References-Online

 

Coverage

CRM WizKids: Taking CRM to the Next Level

 

Synopsis

References-Online (www.references-online.com), Denver, CO.

References-Online identified a business problem most people gave little thought to or did not know about and turned it into an important new business-technology niche that happens to fit well in the CRM stack.  It’s called customer reference management.

There is a perennial problem with managing a company’s best customer references.  They are hard to track and they can easily be over used leading to burnout.  Most organizations keep tabs on their best customer references through home grown systems that reside in spreadsheets or worse — paper. 

It is amazing that reference management has not become part of any sales force automation (SFA) tool since the need for reference management within SFA is intuitively obvious.  Various people disagree about the proper time to introduce a reference into a sales process.  Sales purists say that prospects need to earn the right to speak with a satisfied customer such as by introducing the sales representative to others in the purchase process.  That’s a fair point and certainly no vendor wants to expose a great customer to an endless stream of tire kickers.  But as markets age and clear leaders become established it becomes harder for new companies to be taken seriously and the need to use references earlier in the sales process becomes more acute.

Reference checking has never been easy.  Frequently customer references are dynamic, busy individuals and unless appointments are made — sometimes weeks in advance — the potential for prolonged phone tag can appreciably slow a deal.

With References-Online the time required for a prospect to check references drops from weeks to minutes.  The volume of calls to reference customers is dramatically reduced and references can be used earlier and more often in the sales process to increase credibility, accelerate sales cycles, and increase close rates.