Mainly for us, our program centers on a lot of internal enablement, so using the long form content we have or the case studies or the conference talks and boiling them down so our sales folks, our go-to-market folks, the people who are talking to anybody out in the market have those references that they can easily put into a slide deck, that they can easily reference on the fly; because it's not just important that we know how to tell stories, we have to make sure that every other person in the company, whether they're GTM or engineering or our executives, have the most applicable reference at any given point. I like to simplify it down and describe our job as helping whatever customer we have internally get from point A to point B faster, and then we let them define what point A and point B are, which depending on the person we are working with internally could be any number of definitions. So, it forces us to remain agile, but also means we get to be selective in what content we work on so that our mighty team of 3 can produce things that have the most bang for our buck across the entire business.
That person ended up being me, so I was hired to start it. We needed to put structure in place, to lay the groundwork to have this program when we were small. So, when I joined, there were 270 people at the company; we're now over a thousand. So, the investment is very similar to how sales functions invest in early sales methodology. You don't necessarily need to have something like MEDDPICC in place when you only have one hundred people, but it's all about setting the culture and the expectation that this is an ingrained and an important part of who we are and what we do so that we are well-established for the next thousand people who join.
Overall, though, 60 to 70% of the time we work within the go-to-market realm, so we're talking direct sales, SDRs, CSMs, SEs and working in ways that most customer marketing and advocacy folks say is their bread and butter. But that other 30-40% of the time, we’re working on various cross functional projects like working with our COO and VP of Customer Experience to support sessions at our recent Global Kickoff or our PMM organization on proof points for new product launches and enablement, or even our Analyst Relations team on various review programs.
We also have six conference tour stops (spanning 4 continents) that we're working on right now; each one needs at least one speaker. We have our big conference in June where we’ll be featuring 11 external speaker-led sessions. We have a conference in November where this past year we had six customer speakers. We have our Customer Advisory Board and a whole slew of other programs that keep us busy. So, yea, it’s a wide gamut, but it’s pretty fun to run through it all.
But if I were to pick out one area where I suppose we could say was challenging, I know there really wasn't a formal process for nominations before ReferenceEdge. I mean, it would basically be like "Hey, we have a customer or a user that is willing to speak or otherwise share their story." It'd be kind of ad hoc via Slack or somebody would send an email and, you know, there'd be that. So, there was no formal process and since the beginning, I just pulled up the dashboard, since the day we launched ReferenceEdge, we've had 294 nominations; that includes 152 nominations during our fiscal year that ended in February.
Also, our production process is smoother. We have a really great relationship with our Content team and in consultation with them have refined our interview process to make things easier and quicker to get to a final published product. Beyond that, through our monthly cross functional brainstorms, we’ve actually looked at readership, social, and other website data to figure out what type of content we should lean into producing and what perhaps we should give up on. The best part is that we’ve even come up with new forms of content, things that are shorter, more to the point, but filled with all the good nuggets we need to be useful for both our internal and external customers.
The other thing is, as our Customer and Community Marketing team have grown, we’ve put in place a common language and rubric for each one of us determining what lead goes with what type of end content. Credit to our head of EMEA Customer Marketing Gina Lopez as now we can rest assured that no matter who is doing the story qualifying, we’re all looking at things objectively and delivering on the needs of our customers. Further, and to keep ourselves healthy both personally and professionally, we definitely subscribe to the idea of quality over quantity. And how we determine quality is sticking to our belief that we should let data be our guide as to which stories we should prioritize over others. So the way we prioritize, and we say this to anybody we are working with, is actually to look at our open opportunity data and look at where the money is on pace to come from over the next year. That SFDC data allows us to decide, in terms of industry and product, which stories and leads are the references that we need to cultivate in order to help the Sales team close more deals and which ones may have to take the back burner. And then that changes the behavior of the Sales team because then they know if they have an account in this industry with this use case using this product, they’re gonna try to plug that into our team. And so, the quality of those leads ends up getting better, meaning our ability to tell stories that move the needle actually has gotten a lot better since we have launched.
But if I’m looking at how we’ve set up ReferenceEdge and how it has changed my job, I definitely have a good story to tell there, especially when I look at how I failed at properly setting up and kicking off ReferenceEdge at my previous role. More specifically, I definitely learned that when you launch a program, when you're doing training, when you're getting buy-in, you really only get one bite of the apple. At my previous company, because it was the first time I had ever done anything like this, I was learning on the job. I think I launched, relaunched, whatever you want to call it, ReferenceEdge four times over the span of two years. And each time I did it, we kind of lost the momentum because anyone who was around for each attempt probably asked themselves "Didn't you do this three months ago? Why are we doing this again?" I also knew that having everything; I’m talking in-depth trainings, bite-sized tutorials, and documentation as well as the existing content and referenceable accounts in place on Day 1 was of the utmost importance. Consequently, that’s where I spent my time from the moment we signed our contract in the middle of February to the day we went live on May 1. That is also why I set expectations with our COO, head of Marketing, and head of Sales, with "We might not be producing as many case studies right now as you're used to because we are dedicating our time to making the ReferenceEdge launch the best it can be when we launch it."
In the end, we had this one bite of the apple; we needed to make it right, and it was. When we launched it, we were able to have that full go-to-market team training as well as seven or eight short-form tutorial videos walking through each individual section – how to nominate somebody, how to request a reference, how to send reference content and so on. We also spent time building out content for our various different personas because for us, the SDR team has different permissions than the regular Sales team, so in order to get their buy-in, we needed to make sure we had those trainings ready to go as well. To this day, if somebody's brand new or if somebody just needs a refresher on how to use ReferenceEdge or how to do a specific thing, it's not like I have to send them a 30-minute video; I just send them "Here's a two-minute tutorial; just watch it." And more often than not, their response is something along the lines of "Oh, that's really easy, done."
Every time we demo ReferenceEdge, we get the proverbial mind blown…it’s that simple moments. I was talking with our Product Marketing team recently and they were putting together all this enablement for our new fiscal year and they asked "Hey, we have these three sales plays, what are the best references for each sales play?" I said "You know, we actually have all this information in ReferenceEdge for you to find," because we tagged our content by sales play. And now they're using it and sort of cut us out of that loop. And if we’re decreasing the delta between reference question and reference answer for anyone, that’s a feather in our cap.
On a broader ReferenceEdge note, lots of people have never seen something like what we have with the tool in place. And so they're really super excited that we have it in place and even more that they can use it right away and get what they need really quickly.
From a general program perspective, I think they're really stoked that we have all of these different resources. We are up to 124 slides that are public customer references that we have available to them that they can just grab and go. So overall, I think new hires are really impressed with the program, really impressed with the centralization, really impressed with the metrics and business value stories we have for them. But on the ReferenceEdge side, yeah, I wish more people came into the company with "Yeah, I've seen something like this before." Makes me sad that they haven't…
Beyond the power of ReferenceEdge’s searchability, the other features we heavily rely on are the nominations to help us always have a steady pipeline of references and advocates and the ability to easily upload content (or in our case links to our content) directly into the system. And of course, from a backend managerial perspective, I love the dashboards and reporting that we’re able to do with ReferenceEdge. I have this dashboard that I look at daily that shows me a whole slew of program health metrics, from total nominations, nominations per quarter, how many people have used ReferenceEdge, the amount of content we produced, and even the amount of money in closed won business we’ve affected over time. So, it's super nice, especially working at a company that is centered around dashboarding technology, to be able to have a dashboard that helps track our progress against our quarterly OKRs, keep track of the overall health/usefulness of the system, and finally, see the progress we’ve made throughout the entire history of the program.
Finally, the aspect that is probably the most crucial to getting buy-in from leadership, IT, and our users is that everything about ReferenceEdge is Salesforce native. We don’t have to teach anyone a new interface and we don’t have to require anyone to use a system they aren’t already in just to get a reference or figure out what content they could use. That reduces the barrier to entry and the complexity of continuous use for everyone in the company. And then throw in the fact that we can (and do) utilize the Slack integration and we’ve now made our system native in two of the systems we most rely on as a business.
So if it’s not the money side that we use to measure success, what is it? That’s pretty basic, my team relies on answering a series of simple questions: Do we produce stories that are valuable to what the Sales team is selling? If yes, then we're successful. Do we help people get from point A to point B faster? If yes, then we're successful. Do we show our customers that we work with, whether it is via case study or putting people on stage or anywhere in between, the respect and give them a good enough time that they want to continue this relationship commercially? If yes, then we are successful.
And anecdotally, I can say for certain that we've seen that. We've seen that people we put up on stage have renewed contracts at higher values. Now again, we can’t claim credit for all that, but we can certainly hang our hats on the fact that we were part of that positive journey that led to a higher lifetime value.
And in the years since we went live, it’s been a whole lot more of the same great relationship. I meet every week with my Account Director, Jess, and sometimes, when I'm super busy on other parts of my job and so I haven't really had brain space to think about ReferenceEdge, she would come to our meeting and say something like “Hey, I was thinking about how this type of report would be good,” and then suddenly a lightbulb would go on for me and we’d be off to the races on new reports and dashboards. In fact, that’s how we got started with our conversation about building out custom reports on customer lifetime value as I’m pretty sure we signed on to the meeting and Jess said “Hey, we were talking, we were throwing around ideas within our normal account director meetings and somebody brought up these types of custom reports. Would this be valuable to you?” And the rest, as they say, is history.
The biggest part is, again, I cannot do my job or we cannot do our job without ReferenceEdge; the seamlessness of it, the centralization of it, the fact that it's in Salesforce. I would hesitate to even imagine what we would do without it. But just in case I decide that I want to venture down that rabbit hole of what if, I still have this screenshot of the spreadsheet version of the first reference program I ever designed to remind me how bad it could get. At which point, I snap back into reality and appreciate where we are and where we’re headed with ReferenceEdge going forward.
