Prescreen people for customer references

[Professor Wilder]

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@ Crystal Anderson

I typically schedule 20 minute calls with each customer (MM & Enterprise) and walk through a list of questions to dig into their use case, level of experience with our company, what their level of interest is in working with us on co-marketing opps, and PR restrictions. Often times I try to request a PR representative to sit in on this call to build that relationship out as well – especially helpful once you start working with them on public testimonials. A nice little surprise is I typically will send them a branded coffee mug and coffee beans a few days prior to our meeting…I call it our advocacy coffee dates and it helps create more rapport heading into the call. For SMB, I will send out a $5 coffee giftcard and a form for them to fill out with the same prescreen questions.

…I also would definitely do an email intro. Then you can request to be pulled into the next 1:1 call if you have additional questions or identify a warm/hot advocate. For those who might not fit the bill or are deemed cold advocates, I’d throw them into the advocate nurture to slowly build that relationship and warm them up.

For the holiday crunch – you could possibly get away with using a few of them right off the bat (it really depends on how long they’ve been using your product/experience and interest level in participation). My honest opinion would be to shield them from asks right now…it’s the holidays, everyone’s swamped with strategic planning, and the last thing you want to do is start a relationship out with an ask (but again, you may have 1 or 2 that are looking to build their thought leadership/professional profile and want to do co-marketing with you). IF you do require additional advocates for the holiday crunch time, this is the time when everyone is building 2023 budget plans and renewals coming up..you could build a discount or volume incentive into their contract, asking for a reference/asset in return

… planning for faster reference fulfillment time. This is hard to conquer, especially during holidays, but I’ve been able to manage this by proactively sending advocate handraisers (those who have expressly said they want to do an activity with us) to the sales team/CS/growth teams bi-weekly, sometimes monthly. That allows you and the sales team to get ahead of any potential asks that will occur for the next few weeks. So this month, I am working on warming up 10-15 new referrals/advocates and will send an email to the team mid-December letting them know each indiviudal, “Suzy from Amazon X has handraised for speaking engagements, reference calls, and a success story”. Then all teams have visibility to a list of the most recent handrasiers, what activities they are interested in for next month, January, and we’re able to use the advocate handraisers RIGHT when they’re engaging with us and not 3 months down the line. Hope this helps a little!

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  Professor Wilder.