sit within the Pre-Sales team. We launched ReferenceEdge around October 2018. We have close to 100 team members with access to ReferenceEdge, including all of our sales reps and client success managers, across all the different time zones throughout Canada and the United States.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	Benevity had a reference program before that we called 'BURT'—the Benevity Unified Reference Team, and we managed it through a different software product. We made the business case that we needed a reference-specific software application to manage reference activity at scale moving forward. We took on the responsibility of doing the research, finding ReferenceEdge, and learning how it would help Benevity streamline our program.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Our primary stakeholders are the sales team, including our Regional Vice Presidents and our Senior Vice President of Sales, and then our Client Success Management team, which includes our VP of Client Success. We have a cross-functional working group that meets on a monthly basis to ensure our program is functioning well and address any challenges that may creep up.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	We really wanted to decrease the number of steps in the workflow because, at times, it would take two or three weeks to hear back from the client success team about whether or not a reference request was approved, and that was just too long. So, streamlining and speeding up the process were big goals for us. Another challenge that we were hoping ReferenceEdge would help us solve was salespeople going around the process by simply reaching out directly to their client contacts with whom they had established relationships, instead of going through the BURT process. We wanted to have software that would make the sales reps feel confident that using the application would yield the reference results they needed. We also didn't have a central place where we searched for attribute data to help ensure that we were connecting a prospect with a client that had similar characteristics, so that was another checkmark for ReferenceEdge. And lastly, reference overuse. We definitely overused a few of our clients, especially some of the larger, well-known name brands, and because we weren't tracking usage very well, we didn't know how often we ended up using some of those contacts.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	By using ReferenceEdge, everything is more streamlined because reference requests are going directly from a salesperson to the appropriate client success manager. We've taken out the client success managers' managers; which was a bottleneck for us in the past. Another major change we put in place with ReferenceEdge is having an automated process to include and exclude clients in the program. There's much more reporting that we have access to, and because of that, we can clearly identify things that we need to work on, such as decreasing the time it takes for requests to be approved or declined. Lastly, everything related to references is handled in one central location and, if anyone has questions or needs help, they know exactly who to speak with, which makes things very simple. Those are the things that have really changed and helped us grow the program.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	A number of different responsibilities fall within my role, and references make up about 15% of it. I really appreciate that I don't need to spend more of my time working on things that are reference related because I simply wouldn't have the capacity to get everything else done. ReferenceEdge has helped to save us time. I don't have to be involved in the majority of reference requests because they're going from the salesperson to the CSM using the peer-to-peer functionality, and they don't need any intervention from me.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	About six months after launching, I reached out to our folks in Client Success leadership about how they felt the program was running, and they were so happy to be less involved in things. It was a time savings for them, and the general consensus was that the new processes with ReferenceEdge were running smoothly. That was such great feedback and really put me at ease.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	Many! To start with, I really like the Reference Lead Finder feature. We enabled this pretty recently, and it allows us to find new clients for the reference program who have recently implemented the Benevity software product(s). It's a simple and effective way of getting new clients into the reference program. At Benevity, we are very heavy Slack users, so when ReferenceEdge released the Slack integration, that was another feature that we turned on right away. We've been really happy with how those notifications go to our client success managers and our salespeople. We've also been able to look at how many and which clients are getting used most frequently. If clients have been used two or more times within the last year, we send them a Charity Gift Card (funds they can donate to a cause of their choosing) as a thank you for helping us win more business. So that was another report that was really helpful to us. As an added benefit, I would say that I've learned a ton about Salesforce as a result of using ReferenceEdge. I know how to build custom reports, and I understand how data is populated into various fields on various record types. I'm really happy that I've had the opportunity to work more within Salesforce and up-level my skills there.
How do you measure program success?	Right now, we're focused on ensuring that as many reference requests as possible are responded to before their deadline date. On an ongoing basis, we look at peer-to-peer request outcomes and the peer-to-peer average time to complete. We are consistently working towards improving both of those metrics.
How does Point of Reference’s service compare with other vendors with which you’ve worked?	Our account director is awesome. She's been wonderful to work with and truly cares about the success of our program. She discusses new features and functionality with us, helps troubleshoot various issues, helps us create new reports and dashboards, and enable new functionality on an ongoing basis. We’ve been surprised and delighted at how frequently we are able to meet with her. We definitely appreciate the dedicated support that we receive through Point of Reference.

Delaney Tucker, BlackLine CX Interview

	a conversation with... Delaney Tucker Client Marketing Specialist BlackLine
Please describe your program.	Our customer reference program sits within the client marketing team, a branch of our marketing department. We went live with ReferenceEdge in mid-January of '21 and have about 250 users globally. We use ReferenceEdge to standardize and simplify the advocacy reference request process while also providing a means of tracking other advocacy use cases, speaker requests, and documented customer marketing assets.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	I joined the team in November of 2018 and took over sales reference request as well as a client rewards program through Influitive. As a fast-growing organization the legacy process, created long before I joined, we had to record any requests just barely met our needs. I was asked to fulfill the global reference needs with this legacy process. At the end of the day and at the rate of organizational growth, it was difficult to meet the needs. References are a vital piece of the sales cycle, as anyone who’s in advocacy knows, and it’s important to be able to scale with the sales growth. To that end, I started researching solutions, building a business case, and slowly started getting leadership on board. It took a long time, but we finally got approval to move forward.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Our stakeholders include the sales team, both on the account management and new business, and our customer experience team. Our new business sales team are the primary users of the platform. They require reference calls and RFI/RFP contact listings for various opportunities. But our account management side use ReferenceEdge to request Best Practices Calls, or client to client use case discussions. They also use the platform to nominate clients for the reference program, client advisory boards, and our annual modern accounting customer awards. And of course, our marketing department. We have marketing team requests for clients for webinar speaking opportunities, virtual events, PR, and blog posts.
Tell me a little about your launch. What made it so successful?	Our launch was a success. We engaged Marketing and Sales managers in each region outside of North America to enforce the nomination campaign. We ran a regional SPIFF offering the top 3-5 individuals a premium gift item of their choice for the most champion nominations received in each region. We also used multiple communication channels to remind people to participate including email, calendar invites, ReferenceEdge office hours, team meetings, newsletters, and internal 'Coffee Breaks' with senior members of BlackLine.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	We had a few challenges. The biggest bottleneck that I personally experienced was not having any way to track client use cases. We didn't have a searchable database that supported the unique type of advocacy needs, and there are many, coming from our sales team. It took too much time to search the various internal systems just to narrow down clients who met the very specific or complex reference request. Another challenge was the time it took to complete a reference request. It was very difficult to complete a reference request within the timeframe allowed or needed by our sales team. It often took me a day to research, and four to five days to confirm an account. I wasn't too sure which accounts would necessarily do reference calls unless they had done a reference for us in the past. Additionally, advocacy duties were segmented. We lacked visibility into what others were doing and were recording client marketing uses in multiple places. For example, I would manage the reference request, someone else on my team would handle speaking opportunities, and someone else took care of case studies. There wasn't really any way for us to see what the other person was doing and no visibility into everything that was happening across the board with clients, what they were doing for us or who was in contact with them for an advocacy request. We wasted plenty of time looking for accounts that were already in the process of doing other marketing activities for us. Finally, we didn't have a standardized way of tracking to report and showcase everything we were doing. We couldn’t show the number of requests that were coming in over a given period of time, the type of requests, and the value that an advocate brought to BlackLine based on the deals the references were influencing. We also weren't able to showcase in one place the marketing assets—a blog post or case study—that we had in-process.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	I would say the benefits for us were quite immediate because it was vastly different from what we had the capacity to do in the past. The time to fulfill a reference request has dramatically improved. Our SLA pre-ReferenceEdge was about two weeks, but we've now significantly reduced that time. Two of my happiest success stories from ReferenceEdge include when we filled a three-contact RFP within 24 hours and a two-contact reference request in less than a business day. This was huge! Before ReferenceEdge, that would rarely happen, if ever – it usually took around two weeks. I've noticed a shift in how we're thinking about advocacy, you know? We're trying to think more proactively about building the advocacy pool. We have clients and leads to go to when we get last-minute or complex requests versus in the past when we would just be reacting to requests. Another positive change is not overusing our advocates—not necessarily only references, but speakers as well. With the ReferenceEdge nomination request form available within Salesforce, all of our account managers and account owners have advocacy a little bit more top of mind. That's been awesome.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	Today, my role has shifted from just reactively managing sales references to managing all advocacy within a specific revenue range for our clients. So now, all case studies and speaking opportunities for that space go through me as well. You could say that our role hasn't changed much because we're still doing a lot of advocacy, but ReferenceEdge has been our single point of contact for all of that stuff, which is fantastic. I'm trying to think of some other areas where the business is impacted, and I think that that's something that we're going to be able to showcase quite well down the road. Right now, we're just trying to track and use the reporting that is available to see the impact we’ve had to date. I think that sometimes working in customer advocacy is kind of relentless, you know? It's a lot of effort that people in this role put in and it's not always noticed. The statistics we're able to pull in the reports from ReferenceEdge–tracking all this data and information–speak volumes for what we're doing in the background.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	Our sales reps like the platform because it has added transparency. They like the fact that they have some visibility into the requests. Previously, they would send us a request, and we would kind of run off into our client base and try to pull it out of the woodwork for them. Whereas now, they can see who is in our reference pool. Based on the information we have on the reference search page; they can see why we choose a specific customer for their unique opportunity. Our account managers also like that there's visibility into their reference accounts. In the case where a client is an active reference and there's a change in account ownership, the CSM has an easy little snapshot view. Our leadership team is loving the data points. By combing through the data we're pulling from ReferenceEdge, we can configure reports in Tableau for a nice snapshot for our leadership team. Statistics that we have never had access to before. And, our Customer Success Leadership Team may be interested in building out specific use cases for the CSMs. So, there's some excitement from stakeholders that weren't previously included in the initial evaluation.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	The tagging capability would be at the top of the list. BlackLine has very complex solutions and we have new use cases come up all the time. Creating a new tag and tagging a client based on unique use case criteria is incredibly helpful. Another capability is being able to create that database we wanted and needed for so long in the first place. When we have new marketing assets, it's very easy to create a new referenceability type and attach it to an account. This allows us to know what accounts have been doing and have that historical data. I think that's a big feature that we're really taking advantage of right now and thinking hard about how we can build it out strategically for the future. For next steps, we are working on the Influitive integration right now. We're very excited about getting that up and running. It will enable us to pull self-nominated advocates from our rewards platform as well as push out reward points for anyone who completes a reference or any other marketing asset. Plus, we can push any challenges directly to our Influitive hub—so that's in the process. I know that that's going to be a really big win for us when it comes to our use of ReferenceEdge and building out our reference pool quite smoothly. The fact that ReferenceEdge was native to Salesforce was really important for our organization. Our legacy process was built in Salesforce, and we didn’t want any big changes for the sales team. Everything else that they use is there as well, so we wanted to make sure that we built it out correctly for our sales team.
How do you measure program success?	The things we're focusing on in terms of measuring program success start with building our advocate pool. At launch, we ran a nomination campaign for our global sales team and received just over 180 nominations. That was a big number for us to get from the get-go. We are also looking at the annual contract value that our advocates are influencing. We want to be able to show how advocacy impacts bottom line. In addition, the ability to track customer marketing assets that is critical. We track request type and how many requests we're fulfilling over a given period. We're using the platform to track all that data to show upper management and other stakeholders what we have coming up. It comes back to the effort we're putting in and how we're showcasing that internally. I think ReferenceEdge will be extremely advantageous for our organization and is in lockstep with our advocacy strategy. Our goal is to be an indispensable program for the business units we serve. ReferenceEdge helps us do that.
What is your experience with Point of Reference as a vendor?	I was really happy with all of the demos we went through, all the communication we had; they all seemed to have everything together, which was nice. But also, post-purchase and during implementation, they've been very attentive and responsive to our needs. I'll mention something in a meeting with my account director and forget that I said it, but then I'll get a follow-up on it next week. They're very responsive and attentive.

	a conversation with... Sandi Montour Senior Customer Program Manager Mitel
Would you describe your program?	The Mitel global customer reference program currently resides within the sales enablement team in marketing. For the past nearly four years, I've been administrating our customer reference program. Our global program supports all products and geographies, including the Americas, EMEA and APAC. ReferenceEdge is the software tool that tracks and manages the overarching, strategic program, called the Mitel Ambassador Program. It’s in four languages—English, French, German, and Spanish—and provides public-facing information on the benefits and process.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	The initiative started as a massive data integrity project with the reference system that ShoreTel had at the time. With the Mitel acquisition, the team took a fresh look at all of our systems, including our customer reference database. We considered the options and chose to replace the former system with ReferenceEdge, primarily because it’s a Salesforce native application. Since I was a Point of Reference customer for four years at a previous organization, moving to ReferenceEdge felt very comfortable – both with the technology and the business relationship. For the ReferenceEdge launch with the legacy part of our business, we cleaned up the data, decided what would be moved to ReferenceEdge and what fields to map to. Those stakeholders were relatively familiar with the concept of a customer reference database system and just needed to learn how to use the tool, which had a renewed sense of trust and excitement because of that data clean-up project. For the other part of the business, the legacy Mitel part, having a customer reference database system was brand new and very exciting. Internal surveys and feedback had shown that finding a reference was a top pain point for sales. Having a tool to solve that pain point was a big leap forward.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Our stakeholders include sales, customer success, executives, training, product marketing, field marketing, brand and corporate marketing, user groups, PR, AR, and IR, product trials, and the RFP and activations teams.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	The problems across legacy ShoreTel and Mitel were ultimately the same: no metrics, no central hub for all information and activities, and no scalability.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	There's a greatly improved understanding of who our reference customers are and what they're doing with us and for us. We’ve seen a decrease in that scramble for references, especially for new salespeople who may not yet have a complete understanding of our customers. There's improved coordination amongst departments, like with the RFP team, product trials and the activations team. It has also increased our value to partners as an additional way for us to collaborate and help each other.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	Based on our self-service model with sales and customer success managers owning the reference process, my role is to manage the customer reference system and the program framework, training and tools to support it. For example, I’ve created customized how-to documents, videos and a learning management system course. This also includes my favorite practice of kaizen, which is the concept of continuous improvement. By connecting with and listening to my internal customers – primarily sales, customer success and marketing – and through the great insights of our Point of Reference Account Director and the constant innovation of Point of Reference, we’re always looking for – and implementing – ways to make the system serve our stakeholders even better. Our model also allows me to strategically develop and manage other programs such as the win reports and lead other special customer and partner-related projects.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	There have been a lot of positive responses. A colleague in content marketing said, "I love how you are bringing structure to this very important part of our business." Also, a territory account manager, wrote, "Thank you for providing me an overview of ReferenceEdge last week. It was super-informative and helped me understand how powerful ReferenceEdge truly is. As many of our prospects usually ask for industry, size, location, and product-specific references, this tool is very efficient, easy to use, and will be a competitive advantage. In my career, I have not seen a reference tool like ReferenceEdge." And, after I met with a sales team and sent a follow-up email with resources, a sales vice president said, "I just happened to be on the phone with a salesperson when you sent this. She has one that should close this quarter and will be a nice success story. One cool thing about it is that she was able to move them forward based on references from our reference program." Based on the reports I send to leadership every month, they love seeing the increase in program adoption and the objective, hard data. In essence, the program adoption equates to more opportunities to showcase our customer’s success and our ability to quickly match our customers to the reference activities that are of interest to them. It’s the quintessential win-win. Leadership also appreciates the decrease in those urgent emails trying to find a reference, and the more efficient and focused process via ReferenceEdge.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	First, that it's a native application to Salesforce, so there isn't an additional or different login. We meet sales, our key internal customers, where they already are. Another one is the Gainsight integration. We’ve set up automated processes around the Net Promoter score, contract renewal date, and the overall health score. Based on the numbers reported in Gainsight, we automatically set a customer in ReferenceEdge to 'caution' or 'inactive.' With the contract renewal date, we automatically set a customer back to 'active' when they renew. The customer success managers have especially loved this because it doesn’t distract them with reference requests for customers who may not be currently appropriate. The Gainsight integration further streamlines our processes – and based on our own data and criteria, which increases the trust and confidence in the system. For the overall health score, on a monthly basis the customer success managers and I receive and review a report of the scores. The customer wellness score is based on a variety of internal indicators and provides us with evidence-based, valuable leads for our reference program. Another function that I value is Reference Lead Finder because it streamlines and automates the process of identifying customers who may be appropriate for our reference program. It saves time and harnesses the beauty and power of software. No one needs to keep a list or remember which customers closed 'X' number of months ago. It automatically prompts us to check on a customer’s readiness and provide the option to send the notification to somebody else who may be more appropriate to answer the question. With the reference content functionality, along with case studies, we've also added our win reports. These are internal only reports that provide additional sources of insight that may help win business, and they're searchable based on the same criteria as reference contacts. We’ve also enabled advanced request routing. With the Advanced Request Routing capabilities, supervisors can respond to reference requests for team members/account owners who are out-of-the-office, which keeps the process moving forward at a critical time in the sales cycle. And, of course, the customizable reports and dashboards show all of the objective, hard data needed for the reports to leadership -- in a single place.
How do you measure program success?	The primary ways we measure program success are revenue influenced by the month, the year, percent increase, and by the number of new references. As of July 2020, our revenue influenced is more than 122% higher than all of 2019.
What is your experience with Point of Reference's service?	Our account director is a true business partner. She’s always thinking of how to improve the tool for our unique environment and needs. She's responsive, creative, patient, knowledgeable about the tool and the industry, highly professional, and an absolute joy to work with. She's made the overall experience with Point of Reference a very positive one by taking a keen interest in our business and how ReferenceEdge can help. She relates well to all stakeholders—so beyond me as a reference manager to include our representatives from IT and Salesforce support and anyone she interacts with. Our ReferenceEdge implementation and our program would not be what they are without her.

	a conversation with... Kate Restaino Customer Marketing Program Manager Samsara
Would you describe your program?	Our customer reference program is primarily a sales enablement function led by the marketing team. It is focused on helping our mid-market and enterprise sales teams find the right customer references easily and making sure that we're tracking our conversations and interactions with those customers. We have a twofold mission: one is to make the lives of the account executives (AEs) easier, and the second is to be able to track our interactions and the impact of those interactions on the deal cycle on the back end.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	The initial idea came from my supervisor, who is the marketing manager, and her colleagues on the sales side. It grew out of Samsara's desire to grow the sales organization. They saw how quickly our sales team was growing and that we needed a better way of scaling our reference process to match. The question we faced was, "How can we enable our global sales team, and can we give them tools that are going to increase their efficiency and drive deals to close quicker?"
Who are your internal stakeholders?	We have multiple stakeholders beginning with our marketing leadership. The stakeholders we really try and align with all the time are sales leadership. We want to make sure everybody on the sales team is aligned and understands our KPIs for the quarter, the program outcomes, and how they are going to benefit their organization. Mid-market and enterprise sales leadership are our significant stakeholders there, and additionally, we're looking to create an ongoing dialogue with managers, directors, and VPs.
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	One challenge was efficiently responding to reference requests, which we had previously handled through internal messaging channels. The customer reference program automated and streamlined the process. Samsara has a large sales team, which required a more streamlined process with an actual database. An internal messaging channel didn’t provide the efficient framework that ReferenceEdge has in place. Our second challenge was tracking our interactions with our advocates because, a) we don't want to overuse them, and b) we also want to make sure we are using good advocates who might not have been used before. And then our third challenge was tracking our impact on sales. Enterprise sales is a company-wide focus. Reference calls happen on almost every enterprise deal, and we had no existing workflow to systematically track the outcomes of those. As the company was growing its enterprise sales business, we realized that enterprise sales are significantly affected by reference calls. Leadership wanted to understand the impact of the deals on end-of-quarter numbers, end-of-year numbers, etc.
How did you launch your program so successfully?	We had a pretty big launch with global events. We made it an event because it's obviously a major work shift. Our approach to our sales teams was, "This is going be your new best friend, and this is actually going be a gamechanger for you." We also provided incentives to our AEs. The first quarter was all about making it fun for the sales representatives (“reps”), and now they've adopted it. We've also created a program so that each time a customer takes a reference call, they get a reward—which is another big incentive for our reps to use the application.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	We've gone from a message thread culture to a ReferenceEdge culture for customer references. Now the default is to go to ReferenceEdge first and then work backward if you can't find anything. I think the biggest changes have mostly been about streamlining our process. We're saving AEs quite a bit of time on finding a reference. References are always needed, and we're enabling AE’s to find references by themselves—and to find good ones. AEs can search for a reference based on specific attributes like integrations, previous camera provider, previous telematics providers, etc.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	Our mid-market team has been loving it; they like that they can go in right away and select somebody instead of waiting on somebody to respond in a large message thread. We're a pretty fast-paced culture overall, especially with sales; they want to get their deals done, and they want to get them done quickly. I think they love that it takes less time to find a reference, and more importantly, they love being able to filter references on use case. We’re still transitioning other teams that are operating in a more remote basis, and those reps are getting more excited about the program over time.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	Being able to create search filters around use case, geography, and segment has been the most helpful; that was our number one request from the sales team. Since we have so many products, having a centralized database where you can filter on products and all the other attributes is just so important. We want to set our prospects up with customers that have a similar use case or are in their same geography or same size. Before ReferenceEdge, there was no real way to do it; now we can. Our AEs go into ReferenceEdge, and they're pretty much guaranteed to get one or two references coming back with a 'yes,' so they can just set their prospect up with them right away. Another thing is figuring out and being able to better track and understand who our top advocates are, and then being able to leverage them for other activities too. A big part of customer marketing is figuring out which customers we want to leverage for a specific advocate opportunity. Having all this information now in one place allows me to see when they've been used, how they've been used, what they've influenced more systematically. We position ReferenceEdge as a sales tool, but it's also been great for events and for marketing communications because those teams are able to request happy customers for their activities too. Now everything is streamlined, so ReferenceEdge has been a benefit for these other groups as well.
How do you measure program success?	Our initial goal during rollout was to get a certain number of advocates into the database and requests processed through ReferenceEdge; we met our initial goal this quarter. On average, we're going for a 20% increase in the total number of nominations and requests per quarter. We also now have an enterprise focus, so we have specific KPIs for that. We try to measure everything, and we have pretty extensive dashboards. To measure program success, I have an executive dashboard that gives a high-level overview of the program. We have an enterprise-specific dashboard that shows how we are engaging with enterprise reps, enterprise leadership, and marketing leadership. We also have a more general sales dashboard that tracks different aspects like the total number of nominations, the total number of requests, who's nominating the most, and who’s requesting most. It tracks our more detailed KPIs as opposed to the executive dashboard, which is just tracking high-level KPIs.
What is your experience with Point of Reference’s service?	Our account director has been great. We had a couple of issues with some attributes and reporting prelaunch, and we were able to get the right people on the phone immediately to figure those out; that would have delayed our entire launch had we not figured it out. Point of Reference is very responsive in that way.
What are your future plans for your program?	We have big plans for what we can do with the advocates, and we want to get them as involved as possible. We’re on the pathway, but we’re only five months into the program, so it’s still laying the groundwork and ensuring the foundation is strong first. In addition to the sales team, our marketing communications team is starting to become more involved because ReferenceEdge has a referenceability type for press activities. Our marketing communications team was not an initial stakeholder, but they're finding that it's been really helpful to request time with the AEs to figure out which customers would want to participate in press activities. We can also see how using ReferenceEdge may be a tool to help our product management team figure out which customers Samsara might want to be used for beta testing. Moreover, our product marketing team uses ReferenceEdge all the time to identify customers for case studies, webinars, etc. Our marketing team has also partnered with our legal team to start using ReferenceEdge to track which customer logos we can use for marketing purposes and which ones we can't. These examples are not our primary use cases right now but definitely have an impact.

	A conversation with... Wendi Wolfgram Senior Customer Advocacy Manager A10 Networks
Could you describe your program?	Our global customer advocacy program has been ramping up over the last few years. A10 Networks has a lot of great customers, and we wanted to share their expertise and knowledge of our solution. To do that, we wanted to build a program to share our customer stories and build stronger relationships with our customers. Part of that was implementing the ReferenceEdge solution. The program includes content: written customer case studies and video testimonials. A lot of work goes into creating internal documents such as customer success slides, which we use to highlight a customer story. Additionally, we kicked off a customer advisory board and relaunched a customer community on a new platform. We have around 7,000 customers across the globe, and we are on tap to have roughly 10% in the advocate program in some way by the end of our second year.
Where did the initiative to start a program originate, and why?	A10 did not have a structured program. It was bits and pieces here and there with various marketing owners. A10's marketing leadership recognized that A10 needed to manage a formal program to leverage customer testimonials and provide a better user experience for our customers. You know, they say happy customers equate to lifelong customers and continued business, and I think it's a good way for A10 to be seen, as a partner, with lifelong customers and not just another vendor. A10 had already done quite a bit of solution research before I arrived. I believe they realized right away that ReferenceEdge was a really good fit as that foundational tool on which to build a program. I was brought on initially as a consultant to get the solution implemented and up and running, and then roll out a formal program. Once I did that, I was offered a full-time position to manage it going forward.
Who are your internal stakeholders?	Primarily sales, but also the events team and PR. Occasionally our CMO and CEO ask me to support an activity of theirs. We also respond to quite a few RFPs, so that team depends on our program heavily.”
What were your top 3 challenges before ReferenceEdge?	A lot of the challenge before ReferenceEdge was tracking customers on multiple spreadsheets, which was ineffective and inaccurate. When I first came on board, that's what I was given; multiple very, very large spreadsheets of customer account names and contact names and notes here and there about their reference status or if we had content featuring them. That's just unmanageable. They also saw a lot of missed opportunities to leverage customer content because it wasn't centralized. And, of course, probably too many email blasts hitting global sales when customer reference information was needed; that was not manageable, either. We just didn't have a good handle on how to find customers that were using our solutions by specific use cases, and now that we have ReferenceEdge in place, it's much easier to manage all of this.
Since launch, what has changed in terms of your company’s reference practices?	ReferenceEdge gives A10 that centralized tool to be able to track reference customers. It's that one place for sales to go for reference content and answers. We have automated processes to collect the sales win information easily and then disseminate that across the company. Prior to ReferenceEdge, sales wins were collected as Microsoft Word documents. We collected them and stored them in a Salesforce library, but they weren't easily searchable, and there was no way to tie those wins to accounts or report on them. Now with ReferenceEdge, we can easily report on the data that's collected. We can even identify who responded and who didn't, and then we can share that information with other parts of the organization. Our process includes escalations to the managers to collect that data from slow-to-respond account owners. We recently implemented an automated process to update reference account and contact profiles using ReferenceEdge with the Profile Update Minder feature. This feature helps to keep our reference data fresh and up to date—and it's all automated. It doesn't require me to manually dig through the database and figure out what's current and what's not. We can automate that process, and account owners can make the necessary updates.
Since launch, how has your job changed?	The first year was all about administrative activities, program creation, and implementation of ReferenceEdge along with promoting content. Going into the second year, it's more about increasing customer participation along with new content development. I now have more time to spend on specific projects and relationship development with internal stakeholders and customers.
What feedback have you gotten from stakeholders? Leadership?	It's all been really very positive from the start. I've had strong backing from the sales and marketing leadership who see the value of having an organized and centralized program. I send out weekly news flashes to most of the company, announcing new wins and new customer content. I receive positive feedback from other parts of the organization beyond sales, too—just like "Hey, this is great to know, I always enjoy learning about our customers." This information wasn't being shared in an organized manner before. So, now that we have a formal program, everybody knows this comes through the advocacy program.
What aspects of ReferenceEdge do you value the most?	I think what I value the most from ReferenceEdge is the ability to centralize and track the accounts, the contacts, and the content and then have all that tied together. ReferenceEdge being a native app within Salesforce is a must. Without it being part of Salesforce, the management isn't the same. I think that's huge. Being able to search for references and content by meaningful attributes is so helpful across the organization. Data Collector has been a real win for the advocacy program. It's even used by our operations team to leverage sales input about key wins to share for quarterly earnings or company meetings. Before this, the task was very siloed, and sometimes multiple departments would ask Sales for that same type of information. Now, the question is asked once, and that information is easily shared across all those departments. So, for me, that really was a huge win this first year.
How do you measure program success?	So, in this first year, measuring internal use and changing their behaviors is probably the number one measurement. Changing internal behaviors is probably the number one challenge. Once the sales team sees the benefits not only to themselves but to the overall company and they trust you as a key component to their relationship-building with the customer, then it becomes a win-win. Another measure is the program growth: the number of customer nominations for the program, content creation, and expanding how customer references can be used. For content, we're looking at how many win stories, customer quotes, and reviews we have overall and by each product line. Being able to tie revenue to the program is always a goal, but with A10, I've found that it's more important, at least for now, to arm the A10 sales team with customer names for namedropping and to share how those customers benefit from the A10 solutions. Once the sales team realizes the benefits not only to themselves but to the overall company (and they have to trust you as a key component to their relationship-building with the customer), then it becomes a win-win. At that point, I can track and follow the customers' journey easier through the ReferenceEdge tool by capturing that win story, following up to get the nomination, and then determine how we might leverage that customer for future marketing use.
How is your relationship with Point of Reference?	Point of Reference has been really wonderful for me to work with over the years (at a few different companies), and it's a true partnership; they actually do listen to their customers. I've always felt that if I require a new process, or for something to work a little bit differently, that they listen. I've had a few different account managers over the years with Point of Reference and have always been treated very well. They'll always consider my requests, and they either make it happen, or they might suggest a new way for me to think about that issue or that business problem based on industry best practices.
What are your future plans for your program?	Now, it's definitely all about program growth. As I said, the first year was for implementation, setting the foundation, identifying the processes, rolling it out to sales users, and then continued education. I think the second year will be more about increasing the participation—getting the program's internal customers, primarily sales, to nominate customers and getting new customers to participate. I'm going to focus a lot this second year on looking for ways to speed up our content creation. I'm thinking about integration with a community platform or maybe integration with third-party review sites; those might be other areas to investigate. I want to also focus on other initiatives, such as creating more exclusive groups within our overall customer advocacy program. We can then focus on customer relationships with our strongest advocates and provide a more unique experience with them. Having ReferenceEdge as a foundational tool makes managing reference initiatives so much easier. Customer advocacy touches all parts of the business, not just sales, and marketing. Anybody in the company that has interaction with the customers, this program can relate to them or can be a part of their plans as well. We want to be able to motivate the employees to let them know 'Hey, we have all these great customers. You all should be very proud of where you work.' Having the foundation of ReferenceEdge gives us the power to expand the advocacy program and focus on customer relationships.

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