Being a Reference Manager - Pros and Cons

Someone recently asked me why I am a Customer Reference Manager. The answer was easy - It's my passion and I feel lucky to have found a career I love! I have never had a job where I can impact a company as much as I can as a Customer Reference Manager. I can help sales in many ways including helping them close deals faster, answering their RFPs on time, give their customers recognition for being thought leaders, give them sales tools they love and so much more. I can help them
PR team have better press releases by including customer quotes and giving them customer advocates who are willing to do press interviews. I can help marketing by developing some of the most downloaded assets on the websites - video testimonials and case studies. I can help executives by giving them customer stories to share with analysts, with the press and internally. I can help employee morale by sharing how real-life customers are using the product and having great success with it.

There are of course challenges being a Customer Reference Manager. I heard once that the average time someone stays in this role is one year. I don't know if that's true but I have to wonder when I go to the Customer Reference Forum and people have switched companies and there are a lot of new faces. One year isn't long for a job but this isn't an ordinary job! The challenges include: stress of getting requests 24 x 7 x 365, pressure to find happy customers with minimal help from others, balancing your time between strategic and tactical, the ability to balance projects without dropping the ball EVER, a think skin to handle when you get told no by customers, sales skills to sell customers on why they should be references and internally to sell your program, and so much more... However even these things are fun for me. They are challenges that can be solved especially someone with passion, a positive attitude, enthusiam and some Chutzpah!

Reference Programs - Luxury or Necessity?

Over the past few weeks some friends have commented that Customer Reference Programs are a luxury for companies. Really? They are a luxury? I disagree for many reasons. First, if your company is truly customer-focused you will have increased sales, customer satisfaction and employee morale. Some companies in fact, see customer reference programs as so valuable that they have built an entire organization around customer references and feedback. Oracle has a team of over 100 people in their "Customer Focus" organization and they would agree it's been wildly successful. At the Customer Reference Forum earlier this year, I got to hear Julie Tung talk about their Customer Focus organization and programs. Here's a recap of her presentation. One of my favorite books, Discipline of Market Leaders talks about this quite a bit. They say "Making the improvement of the chosen value to customers the focus of the entire company will result in corresponding shareholder value". Another author says "Between 85% and 95% of senior business leaders believe that the next competitive differentiator is Customer Experience. Implementing a comprehensive Customer Focus Strategy will give you a unique competitive advantage." (Ray Miller - That's Customer Focus)

Second, research has shown that companies who have an established reference program can decrease the length of the sales cycle and increase the efficiency of employees. Just the other day, Gartner Analyst Richard Fouts gave these two points:

• The sales cycle used to be 12 months now it’s 15 months (increase by 20%)and customer references help shorten the sales cycle. Customer references are more important than ever to help shorten the sales cycle and have huge impact on revenue.
• #1 thing that influences a customer to buy is a customer reference (2.5 more times likely to buy when company can articulate message with a customer reference). References validate the message a company is saying about their product/solution and references reduce risks. (Gartner survey - Richard Fouts)

Third, never underestimate the power of a passionate customer reference program manager. If you get the right person in this type of role they don't just impact your reference program but can help transform your company to be more customer focused and roll out more customer programs and initiatives (customer welcome programs, customer surveys, communication etc).

Please discuss.