StoryQuest Blog

Having a proper reference program in place in your organization is critical to the success of your sales organization and your business overall. As sales executives and professionals already know, in a complex system or solution sell, sooner or later the prospect will ask – “where have you done this before,  what were the results.”  such as an enterprise wide ERP implementation, almost always means a complex buying process and sales cycle.

The complexity can be seen through these lenses:

• People: The people you need to engage and work with on the client side and internally
• Documentation: Proposals, Bill of Materials, Scopes of Work, References, Insurance, Project Plan etc.
• Solution/System: The components and services that make up the system/solution being implemented
• Process: The process the sales and support team will follow in order to educate, advance and complete the sale.

Now multiply this by the number of sales reps you have, the number of sales opportunities being developed and the availability and capacity of your sales support resources and you start to get a picture of how busy your business can get pumping out proposals.

There’s a lot that needs to be done to be successful!

The Problem
In my 13 years working in the technology industry I’ve witnessed complete and utter chaos when it comes to proposal development, especially when it comes to references. Most Request for Proposals (formal and informal) require references to be provided.

In fact in some cases, depending on the industry, the proposal will ask for references from within their industry, of similar size and scope and within the last 12 months.

Imagine a scenario were your company has 10 proposals due by Friday next week and each requires 3 references. Each reference must have the name of the company, a description of the project and key individuals that can be contacted.

In my experience sales reps could do one of three things:

• They reuse references from an older proposal
• They use their own accounts as references
• They send out an email to everyone asking for references

What makes this a little more challenging is:

• Reuse of references from older proposals is a ticking time bomb without checks and balances. Is the reference still current? Is the contact still there? Are they still willing to be a reference (is the relationship strained)? Are they being put forward as a reference too often?
• Using their own accounts as references means that other reps won’t benefit from being able to use a quality reference for their sales opportunities.
• Sending out an email is what I call the “Hail Mary Pass” where, usually at the last minute, the bid team needs three references and usually within 24 hours.

In my scenario above you’d need 30 references by next Friday. Now, using the approach above, you could have:

• Proposals with old outdated references. This reflects poorly on your organization.
• Used a great reference too many times. Your happy client may become unhappy when s/he gets 30 voicemails.

The Solution
Reference programs are the answer to solving this nagging and systemic problem. StoryQuest has asked me to produce a series of blog posts on reference programs as a service to their customers and prospective clients.

Clearly, customer stories like the ones StoryQuest produces, can and should be an integral part of your reference program. We will talk about where they fit into a reference program in later posts.