A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Building an Efficient Reference Program (Or, How Automation Once Again Saves the Day)

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June 2010, Issue 76

Marketing Evolution
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Building an Efficient Reference Program (Or, How Automation Once Again Saves the Day)
By Heather Foeh, Senior Manager, SMB Customer Success for Eloqua

As a marketing automation provider, we're always looking for new and interesting ways to solve our operational problems with our own tool. Last year, one of these "problems" was keeping track of our "reference-able" customers. Happily, we have so many of these that it was becoming a challenge to know who they all were. At Eloqua, the customer success manager (CSM) owns the relationship with the customer, so each of the CSMs kept up with their own list of references, but there was no sharing of this knowledge among the team. And more importantly, there was no visibility to the sales team who needed to use the references.

If Your Sales Team Isn't Happy...

Every three months at the end of each quarter we had a flurry of reference requests from the sales folks—sometimes several requests in one day. To make matters worse, the requests were sent to our general CSM distribution list so it was always easy for the CSMs to think that someone else on the team would answer, resulting in delays for the sales team. The bottom line was that the sales team was frustrated with the CSMs and the CSMs were worn out trying to keep up with the urgent requests. It wasn't pretty.

Our Product Marketing team, with the help of Marketing Operations, came to the rescue (as they've done many, many times)! They knew that the sales team lived and breathed in Salesforce.com (our CRM system) so their solution needed to be visible in that system. And since the final result would be in Salesforce.com, why not have the kick-off be there as well? They cleverly added a checkbox to the contact record page layout in Salesforce.com that simply read "Add to Reference Program." When this box is checked, it triggers a sync between Salesforce.com and our Eloqua system, dropping all of the checked records directly into an automated program.

Marketing Automation to the Rescue

Then the beauty of marketing automation takes over by sending the contact an e-mail invitation to be an official reference. We automatically resend this invitation two weeks later if we haven't heard from the customer yet (maybe they were on vacation, for example). When the customer clicks the "yes" link in the email, they're directed to a short form allowing them to choose their level of engagement—do they just want to participate in phone calls, will they be a social media evangelist, etc.

As a courtesy, we check in with the customer every 30 days and give them the opportunity to opt-out of the program. We understand that our loyal Eloqua users also have many other irons in the fire and they may just be too busy to participate for a period of time, or perhaps they're going on maternity leave, etc. If they do opt-out, we give them an opportunity to tell us why and then we make sure that they cannot be added back into the program for at least 90 days. This is a "safety net" for times when someone might not realize that the customer has opted out and tries to add them to the program via the checkbox in Salesforce.com.

The customer's contact record in Salesforce.com reflects their status in the reference program (accepted, not accepted, level of engagement). This allowed our operations team to build beautiful dashboards for the sales team to use. They can slice and dice the data by company size, location, industry, product type and more.

The bottom line? The sales team is happy, the customer success managers are happy, and the customers are happy—it's a win-win-win situation. Chalk up another success for automation.

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Heather Foeh is senior manager, SMB Customer Success for Eloqua.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, an online marketing agency that changes the way BtoB companies define demand-generation strategy, engage prospects and convert leads to customers. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, director of Field Marketing.