What is a Customer Reference Program?
Customer reference programs provide a way to leverage customers to establish, maintain or strengthen your brand. A program enables companies to engage their customers in every aspect of marketing – including advertising, PR, analyst relations, and the corporate Web site – sales, events, executive presentations and more.
The goal is to have an army of highly satisfied customer evangelists who are passionate persuaders for your products and services.
Ideally a program should track the lifecycle of a customer: from deal signing, to first adoption of a product/service, to measurable ROI from use of your product/service.
Logistically speaking, this means the program needs to track the customers, understand which customers are using which products in what vertical markets, and have basic contact information – typically all available via the sales team. Then customer reference program managers can make contact with the customers to get a sense of how they are using the products and services, and to gauge their viability and interest in participating in reference activities.
In simplest terms, a customer reference program helps a company understand its customers better, and enables it to leverage them for all kinds of marketing activities.
We’re barely scratching the surface here, so know that in future posts we will cover additional topics such as:
• how to get internal buy-in to create a customer reference program
• budgeting for a customer reference program
• conducting customer interviews
• types of customer marketing content
• securing approvals: customer, legal, PR
• using technology in your program
• measuring results
• … and much more!
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Email“While it makes sense that some organizations will limit their definition to a particular type of reference activity, we’ve found a lot of efficiencies of bringing all types of customer marketing content and live peer to peer activities under a single program. It does take more work to align all the different stakeholders, but really allows us to ensure the best experience for our customers.”
– Donna Martinez, Program Manager ADP.
