One of the most effective ways to demonstrate the practicality, efficiency, and reliability of a product or service is through customer references. However, managing customer references can be quite challenging as the process involves navigating through different systems, keeping up with sales requests, and maintaining a balanced and sustainable relationship with reference customers.
Influitive’s Response to Complexity: A Holistic Ecosystem
Understanding the multifaceted challenges and the pivotal role of customer references, Influitive has engineered a Reference Management App for Salesforce — an embodiment of simplicity, efficiency, and strategic alignment in the world of reference management. With this release, Influitive becomes the only vendor that can source, manage and reward references in a single unified system.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the full reference process to show you how you can consolidate your advocacy and reference programs into one platform.
Sellers can create a Reference Request at the Opportunity level inside Salesforce
The app is designed to work seamlessly with your broader Influitive program. Recruiting can be done organically or via nomination by CSMs and Account Managers. Leveraging a combination of pre-existing Salesforce data, and the living and breathing zero-party data collected every day by Influitive, finding the perfect match is easy and accurate.
This also works in tandem with Influitive’s new embed apps for Khoros and Salesforce communities, giving you the ability to promote reference opportunities on multiple platforms with a single click. This helps fulfill requests faster so that you can close more deals.
Intelligent Automation and Smart Matchmaking
The app introduces a new feature that automatically scores and ranks contacts dynamically based on the opportunity and prospect. By instantly sorting and recommending potential references, it ensures that sales reps can move fast and reference managers recruit the right contacts. This not only enhances the probability of conversion but also safeguards against bad-fit references.
Automatically find reference matches using demographics, firmographics, account health, etc.
Contact scoring even works when you anonymize reference contacts to protect them from being overused by your sales team. This ensures good matches and prevents impatient sellers from going around systems and processes to reach out to customers directly.
Swift Approvals and Informed Stakeholder Participation
Get approvals from key account owners before moving forward with a reference
Traditionally, securing internal approvals has been a time-intensive process, potentially slowing down sales momentum. The Influitive app offers a simple solution by enabling swift, 1-click approvals, that are automatically sent to the appropriate contact owner and reference manager.
This ensures that while all stakeholders are kept abreast of the developments, approvals aren’t an impediment, thereby maintaining the rhythm and pace of sales operations.
Using Influitive to Build a Solid Reference Pool
Influitive’s advocacy platform helps companies discover, nurture and mobilize their advocates at scale to generate referrals, references, reviews and more. When it comes to reference management, we know that customer advocates make the best references because they have a demonstrated willingness to speak about your product and deeply understand its use cases.
Using Influitive’s proprietary targeting engine and modern engagement mechanics, members are guided through a personalized journey based on their preferences, profile data, and past behaviors. Actions taken within Influitive can be recognized in the form of points, badges, levels and leaderboards that give a sense of achievement and create friendly competition.
Influitive program managers can surprise and delight members with personal notes, one-off activities, and extra points to say “thank you.” Influitive is a proven tool that deepens customer relationships and increases the size of your reference pool continuously.
Influitive can automatically import contacts from Salesforce and seamlessly add them to a dynamic “Reference Group” which will fuel your pipeline when sales reps generate a new Reference Request within Salesforce.
Sales reps can also nominate reference pool candidates to your Influitive program right inside of Salesforce.
From there, you can build out a reference member’s profile by combining critical customer data from Salesforce with zero-party data collected from Influitive activities. This ensures your members receive highly tailored requests that support their expertise and experience. These fields may include:
- Company Size
- Product
- Industry
- Use Cases
- Integrations
- Competitors evaluated
- Vendor replaced
- Years of experience
- Languages spoken
- City
- State / Province
- Phone number
- Pain points before purchasing
Deliver a sleek and targeted reference request inside your Influitive advocacy program
Once a reference request from Salesforce has been created and approved, a templated reference activity is automatically created in the Influitive program, and reference managers can further personalize the ask and award points for each stage of the reference flow (e.g., customer accepts reference opportunity, schedules call, completes call).
Beyond Metrics: Delivering Strategic Insights
Metrics and KPIs serve to measure the effectiveness of your strategies and tactics, providing tangible data and insights to gauge both efficacy and impact. The Reference Management App provides you with the measurements you need out of the box.
This dashboard offers key performance indicators such as:
- The number of references received
- The incremental impact of references on your win rates
- The total pipeline revenue influenced by your reference program
Attribute revenue and measure the ROI of the program directly in Salesforce
You’ll also be able to view all references provided at both the account and contact level.
From evaluating the incremental impact on win rates to discerning the total pipeline revenue influenced by the program, the app delivers a comprehensive overview, ensuring that your reference program’s strategy is continually refined, optimized, and aligned with broader organizational goals.
Conclusion
As we step into a new era of customer advocacy and reference management, tools like Influitive’s Reference Management App will stand out, not merely for their ability to streamline processes but for their capacity to transform customer reference management into a strategic, impactful, and customer-centric initiative, propelling businesses into new realms of credibility, trust, and sales excellence.
Ready to automate and modernize your reference management program? Click here to book a demo.
