Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms - of which Salesforce.com is possibly the most well-known example - provide comprehensive facilities to track leads, client contacts, diary notes, action items and so forth.
In a sales-driven organisation a CRM is a terrific tool for providing your customers with quality service, for keeping track of all the interactions between your company and the customer irrespective of medium used, and generally doing business smarter.
Yet, because these platforms contain a rich suite of functionality and power their users can find themselves lulled into a sense of security when it comes to a different type of CRM, namely customer reference management.
To clarify, customer reference management - or customer reference programs - refers to harnessing your customers to become an asset in your sales and marketing.
Every customer you have can potentially be a member of your sales team. A customer testimonial carries weight where someone, just like your prospective customers, is facing the same challenges and hurdles and achieves efficiencies and savings through the solutions you provide. It's no longer you asserting benefits; a customer reference provides verifiable proof of its success.
It sounds simple, but you really need a good database and system to leverage this to best effect. Which customers are likely to be ambassadors and promotors of your products and services? How can you coordinate and fulfill requests for customer references during the process of acquiring new clients, as well as assisting analysts, media and investors validate customer success stories?
To exploit this to best results you need to organise references which apply to different products, services and stages of the sales cycle. Trying to maintain this in a CRM - at least, out-of-the-box, is going to be an exercise in frustration.
You will also want to house and group customer reference collateral - video and audio interviews, case studies, presentations, whitepapers and the like - but CRMs typically are not designed to store and catalogue material like this, let alone track and report on who you have sent material to and how frequently it has been accessed.
To solve this problem of customer reference management you essentially have three options.
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A case in point is customer reference burnout. Your CRM will manage your customer's contact details, but won't automatically track how often customer references are being called upon to fulfill a request. Given these customers are your ambassadors you do not want to risk overusing and burning out such strong advocates.
Secondly, alternatively, you can use a dedicated customer reference management tool. This allows you to continue using a best-of-breed tool for customer relationship management and similarly for customer reference management.
The downside is switching in and out of each app, having your salespeople now work with two distinct systems, and potentially having inconsistent data between the two.
Third, add customer reference management facilities to your CRM app. The major CRM apps - like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Zoho and others - provide extensibility so extra functionality can be built, packaged and made available.
For a Salesforce.com example and solution, you could use RO|ReferenceView from RO|Innovation which is dedicated to this very task and is easily plugged-in to an existing Salesforce.com environment.
This product appears as simply another tab in SalesForce, providing dedicated functionality to manage customer references yet doing so directly within the familiar SalesForce environment. There is no need for the sales dept to switch in and out of applications, or to learn a new interface.
Now, what would a customer reference management system be without customer references? As you would expect RO|Innovation provide several case studies from well-known companies like Blackboard, Sybase and McAfee.
