When handling high-value, unique, or complex deals, a good customer reference can be make or break. References are most effective when matched closely in terms of use case, industry, tech stack, or other criteria that will affect the buying decision. 

But all too often, references are sourced based on relationships that the CSM has built, which make the referrer likely to be a firm advocate, but potentially not as effective as they’re not a great match for the prospect. This also leads to an over-dependence on a few customers to provide references. 

Here’s how you can use Planhat in order to identify potential referrers, achieve the closest alignment between the customer and the referrer, and foster the relationship to create serial referrers. 

Initial steps

1. Collate: To start with, create a Conversation Type called “Reference” for customers that are willing to be a referrer. Then create conditional custom fields for the data you want to document. This will be how a referrer is partnered with a customer, so include fields like industry, location, use case, and tech-stack as a minimum. Another valuable field can be what they were using previously to solve the problem your product solves for – did they come from a competitor, were they using spreadsheets, phone calls and sticky notes, a home-built solution, etc. 

2. Surface: Make it easy for Sales to identify the appropriate referrer for an opportunity by creating a Reference Dashboard. By feeding the information from step one into a dashboard, Sales are given instant access to all the potential customers that match the deal they are trying to close. 

3. Contact: At this stage you can either have Sales reach out to the CSM to confirm the customer would be appropriate and willing, or create a toggle on conversation type that allows CSMs to remove customers from the reference list. This ensures anyone on the list is contactable, and allows for easy temporary removal if the customer is not in a position to give a reference. 

4. Reward: To foster ongoing enthusiasm from your cohort of referrals, you can use Planhat to set up automations where you thank customers for providing a reference, or prompt CSMs to get the customer a gift after a pre-set number of references.

Pro tips

• Set up an automation so when a customer provides a positive NPS score it automatically updates the field on the contact level to say this person could be a good reference. 

• Create a sense of community by talking about customer references and the relationships they build in customer communications. This helps foster the idea that providing references is something that provides value, so it feels less like a favor. 

We hope you find this guide useful. If you have any suggestions for how it could be improved, please reach out to me at andrew.london@planhat.com.