My name is Karen Newman. My role is Director of Global Customer Advocacy and Marketing Communications for Siemens AG. I am responsible for a worldwide Siemens program aimed at building our base of customer advocates. This includes all of the activities related to customer reference management.
It’s any customer that is willing to share their story of their successes with any of our products. Whether they’re willing to do a reference call, an on-site visit, or another form of reference, we consider them all to be customer references. We believe it’s important to have a comprehensive definition because it allows us to manage these relationships consistently.
Our program serves the entire Siemens organization. We are heavily focused on sales because references are always needed to close deals. But we also help the marketing organization, public relations, and analyst relations, executives – pretty much anyone in the Siemens organization that needs a reference. We’re rolling it out to the partners as well so that is everybody – sales, marketing, services, and partners – all have access to a single system. We make it available to just about anybody looking for any type of reference.
My first advice is to get management buy-in. That’s the top priority before you begin. And it has to be at the right level. It’s great to have it from the top, top down, but I also needed it lower, closer to the sales rep than the top, because the sales reps also listen to their management. My second suggestion; find champions. You need to have champions willing to work with you and support you from within sales. I was able to get the support of a handful of reps that really stood behind getting a reference program going, and they had helped start establishing the references in the beginning with the larger accounts.
The value that it brings is really close to the sale revenue of the company. We are providing a centralized process and single repository for all of our references. It makes the sales reps jobs a lot easier, because it cuts down on their time doing non-selling activities and helps give them the tools they need to close the deal. We use references in at least 75% of our enterprise deals and can save our reps at least five hours per sales cycle by having references available for them. That time gets put back into more productive selling activities. It’s time and money. If this system ever went away that would be a huge impact on the sales. Our executives are very clear about the value they’ve seen to date.
The software application is essential because the data doesn’t reside anywhere else but within this system. We considered trying to manage this information using other types of tools, and of course we kept spreadsheets for a while, but we needed something that would really support our process and information.
Frankly, our IT department did not have the bandwidth to focus on something we could buy. We wanted to manage profiles and activities and content in one place, and it needed to be simple to use. Of course our IT people could have built something, but we really didn’t want any more homegrown systems. We felt that our best bet was best of breed, commercial software that could be integrated and that we wouldn’t have to maintain ourselves.
Awesome! Boulder Logic is great to work with. We’ve been a Boulder Logic client for several years now and it’s a strong relationship. When I have a request, they are always quick to respond. That’s what I always tell people who ask. There’s not one thing I can complain about.