Referrals IMPACT Playbook
The Problem Statement:
“We do not strategically drive referrals from our existing customers.”
The Desired Outcome:
“We consistently generate referrals from every happy customer every year.”
Why is this is a Revenue Operations Challenge?
In most companies generating referrals is a sales team responsibility.
But as the likelihood of a generated referral landing in the AE’s territory is low, few AEs ask for them.
Only by bringing Marketing, Sales and Customer Success together can we develop a strategic referral capability.
Questions to ask yourself?
Do we know how many referrals we generate today?
Do we know if a referral is better for our business than any other source?
Who in our business ‘owns’ referrals?
Do we have a cross-functional process in place for generating referrals?
What data do we capture related to referrals?
Are our sales reps and customer success managers incentivised to request referrals?
Are we happy with the number of referrals we generate today?
Metrics
What will we measure?
Annual referrals per customer
Cost of acquisition per referral customer
Conversion rate per referral customer
Cycle length per referral customer
Average deal size per referral customer
Average contract length per referral customer
NPS per referral customer
How will we build the business case?
We will demonstrate that referral customers
are cheaper to acquire
are faster to convert
commit to longer contracts
contract on more favourable terms
buy a wider range of products/services
are happier
churn less
Inputs
People
Typically requires input from:
Marketing leadership
Marketing operations
Sales leadership
Sales operations
Account Executives
Customer Success leadership
Customer Success Managers
Systems
Typically requires updates to:
CRM
Marketing Automation
Sales Enablement
Sales Engagement
Customer Success Platform
Customer community
Website/App
Reporting platform
Data
Typically requires data from:
Product usage
Customer community
Website/App
CRM
Marketing Automation
Sales Enablement
Sales Engagement
Customer Success Platform
Process
Typically requires process updates to:
Customer communications
SDR outreach
Sales process
Onboarding process
Customer Success process
Renewal process
Event process
Process
Hypothesis
Develop a hypothesis for how a strategic referral programme will drive rapid business value.
Diagnosis
Conduct subjective and objective analysis of the current situation, including interviews with leadership, functional contributors and customers.
Prioritise and Plan
Agree a prioritised set of activities and plan out a schedule including roles, responsibilities, and measurable outcomes.
Implement
Get to work. Aligning Marketing, Sales and Customer Success functions to build out the required processes, system changes and measurements to deploy the new strategic referral programme.
Measure
Use the deployed data analysis capability to consistently measure the new referral programme and to compare the selected metrics against non-referral business.
Improve
Learn from the data analysis and continually provide new hypotheses for how to improve one or more referral programme metrics