One of the things that gets me jazzed most about customer references is the really big impact they have on the bottom line of almost any business.
If I had to think about it, I guess this enthusiam comes from a marketing background exposed to too many carefully crafted, super cool campaigns that required a ton of work and money, but just didn’t move the needle on results for the business.
Testimonials from customers are different because they are so directly involved in the sales process. At the same time it’s sometimes hard to put your finger on exactly how to quantify it.
When working with clients and prospects, Boulder Logic typically starts by looking at the number and size of deals that can/should use references and then considers the impact that a positive testimonial can have on the deal closing.
Here’s a table illustrating that formula for a single sales rep with some hypothetical values:
| Number relevant opportunities per sales rep | 90 |
| Poorly matched reference requests (50% x 90) | 45 |
| Estimated impact on deal close rate | 3% |
| Average deal size | $125,000 |
| Total impact per sales rep (90 x 3% x 125K) | $168,750 |
If this is of interest, our company recently recorded a webinar that walks through this and other customer reference ROI calculations step by step. It’s about 15 minutes long.
Posted by Joshua Horwitz 
