An interesting phenomenon I noticed when I first became a customer reference manager was the number of education customers who volunteer to be customer references. One of the first things I did at LANDesk when I got there was to review the existing customer references and success stories by many areas including industry, geography, company size, product/solution, etc. I don't remember the exact number but it was somewhere around 20% of the existing references were education. This got me investigating why it was such a high number. Wouldn't you want to have references for industries that have bigger budgets and/or are growing rapidly like financial services, healthcare, etc? Also don't you want to align your customer references and reference assets to the industries you want to sell to?
After five years of being a reference manager I now understand why education customers are typically references. First, IT teams at colleges and universities are usually early adopters and like to participate in beta programs. Second, they usually don't have to get approvals like customers at Fortune 500 customers do. And third, they are some of the nicest customers I have ever worked with!
Bottom line is that it's fine to have educational references but be sure to expand your reference and reference asset portfolio to include other industries as well.
Happy referencing!
