It seems like a question that doesn’t need to be asked, right? Salespeople live and die on references to make quota. No, the question is really whether your salespeople use references, but are they effective in their practices?
Have you ever heard of sales training, like a module in new hire onboarding, just on the topic of customer references? I’ll bet not. Salespeople generally learn on-the-job, as part of various sales positions, how to field customer reference requests. They watch and learn, but the quality of this informal “training” may not follow best practices.
We would suggest that customer marketers/customer reference program managers/advocate managers—whatever the specific title is—are the most obvious subject matter experts in the art of customer reference practices. Personally leading this training segment is also an excellent way to build relationships with the most populous group of most program stakeholders.
Beggars can’t be choosers is often the mindset regarding references, especially when recruiting customers. However, not all references are equal in the mind of a buyer. Companies are getting more adept at supplying references. Still, relevancy correlates with influence impact. All other things being equal, “their references were better,” is one reason deals are lost. “Better” means more relevant and relatable. Can the buyer relate to the reference’s story and envision similar success in their future after reading, watching, or listening to that story or talking to that customer? Relevancy isn’t just about matching up industry, products, and geography. Savvy salespeople, analyst relations reps, and PR managers must consider use cases, equivalent vantage points (job title is just one indicator), and even personality.
What’s more impressive to a buyer, getting references only after asking or a seller sharing customer stories throughout the sales cycle? A thoughtful program provides reference assets (customer content) for early, middle, and late stages of the sales cycle. Being exposed to customer stories early on gives buyers confidence in their judgment and often leads to less discounting. Salespeople commonly wait too long to start a reference search. You’ve probably seen “Need ASAP” or “Help please! Need by EOD tomorrow!” in the body of a message. This is just poor planning and doesn’t acknowledge that reference customers aren’t sitting around waiting to help one vendor or another close a deal.
Salespeople have less interaction time with buyers now that so much of the buying process occurs online. Once looped in, salespeople need to be consultants, which means sharing customer stories that address any buyer’s concerns: product maintenance, user adoption, analytics, etc. Properly “tagging” both reference customers and customer content makes finding the right stories easy for sellers. Do they know how best matching reference is surfaced or searched?
Every company has different versions of processes related to finding and securing the use of customer references. On one end of the spectrum is the “Everyone for themselves!” approach. This looks like a continuous stream of direct messages or emails to ALL SALES or ALL CUSTOMER SUCCESS with various criteria. Then the requester waits and hopes someone replies, and with a good match. It’s an inefficient approach with little guarantee of success in the time frame required. On the other extreme is a fully technology-enabled program that removes uncertainty and bottlenecks and maximizes the use of customer references to increase win rates and revenue growth. The technology provides the process and easy access to customer reference “gold.” Consistent system use addresses the How component, but that doesn’t mean the Who, When, and What are a given.
Each company’s culture, reference particulars, and programs are different. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend providing several recent, real-world examples of customer reference success, emphasizing why and what specifically resulted in success. Think of these as references for the use of references. That’s a great place to start.
Then, walk salespeople and other users through a complete sales cycle, explaining what reference resources are available for each stage and what their colleagues have found most valuable. This introduces them to the full menu of available options and both when and how to use various resources. Study after study on content use by sales teams shows most content doesn’t get used because it can’t be found, doesn’t match their needs, or its existence wasn’t known. This is one way to avoid the first and third reasons in that list.
Training comes in different forms. You may present the customer reference training personally to both new and current stakeholders, create a course for your training department to deliver, or build an online learning system module. Regardless, you’re the catalyst and champion for providing this very specific training overlooked in most organizations. Customer reference SMEs produce higher close rates, which means you can raise below average closers to average, and average closers to star performers.
To read more about what should go into a customer reference training module for your sales team, read our blog, Why Sales Needs Customer Reference Training.
For more information on developing a Customer Reference Program, check out our recently updated eBook, 7 Priorities for Building a Customer Reference Program.
It's only natural that many advocacy leaders have landed on the same objective: make the program easier to use by meeting users where they're already working.
Today, that increasingly means Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever generative AI assistant employees happen to have open.
Imagine a salesperson simply asking AI, "Find me three German healthcare customers using product Y, willing to speak with a prospect," instead of navigating to another interface, or waiting for someone from advocacy, or elsewhere, to respond. It's easy to see the appeal. Removing friction has always been one of the fastest ways to increase adoption.
It is exactly the right instinct.
The difficult parts, arguably the reason program managers exist, occur before and after AI says, "Here are your three best matches."
The value advocacy professionals bring is the ability to operationalize and scale customer advocacy for maximum impact. Quality advocate information doesn't just appear, it's the result of a system.
Now that the user has three advocates, what should happen?
Notice what happened. The search was completed.
The next steps are just as manual as ever if AI search is the be all, end all.
Reality Check
AI can tell you who could participate. It can't tell you who should participate unless someone (or something) has been keeping score.
This is where the story starts to feel strangely familiar.
Many companies still operate their program using spreadsheets, scattered CRM fields, shared drives, email folders, and the remarkable memories of a handful of program managers.
Eventually, organizations realize they aren't managing an advocacy program at all. They're managing lists that happen to contain advocates.
But the shortcomings are real:
Purpose-built advocacy platforms emerged because advocacy is much more than a search problem.
Ironically, AI has convinced some organizations to revisit the same shortcut they worked so hard to escape.
Let's imagine two different worlds.
In the first, AI recommends an advocate for a sales call.
Months later, AI knows this customer recently participated and may deserve a break before being asked again.
Now imagine the second world.
Three months later someone asks how many customer reference contributed to the revenue this quarter.
Silence. Nobody really knows.
The advocacy happened...hopefully. The program didn't. Collectively, the organization slowly stopped feeding the very system it depended on to understand its advocacy program.
Reality Check
If AI helps facilitate twenty closed-won opportunities this quarter, but none are recorded, your executive dashboard still says zero.
One of the easiest mistakes to make in an AI-first world is assuming that successful interactions somehow become organizational knowledge on their own.
They don't.
If a customer agrees to speak with a prospect and nobody records it, the organization loses far more than a single activity.
The most valuable advocacy data isn't simply who your customers are.
It's everything they've done.
That's the story AI actually wants to read.
It's often said that AI needs good data.
That's true.
But operational history is far more valuable than static customer information.
Those aren't search results.Those are patterns.
Remove any one of those pieces and AI becomes little more than an exceptionally fast search engine.
Reality Check
Every workflow skipped today is a pattern AI won't discover tomorrow.
The AI revolution has created tremendous excitement, and rightly so. Finding the right advocate is becoming dramatically easier than it was only a few years ago.
That's worth celebrating.
Just don't confuse a better search experience with a better advocacy program. Search is only one chapter in the story.
The organizations that see the greatest return from AI won't necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated models.
They'll be the ones with the richest operational history.
Those organizations won't use AI merely to answer the question, "Who should we ask?"
They'll use AI to answer far more valuable questions.
That's when AI stops behaving like a better Google search.
That's when it starts behaving like a strategic partner.
Finding the right advocate has always been the opening scene.
If your AI can find advocates but your program can't learn from using them, you've built a remarkable search engine instead of a remarkable advocacy program.
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