One of the biggest challenges for customer reference managers is finding and recruiting customers. If you are lucky enough to work for a large company like EMC, Microsoft, Intel, HP and Oracle your job will be easier because customers WANT to be part of your reference program! In fact EMC has an awesome reference program called Studio E. On their Studio E website customers sign THEMSELVES up to be a reference. The EMC reference team then calls them and finds out what level they want to be, gets more details, etc.
For the rest of us who work for smaller companies it's a different process. We have to first find potential references. What I usually do when I start with a reference program is build a target reference list which I call my "reference pipeline". When building your 'reference pipeline' be sure to include a wide variety of customers in different geographies, industries, products, new products, and company size. This is important to ensuring your reference program helps your company's strategic long-term direction.
In my reference pipeline, I try to have at least 100 target references. I find these by talking to the internal teams that work with customers (sales, inside sales, support, consulting etc), reviewing forums for customers 'advocates', attending sales meetings/calls, reviewing sales systems for long-time big name customers, working with product management and reviewing customer surveys for happy customers. Hopefully your company has a Net Promoter® survey or at least includes these questions in your customer surveys to identify the customers with the highest satisfaction and willingness to recommend! These are just a few ideas to identify references, but what I love about being a reference manager is that I can be creative in finding customer references!
Recruiting reference customers is one of my favorite things to do. I think it's my sales background but I love asking customers if they will join a reference program! I have call and e-mail scripts but I usually try to change it up a little every time to see which ways work best. It's seriously like closing a sale. The worst they can say is 'no' and that causes me no physical pain. If they say maybe, ask when you can check back and if there's anything you can do to get them to say yes. Even if they say no, qualify that more. Is it a HARD no or a soft no? If it's soft no, ask if you can check back in 3-6 months or if there's anything you can do to help out. Whatever their response is make sure to track it so you can follow up if needed. I highly suggest though that you always work with sales to ask customers. Sometimes they want to ask the customers themselves, be on a call with you or will let you go directly to the customer. But never go around your sales reps. It's very disrespectful and won't build you any points with them if you know what I mean!
For more on this topic, I recommend an article by Joshua Horwitz of Boulder Logic "To Grow Your Customer References, Get Support from Those That Know Them Best" . He expands more on working with key people internally who have trust relationships with customers to help you get references.
