Our program is known as the Admiral's Club Program. We have 700 members that translate into more than 1000 reference contacts worldwide; broken down by region it's 50% in the Americas, 30% in EMEA, and 10% in the APAC region. The support team includes myself as the Reference Manager, a wonderful Salesforce administrator, and three other team members in different regions who fill in when I'm not available.We launched the program two and a half years ago, in mid-2021. The program was originally under Customer Success, and it now resides in Customer Marketing, rolling up to the VP of Corporate Marketing who reports to the CMO. We have full support from management, which is wonderful, because that is crucial to the success of any program.
Before ReferenceEdge, we had a homegrown solution that was using limited information from Salesforce; it was a manual and very slow process. The reference information was stored in pockets in various spreadsheets and quickly became obsolete with no single place to search.Too much time was lost finding and sourcing customer references and our advocates were being overused, so it was very apparent that we needed to search for a tool that could help us overcome those challenges.
The Sales account executives, Customer Success Managers, Sales Management, and Customer Success leadership. Next year, we’d like to include the Digital Sales team and selected
The number one challenge was identifying new customer references; we had very few customers advocates in the program. Also, not having the reference information in a single repository made it very difficult to track who was used and when, and this led to the overuse of our advocates. And the third challenge was the delayed response time; meeting deadlines was a struggle with the reference information dispersed in different files.
I think the biggest change was enabling users to self-serve, we moved from getting multiple reference requests via emails and phone calls to allowing the user to search the database and select their preferred reference option(s). This enabled the reference team to focus on recruiting new references and scaling the program. We went from 120 reference accounts before using ReferenceEdge to 700 account members today, nearly a 6X larger pool of advocates with an average growth rate of 83% YOY.Another significant change is the ability to customize the program for our members; we can now track the advocates’ preferences on how they want to engage with the program. For the most part, advocates are willing to participate in multiple activities, but some avoid the spotlight and prefer activities away from the public eye. We ask each member to select from a list of activities and track it in ReferenceEdge. We couldn’t track that level of detail systematically before.Our program can now identify who are the most active advocates and recognize them with points that they can exchange for rewards. We’ve automated recognition for sales-related opportunities. We’re also looking at tracking marketing usage in ReferenceEdge so we have a holistic snapshot of each advocate’s contribution and impact to the business.We can track and report on business impact and revenue influence. The data can be sliced-and-diced and presented in dashboards that allow us to report to the executives on what's most important to them. We report our reference status to our CMO weekly, and we report to the Sales and Marketing leadership quarterly (QBRs). So, references are top of mind, and we have the platform to support it. I think that is different from the job before, where they struggled to capture the data and report on it.We can now source references faster with a single repository and find that suitable reference. That, in turn, helps Sales close deals because we can meet deadlines.What I see today is that the company holds the reference program in a high place of importance and that goes from the executive level all the way down to the individual contributor, where everybody is keeping track of who our advocates are, how we treat them and how we reward them for everything they do.We’ve been able to implement multiple capabilities that we didn’t have with the manual process, so a great deal of the difference is based on what ReferenceEdge provides.
I’m always looking for ways to create a better UX and educate the users to make the program more self-serve so I can free up my time and focus on more strategic projects. ReferenceEdge was successfully launched about 8 months before I joined SailPoint. At the time there was a roadmap of additional functionality to be implemented, so the first year I focused on that.An example of new functionality that helped free up time spent supporting individual questions or requests included the Profile Update Minder (PUM). Reference owners would often ask me to update the information on their reference profiles; PUM now sends quarterly reminders to reference owners giving them access to update their own referenceable accounts at any time through a unique link that stays active until the following reminder. Also, identifying referenceable products from products owned was a crucial piece of information that improved the accuracy of reference searches. Our customers own multiple products, but often feel more comfortable talking about a subset of those products. Reference owners are now able to identify who can speak to what from the range of referenceable products owned by each customer. As a result, the volume of managed requests has faded/transformed into peer-to-peer requests.New projects were added to my role this year, including sourcing customer advocates to participate in various SailPoint initiatives. A good part of that is sourcing customer speakers. So, I continue to focus on making the reference program more self-sufficient. Some examples of enhancements delivered this year include how-to videos and office hours. For the “how-to” videos, a series of brief videos were created for quick reference and as I include new features, I create new videos. The videos are also supported with written instructions. Again, this has reduced the overall number of one-off questions. Regarding Office Hours, I recently launched a series of office hours to the Customer Success team. I’ve had good turnout, good questions, and useful feedback.
I occasionally get invited to Sales team meetings to talk about the program. I also join the Customer Success bi-monthly team meetings to provide updates on what’s new, what’s important and areas we need to focus on. The Customer Success team carries and owns the reference in terms of approval.When I reach out to my leadership, they support any ideas or initiatives I have. Right now, we're collaborating on how to increase adoption because we found it was a bit low. One idea that was put forward was to ask our most active users to share their experience and results with those who haven't been using the program, because peers trust their peers, right?.References are seen as an important part of closing deals and impacting our revenue. I see the support at different levels of the organization. For example, our CEO and CCO have a joint video posted in our online community welcoming new Admiral Club members and a second video from our CEO encouraging customers to join the program. This level of commitment from the C-level is not something I have experienced in other organizations that I've worked in.During our annual conference, Navigate, this year, we hosted an exclusive meet-and-greet for the Admirals Club members. Our CCO was there to thank them and network with the attendees. A similar session was offered at our Navigate event in London, also hosted by the executive team. This is why I say, our executives see the importance of the program, they are present, and they thank our customers for what they do.
There are big things and there are small things I value. The Calendar Coordinator is an easy feature to implement that people are starting to use and they've come back and said that it's useful. So that is a small feature that I appreciate and value.I love the feature in Slack that pops up when somebody is looking for a reference that says "Are you looking for a customer reference? If so, you can use /references to search and submit a request.” That is, to me, a small feature that helps create awareness.The self-serve peer-to-peer requests is a big one. I think that saves valuable time that I can use to focus on other, more strategic things.We also receive ongoing nominations from Customer Success; and that I appreciate because it’s just a click of a button to approve it. Typically, those nominations are already qualified, so I just check for missing information. We’ve also done nomination campaigns to fill the gap in areas where we need more references. Another way we get nominations is by giving customers the option to self-nominate. They fill out a form in our online community and we capture that information and enter it in ReferenceEdge. Entering the information is a manual process, but it expands the possibilities of getting more people that maybe our internal success team hasn't thought about, and we grow the program faster that way.The integration with Slack is a nice feature to have. We use it and it is working great. Slack is used extensively at SailPoint and a good number of ReferenceEdge users prefer Slack over email notifications, some of which happen to be my superusers and biggest internal advocates. They keep me honest and challenge me by suggesting new, creative ideas of how to use the platform.The dashboard, there's so much information you can report on, I haven't even scratched the surface. I learned a lot at the ReferenceEdge User Group session on dashboards; I always benefit from the User Group sessions where we can brainstorm or learn best practices from other customers; I appreciate that.What I value most is my Account Director, she's so creative. I appreciate our weekly calls, there's always value in each meeting, without that, the program could not be as successful. I also appreciate having access to the Point of Reference leadership when needed, not that I'm tapping into them all the time, but yes, that's something I love about Point of Reference. So, kudos to the Reference Edge team!
The first year, before I joined SailPoint, the priority was to expand the number of references and measure revenue influenced by customer references. Today, we continue to measure revenue influenced by customer references and focus on filling the gaps. We measure number of new references for specific products and key initiatives.Integrity of the data is an important measure because it helps the users trust the system and increase user adoption.Awareness of the program is another key measure. We aim to keep stakeholders informed through various communication channels: we include reference updates in fun videos produced by Sales Ops every two weeks that are targeted to the revenue organization. We participate in short webinar sessions called Seven and Seven, which means seven minutes of content and seven minutes of Q&A. The “how to” video tutorials are available in different channels and promoted on Slack and the office hours for the Customer Success team — all those are activities that support the goals and it’s how we measure the program.Our next step is to start tracking Marketing reference usage in ReferenceEdge. This will provide a holistic view of reference usage and impact on the business. But in terms of measures, I'd say that the strategy is to align with the key initiatives of the organization and our goal is to fill the gaps that support those initiatives.
I think partnership is the biggest differentiator. Our Account Director has a huge role in our success and your leadership - David and Darren – are very approachable.
