Referral Program for Large Enterprise Customers for Land and Expand Strategy
Hi CS folks,
I am working for SAAS company where we are working with many large enterprise customers in different industries that are using our product at some of their sites. For context, we are a 360° conferencing technology that can be used for remote collaboration/ audits/ inspection/ site tours at a facility or manufacturing unit.
We are working with some major Pharma and CPG companies where each site has its own budget and there is no consolidated purchasing overall. Our goal here is to expand to more sites by developing a referral program where we can leverage the success at a site or a few sites to expand into more locations.
Does anyone have experience in developing or working on a program like this? I would love to chat with you.
Thank you,
Parul
Head of Customer Success at Avatour
https://www.linkedin.com/in/parul-vij-chopra-87654a1a/
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I've done something similar in the past at a SaaS company as well. One thing that worked pretty well for us was finding advocates from similar businesses. It helps if the business and/or advocate is more well known within the industry. We asked our advocate to host an 'open house' or a 'lunch and learn' for us. Marketing helped us promote the event. We'd invite other business leaders to attend and sent virtual gift cards to attendees for coffee/lunch. There were times when instead of gift cards, we'd offer trials or pilots for the potential company to test out.
During the open house or lunch and learn the advocate would share success stories, why they chose our product, talk about the value it brought them, etc. Sometimes it was more interview style with the advocate and a sales rep. Other times it was the advocate talking and sales reps would follow with a quick demo.
In return, we'd comp something for the advocate (extending their subscription for a month or two, giving a trial of something) or send them some company swag.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas!
Hi CS folks,
I am working for SAAS company where we are working with many large enterprise customers in different industries that are using our product at some of their sites. For context, we are a 360° conferencing technology that can be used for remote collaboration/ audits/ inspection/ site tours at a facility or manufacturing unit.
We are working with some major Pharma and CPG companies where each site has its own budget and there is no consolidated purchasing overall. Our goal here is to expand to more sites by developing a referral program where we can leverage the success at a site or a few sites to expand into more locations.
Does anyone have experience in developing or working on a program like this? I would love to chat with you.
Thank you,
Parul
Head of Customer Success at Avatour
https://www.linkedin.com/in/parul-vij-chopra-87654a1a/
Hello @Parul Vij Chopra,
I'd suggest a program to first identify your advocate/promoters and then engage them for introductions into other parts of the business (that is, "activate" them once identified). In the process of gathering customer feedback from your key stakeholders, the Net Promoter "recommend" question could be key here to phrase correctly in B2B environments like yours, "How likely would you be to recommend Avatour to colleagues, if you were in a position to do so?" In other words, a stakeholder-oriented Voice-of-Customer program would not only provide feedback to the CS team and to the rest of the business around what is working and what the optimal priorities are for improvement, but will also accelerate expansion efforts especially when you are targeting key influencers such as your stakeholder team.
I'm happy to provide more details and perhaps this article is a good place to start as it contains tons of detail on the "how" to do this for ROI:
https://waypointgroup.org/stop-chasing-renewals-heres-how-to-keep-customers-engaged-so-renewals-and-more-will-just-come/
Does this help and/or what questions can I answer?
/Steve
Hey Parul,
Before starting Onboard.io, I was the Head of CS & Onboarding at Ambassador Software. We put together a ton of content on this, but just to summarize here are the steps:Feel free to ping me - I think I have an ebook that I wrote when I was there that went through how to structure referral programs.
Hope this is helpful!