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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Comments

Will Stevenson

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:

Identify who should be in your referral program. Ideally you're looking for Promotors (NPS) and Raving Fans (customers that might not have filled out an NPS survey, but have made it clear they love you).
Engage your referrers by activating them. Invite them or automatically enroll them in the program, providing them with all the information they need (i.e. referral link, incentive structure, etc.). But the key is to ask them for referrals at the right time - usually at the moments of peek excitement (i.e. after they've seen the first major benefit of your software).
Incentivize with the right amount, at the right time, for the right referral. What event do you want to reward for (demo request, signed contract, etc.). There can be a ton of combinations here, but cash is still king. For top of the funnel activities (demo requests) you can typically provide a lower incentive. For bottom of the funnel (sign ups, sales) you'll typically need to increase this incentive, especially if your sales cycle is longer. You don't want your referrers to go months without receiving an incentive, unless it's worth waiting for.
Conversions should be measurable and easily accessible for customers. The last thing you want is for a referrer to feel like they're not getting credit for a referral. There are a ton of softwares to help with this, but if you're trying to do it manually it's honestly going to be hard not to miss referrals.

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!

Christie Anderson

Hi Parul,

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!

Parul Vij Chopra

At this point, we are looking to be lean and do it manually. Such a complex world when every entity is acting independently.

Steve Bernstein

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

Jonna Pedersen

Hi Parul
Following this thread! We introduced a referral/loyalty program a few years back but it only lasted a year (the cost of the software that backed it was expensive, change in leadership that owned the initiative). We've been on the hunt for something new since.
Thanks for posting
Jonna