We are joined today by Celia Brown, a Marketing Program Manager and Social Media and Community Professional at Dell Boomi. Celia was responsible for defining customer reference and social media strategies for Boomi before their acquisition by Dell in 2010, and she continues to help evolve these important programs.
Why are customer references important to your business?
Prior to the acquisition, references were especially critical because we were such a small company and as a start up many of our prospects questioned our credibility. Pointing them towards our references and having reputable customers to offer up was critical.
What is your definition of a customer reference?
I think of our customer references as individuals who might be willing to participate in the program in multiple ways. One may only be available for sales references via phone whereas another might be interested in speaking opportunities or a joint press release. We take it case by case.
What are some of the activities you’ve established for your program?
When I proposed enlisting a solution like Boulder Logic to support our reference program, I created a matrix of priorities. The basic design was to categorize each customer, for example by size, industry, product, and by the type of activities they might participate in. We ideally wanted larger companies who had deployed Boomi as an enterprise solution and to involve them in wider reach activities like press releases, case studies, and speaking circuits. Sales references were definitely a high priority too, but we felt we could make bigger waves for the business overall by focusing these marquee customers on contributing to marketing. This left smaller customers as sales references or to give us a review on the salesforce.com AppExchange. This strategy helped us focus our really limited resources.
How do you encourage customers’ organizations to encourage customer participation?
I think our reference program became much more successful once we were able to showcase some of our customers that participated in the past. Beyond that, I think it’s important to learn about the individual contact within the customers’ organization, understand their business goals and personal goals as well. We’ve found that a number of our customers have a personal agenda that we can help to support through our reference program. They may be interested in getting more public speaking experience or providing thought leadership within their field. A lot of our smaller company customers were especially interested in getting branding exposure on our Website. They get very excited about that. So I encourage folks to inquire about the goals of the individual as well as the company.
How would you advise somebody just getting a reference program started?
I would recommend that they enlist a solution that is easily accessible by both sales and marketing. Making it friendly for sales is most important because they are typically less motivated to participate if it’s not convenient to them. So that was one of the big reasons that we picked Boulder Logic because it is integrated with salesforce.com which is a tool that our sales team lives in on a daily basis.
Can you comment on the process of deploying your customer reference solution?
Anyone who is tech savvy and has been a database administrator of some sort in the past could probably set up Boulder Logic successfully in just a matter of hours because it is very easy to customize and configure and there is no coding required. Once our client services manager showed us the basics, we just dove right in. The solution is very flexible, so I feel confident that anytime I need to reconfigure, I can go in and revise and modify without too much hassle and without causing any problems with what we have set up already.
How has your reference program changed in the last year?
Since the acquisition by Dell, you could say we have a lot more chefs in the kitchen! In addition to our sales, marketing, and customer success teams, we also have various parties from Dell headquarters that are interested in taking advantage of our sales references and reusing our case study content. So it’s been incredibly valuable to have a centralized source of information. I think it’s definitely increased our visibility at Dell and our credibility internally because we are clearly very organized.
What are your next steps?
So the good news is we are staffing up to some extent. We’re doubling our marketing team from two to four – allowing us to be able to focus on customer success. Right now I’m spending 5 to 10 percent of my time on that and I’m hoping to double that in the near future, so I’m excited. I love the Boulder Logic tool and have had no issues with it. The features seem just right for our needs.
