Building a customer reference program/repository

Markus Siebeneick

Hi Community Members,

As our company grows as an organization, we find that customers and prospects are asking for references at an increasing rate in step with our companies growth.  We are looking to create a reference repository to track are references, when did they become a reference, industry, title and when did we last use them as a reference.

Talking with our team internally, we are aware that this can be a difficult repository to build and administer.

Looking to hear from the community of what they have done in the past which has been successful or what has not worked when creating the reference repository.

#CustomerReferences

Mike Gospe

Hi Markus,

I interpret your question to be focused on how to build a customer reference database for internal use and tracking.

A word of advice if you also plan to build a publicly viewable customer reference library on your website. Be strategic, targeted, and careful. Posting comes with a risk. 

I say this because I am a strategic marketer and some of my most successful marketing campaigns were when I was able to go to a competitor's website and build a target list of my competitor's customers! They were kind enough to list them by industry, contact name, and contact title. Since this was posted publicly, all this data was fair game. I used this data to fuel my Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaign, and they were highly successful. So, watch out because your competitors are watching you, too!

Best,

Mike Gospe

Carlos Gonzalez

Markus are you looking to evaluate Reference Management Platforms?  I have done this in the past and have deployed systems.  I'm actually looking at this again right now and would be happy to discuss.

Lisa Pratt

Hi Marcus - We use a reference management system to track everything you mentioned plus other advocacy related data such as: are they willing to do case studies, speaking engagements, peer reviews on things like G2 crowd, speak to analysts, give PR quotes, etc..  We also keep note of what they are willing to say (that way we can assure Sales that there will not be any surprises) and, probably the most important field is a status flag so that if a customers was wiling to do references but then has a serious issue and is no longer a good advocacy candidate, we will put them on hold until they are happy again.

Lisa Pratt

Andrea Brisker

Would love to hear about some of the platforms you all are using for reference management. We have the same struggle as Markus.

Lisa Pratt

We use Upland Software RO Innovation.