Before You Start - Develop Your Plan

For any of you who have built a home you can probably remember how important the blueprints are. In fact, there is no way that a contractor would build a home for you unless you have blueprints. Well just like with a home, you are building a reference program, so you need blueprints also know as a plan. If you can take a few weeks or months to build your plan this will make a huge difference in how successful your program will be.

As you develop your customer reference program plan, here are some things you my want to include in your plan:

• Executive Summary (benefits to company and customers)
• SWOT (Strength, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
• Business Challenges (Challenges to getting references)
• Program Goals and Objectives (Top three goals and supporting objectives)
• Customer Program Components (Web, newsletters, deliverables)
• Project Strategies (Guidelines, Rules of engagement, scripts, forms)
• Proposed Program Changes (Levels 1-4, benefit matrix etc)
• Job Details/Responsibilities (Including expectations, timelines etc)
• Action Items (90 day plan to get started and then goals for rest of year)
• Research (Industry Research, survey results, Target 100 references, Target 50 success stories )