By Linda Forrest
On this blog, we’ve written quite a bit about the PR value of reference customers and how to groom them. What we haven’t yet explored is how your PR team works with the balance of your team to cultivate that reference and ultimately exploit it to the highest degree within your PR program. This post aims to do just that.
How does your PR team know which customers to approach to be a reference?
Success relies heavily on your PR team having good interactions with your sales team. Without the insight that sales can provide as to who is using the product to best effect, is happy, articulate, approachable and exhibits other attributes you would want in a reference customer, the PR team could pursue a reference from a customer that will not serve you best in this capacity. Just handing your PR team a customer list and having them start dialling is a recipe for disaster. Have your sales team forge a warm introduction, then have your PR team spell out exactly what it is they’re after and what the benefit is to the customer that participates.
What’s in it for them?
Incentives for participation may range from points off on purchases, to improved market awareness for them should your PR team be pitching stories in vertical media.
Rather than going cap in hand to the customer and begging their participation, your PR team can frame the conversation with “how would a PR initiative like this further your communication efforts, get you closer to your goals?” This is a symbiotic proposition – if your PR team gets coverage for your customer and has worked closely with them to ensure that the effort aligns with their communications goals, they’ll be much happier at the outcome (and likely to act as a reference again in future) if the messaging of said coverage is accurate and helps propel their marketing forward. You benefit from the endorsement of your customer, as prospects will hopefully see themselves in the customer profiled and be inspired to learn more about your product. You also benefit because of the strengthening of your relationship with your customer.
Determining the range of reference options
Do you want to develop fully produced marketing case study pieces that will be used as sales collateral, or are you just looking for a customer to take a phone call from a reporter? Many customers will have the former in mind and be frightened off at the prospect of a large amount of their time being required and a lengthy quagmire of approvals before them when you may only be asking them for 15 minutes of their time on the phone. In my experience, the bigger the organization, the more hoops that need to be jumped through in order to secure that reference. That’s when it’s time to get creative with what the reference will be comprised of.
Determine the range of participation available to your customers and then have exploratory conversations with them at the outset. What are they personally comfortable with? What is there communications department comfortable with? Making sure everyone’s on the same page, being creative and flexible about what shape the reference takes with a clear mutual benefit spelled out will lead to a happy result for both parties.
Rocket Watcher wrote a post back in 2008 that offered some suggestions on what customer references might look like:
- A Guest blog post on your corporate blog
- A video/audio interview with pre-set questions
- A Q&A interview by text
- A quote Agree to be a reference for press interviews
- Agree to be a references for analysts
- Agree to speak at your conference or local events
- Agree to speak at your sales conference or internal kickoff
- Agree to being on a public list of members of your advisory council
All good ideas, which require varying degrees of participation and approval by communications gatekeepers.
There are some extensive resources on the topic that you might want to peruse if you’re looking to formalize your customer reference program. Pragmatic Marketing has a detailed, step-by-step plan for implementing a customer reference program. A key step of this plan is establishing a champion (there’s that word again!) for the program:
Centralize and have a champion for the corporate customer reference program. Customer reference efforts often fail because once you provide a reference and win a deal, it’s time to move on—until the next scramble ensues. The problem can arise because no one owns customer references. Or because no one champions the need for a formalized reference program. Or because there is no central repository for reference information with notes about accounts and activities. Information often resides in individual spreadsheets and emails. A champion communicates and demonstrates the benefits of a formalized reference program. A champion also maintains the momentum of valuable reference activity.
Finding a champion often comes from a marketing or sales executive who understands the benefits and challenges associated with customer reference management. From Product Management to PR to Sales, effective customer reference management helps all facets of the organization, but it often takes a whisper in an executive’s ear to get the ball rolling and formalize the effort.
Time and again, when searching for customer reference experts, Joshua Horowitz, who wrote the plan mentioned above, was at the top of my search results. His company Boulder Logic has created an enterprise software package to manage customer reference programs and he’s a frequent guest blogger on sites such as SavvyB2BMarketing and MarketingProfs. If you’re looking for more information on this topic, his blog is a great place to start.
Image: See Virtual
