First and foremost, you need executive support. You need a champion at the executive level who understands the importance of a customer reference program and will support your efforts with headcount and budget. This champion will help you in many other ways too such as selling the program internally.
Second, we have the sales organization which is a critical component to building your program. In my last post, I covered why sales should be your best friend. Sales is an interesting stakeholder because you need each other. They need a successful customer reference program to help them sell more and you need them to build your program. If this relationship is strong, it's a huge win-win for your program. Make sure to involve all players in sales from sales management, field sales, strategic account managers, inside sales, etc to ensure you have a strong program. They all have insights and relationships with accounts and as a whole their feedback should give you a complete picture of accounts.
Third, marketing is another key stakeholder. Whether your program sits in marketing or sales or wherever, you will be working with marketing usually on daily basis. You'll need to have their help in producing collateral, getting deliverables on your company website, getting your customers successes in customer and internal newsletters and many other ways. Get to know your marketing contacts and build strong relationships with them as this relationship will make or break your program.
Other key stakeholders include IT (who will build your systems you need to run your program), partners (who are very important and I will touch on in a future article), services and engineering. You'll also have to include product management but often they will sit in the engineering or marketing organizations.
