At Gainsight, we are tracking references through Milestones on the Customer 360 page. In the comment section of the milestone we include which contact at the customer was used for the reference and for which prospect they were used. We do this in order to be able to run reports on references and pull in the date of the last reference into a dashboard so we don’t overuse our advocates.
In addition this may be a good use case for identifying the reference contacts in Sponsor Tracking. This way the contacts will be very visible on the Customer 360 along with the Milestones for dates when that person was utilized as a reference. The added benefit of this is that you will know when a reference contact leaves the company or changes position at your customer.
Thanks, Nathan! This sounds like it might work for us as well.
We did a webinar a while back that outlines in detail the program that Nathaniel is referring to. You can view the recording here:
http://www.gainsight.com/event/finding-approving-and-tracking-sales-references/
I see a lot of this activity is from 5 years ago. Question, what is Gainsight NXT’s current capacity for reference management?
@Dkirkpatrick Curious to understand how you’re thinking about reference management and how you would change what you currently have. I’ve seen some organizations build out a reference dashboard. Others look to build a system of points to assign to people to understand who their best advocates might be.
@Dkirkpatrick Our latest approach to reference management in our instance of NXT is to use fields on Company Person to record whether they’re a reference. (If I had to do it again, I might even recommend doing it on the Person, since they can certainly stay a reference as they move from job to job.) The first and most impactful think you can do for folks who are sourcing references is to provide the single list of who those references are, along with data like health scores and such. To that point, we built a Data Designer that includes data for each reference, such as open risk CTAs, escalated support tickets, and the date of the most recent reference conversation. (Our Customer Marketing team creates CTAs as a record of reference conversations.) The last bell’n’whistle that we added was to put a question into the NPS survey asking if someone would be a reference (which only appears if they’re an NPS promoter), and we’ve also put a single-question survey in-app using PX. In both cases, Rules use that data to automatically populate the reference field on Company Person. And the dashboard includes reports of those most recent survey responses, so that Customer Marketing can easily see which references most recently came in through those channels.
