How Vitally Built a Best-in-Class Customer Reference Program

‍When to use this Blueprint

Mary’s Blueprint includes two examples: a Customer Reference list (Table View) to track and identify the best match for a prospect and a Reference Request Process (Internal Doc) to define guidelines for the reference program.

There are a few factors to consider when building out your customer reference program for the first time:

• What constitutes a healthy, referenceable customer? (e.g., NPS of 8+, type of user or job title, engagement level with the CSM, lifecycle stage, etc.)
• Who is in charge of managing the customer reference program? Will we create a self-serve list for the Sales team to access and update, or will we have a dedicated person gatekeeping the list?
• What incentives can we offer our customers for participating as a reference? Sometimes, this is a monetary incentive, gift, or company swag. Other times, it’s providing a community - customers might enjoy the aspect of networking with like-minded industry professionals.

Once you’ve identified your initial criteria, you can then leverage a Customer Success Platform (CSP) to build out and maintain your process. From there, you can even set up automated emails to invite customers to your reference program like Emma, Sr. Customer Marketing Manager at PeopleGrove, has done here.

‍KPIs Impacted‍

• # of New Deals Influenced by Advocates (Closed Won)
• % in Deal Velocity
• Total ARR Amount ($) of New Deals Influenced by Reference Program Advocates
• % of Difference that Advocate Accounts Retain over Non-Advocates

What data points or information will you need to complete or add?

This Blueprint offers a look into how the Vitally team manages references. You’ll need to adjust the Traits (customer data points) in the Table View and the content in the Internal Doc so that it makes sense for your team.

With Table Views, you can pull in a wide-range of Traits from 20+ integrations such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Mixpanel along with data provided by Vitally (NPS, Health Score, etc.). You can also build custom Traits to help you track data specific to reference customers. You might want to create custom Traits to track the Last Reference Date, the Contact’s Location, Competitors Considered, and much more.

‍How can you customize this for other use cases?

Table Views & Internal Docs are completely customizable for any scenario within Customer Marketing, Customer Success, and beyond. Customer Success teams can create external facing Docs to collaborate with customers and align on projects such as onboarding or success planning.

Sales and Marketing teams can build tailored Hubs to surface the data that’s important to them. The sky's the limit!

Going beyond Table Views & Docs

Beyond the features discussed above, Vitally users have the ability to create Hubs, Projects, Conversation Templates, Playbook Automation and much more to foster collaboration with customers and overall efficiency of their teams. Request a demo to learn more about how Vitally can help your teams become more productive.