Today’s lesson: Leveraging customer references in three phases

To help you win even more customers

No customer wants to be the first penguin

“but everyone wants to be the second penguin”

To leverage customer references we have to look for three different

kind of penguins

To match the three main phases of a product life

cycle

We can use this model for customer references

I use 3 kinds of customer references

1. Conceptual

2. Architectural

3. Financial

#1 -- Conceptual: The customer “gets” the technology and validates

the new concept

The “conceptual” customer is an early adopter

Conceptual Customer Reference

• You have a MVP and have signed up private beta customers

• In tech, these are early adopters, very competent, know that bits are missing

• Customer can imagine how they will use it

Not a lot of “info”, just a validation that the technology could be useful

Weather Channel

A consumer product version: ThingCharger

ThingCharger

Conceptual use cases are often used to pitch products to investors

#2 -- Architectural: The customer proves that it works

Architectural customer may bridge “early adopter” and “pragmatists”

Architectural

• Customer proves that it works in (early) production

– Could be a proof of concept

– Tends to be using production data (perhaps in parallel to existing systems)

– Too early for ROI, but the customer believes they will see benefits soon

Most references are architectural

• Lots of formats (in order of expense)

– Slide decks – user conferences

• The customer does it himself

– White papers

• The slide deck is expanded to a white paper and posted to the web

– Video

• Can be cheap or expensive to produce but getting the customer to participate takes some time

In a perfect world you have many architectural references

• Customers from your key vertical markets – Manufacturing, Healthcare, Public Sector

• Customers by region (esp if you are global) and in local languages (esp in APAC and LATAM)

• Customers with new uses of your product or extensions

Architectural example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va-

rcr0qS_c&list=PLFF9C9E69AFC3DFF7

Logos: Amazon AWS

Mostly Architectural

Financial Benefits are Vague

Real financials would be verified by a third party

The point is lots of use cases

Hopefully from companies other customers have heard of

Logos: not much detail but “borrowed” reputation

Financial: The customer can prove financial benefit

Financial references are for the fat part of the bell curve

Financial

• Documented financial benefits

• Best done by third party

• Expensive/time consuming

• Durable – longer shelf life #1 and #2

• Useful for creating webinars

Usually a white paper

Or spreadsheet

Financial Examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4O2poUssMc

Best Practices

Making references a standard part of the sales and marketing process

References are difficult and expensive to get, we usually use personal incentives

• Incent sales reps “first referenceable win”

• Incent customer – swag, speaking slot, pro exposure

• Most require legal review by both parties

• Third stage – financial – is best done by a third party (i.e. Gartner, Forrester) and is super expensive

You need to bake reference processes into your CRM systems

• Put these on wiki or salesforce or whatever CRM system you are using.

• Add a field for customer reference (Y/N)

• Add customer story field on CRM system

• Track when they are accessed by reps

• Update annually, date everything

• Most companies have sales rep for that account as first contact.

For external sites

• Less info than on internal reference sites

• Legal/legal/legal

• Usually must renew the customer agreement (to be a reference annually)

• Sometimes just a few logos and videos is enough (first penguin syndrome) to get started

Contact Info: jeff.medaugh@gmail.com

@jeff_medaugh

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