Customer Reference Programs

I let the customer know that I’ll be sending him an American Express gift card so that he can replace the broken glass and he’s happy. Whew!

About a month ago I had one of my Sales guys forward me an email from one of his customers. The customer had previously requested for an article he was highlighted in, to be framed and sent to him. The Sales guy had either forgotten about the request or meant to do it but hadn’t gotten around to it. Either way, the request was sent to me.

I was able to track down the copy of the article (after the magazine sent me a copy of the right month but wrong year) and brought it in to be framed for the customer. Because of the size of the article – 9 pages – it was a huge job that had to be custom made. After about a week and a half and a few hundred dollars, the article was ready to be picked up.

It then sat inconspicuously in the cube next to mine for about two weeks. Ughing over the fact that I had to find a way to ship this monstrosity (3 feet by 4 feet and 24lbs), I put it on the back burner secretly hoping that it would find a way to pack and ship itself.

Finally realizing that it was collecting cob webs, I brought it to a local shipping store, spent another hundred dollars to get it packed up and a few hundred more to get it shipped to the customer by end of the week. I was finally happy that it was in the mail and was even getting congratulations from co-workers.

Anxious to see what the customer thought of it, I went online and saw that it was delivered and signed for on Friday. I sent the customer an email this morning to make sure that he had received it. He did – and the glass was shattered. My customer was checking to see if the actual article had been torn too.

After spending close to $1,000 and having the customer wait about a year (from the initial request) the beautiful, gigantic article was ruined. Was it worth it? At this point it’s anyone’s guess.

When I was in fourth grade I got an “A” in history class. Later in life I successfully graduated from college (not by much but I graduated – hee hee). Years later I completed a triathlon in the time I had wanted to. I constantly set goals for myself – both personally and professionally – and reevaluate what I’ve been doing when I do or don’t meet that goal. Companies aren’t much different than us as individuals. Companies rely on success.

How do you measure success with a customer reference program? You can measure in different ways, but the key thing is to clearly mark out what success will be for your program and let that set the standard – is it brand recognition or revenue generating or a combination of both?

So you got a customer into the New York Times, but is that success? Can it directly tie into a sale? That might be difficult to measure, unless of course the Sales person put into your CRM tool that the reason the customer called was because of the article. Chances are probably pretty slim that that’ll happen. Based on a revenue generating “success” this one probably won’t fit the bill. For brand recognition, it’ll be huge.

For Marketing references I suggest setting a number of goals such as number of customer press releases announced, number of case studies distributed, number of customers highlighted in articles, types of customer references you want highlighted (specific products, verticals, campaigns supported by press releases/case studies). Success on the Marketing side will generally be much more brand recognition than revenue.

Tracking what references were given to Sales people for prospects at the end of the quarter and year is critical for the revenue generating success factor. If you can say at the end of the year that references you provided were influential in $15 million worth of revenue then your success has been measured. I do this by logging all sales requests along with who the prospect is, what references were given, time it took to give the references and other basic information such as what specifically the Sales person was looking for (ie particular vertical, specific products, specific competitor replacement…)

By creating a form and logging this information, I can then go back at the end of the year and say in January I provided 10 references to Sales that led to $250K in sales and 90% of the requests came from APAC. In October, that number grew to 50 references and led to $4M in sales with 50% from APAC. I can also break it down by region and types of references. This helps me justify the program and let’s me show (and not just tell) in a graphical way the increase/decrease of requests, how long it takes to get an answer to the sales person, how much money is being brought in and the like.

No matter how you run your program, make sure you have a way of measuring success. If you can’t say you were successful (not that you weren’t) then I think you’re in prime picking to have your program cut. And once you were successful, let everyone know!