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