Every organization we work with has gone through some trials and tribulations to gain executive support and funding for their customer reference program. There are the exceptions where an executive intuitively “gets it” and doesn’t require extensive financial payback models and your first born to get her signature—but those are rare.

We, the founders of Point of Reference, come from a sales background. As such we see things through the lens of the sales force. If the customer reference program doesn’t start with the sales perspective, we believe it’s unlikely to be successful. So when we talk to companies in the early stages of building their case, we recommend beginning with a survey of the field. There are a number of questions that should be asked, and there will be variation from organization to organization, but here are a few we feel are “must haves”:

• What percentage of your deals require customer references in order to close?
• On average, how many customers make up any single request (e.g., I need to talk to 3 of your customers)?
• How are you finding those customers today (this list should reflect your environment)?
• On average, how much calendar time elapses from a request to fulfillment?
• On average, how many hours do you spend on any given request?
• On average, what percentage of the reference interactions you arrange actually hurt your chances of closing the deal?
• How many of your customers have asked to be rested or taken off your reference list in the last year due to overuse?

These questions create a baseline of understanding, and also a basis of comparison for a survey you’ll want to run after the program has been launched and the kinks worked out. The key take-aways are related to sales efficiency, the risks of having reactive/unorganized customer reference practices as well as the potential to damage your most valuable customer relationships.

Use the feedback you get from sales to set targets for reducing and monetizing the time spent by sales rounding up references, to reduce this portion of the sales process (e.g., accelerate the cycle), to ensure all references help the process, and that customer overuse becomes a thing of the past. Coupled with arguably the most meaningful metric programs have today, revenue influenced, you’ll gave a strong starting point for building your customer reference program case.

For more resources on building a program and achieving successful user adoption, visit our reference program tools page. As always, we welcome your comments.