If you have a decent-sized sales team, and you are a customer marketer, you are probably very familiar with Slacks and emails from reps at all hours asking for references and case studies for their deals, “Do we have any customers in financial services, in EMEA, using our cloud analytics platform, where we beat IBM?”
Cultivating a large and active pool of customers that are willing to speak as a reference for sales deals is critical to be able to provide sales with a relevant and timely reference for their deals. But keeping track of reference recruitment, and managing the lifecycle of references is tricky—customers ebb and flow in their happiness, and some advocates leave the account. Furthermore, you don’t want to fatigue or overuse the same references.
Customer Reference Platforms help organize and manage the lifecycle of customer references, making it easy to serve up appropriate references at the request of a sales rep. Many of the reference platforms below also have the ability to present other content, like case studies and testimonials. Integrations with CRMs like Salesforce are another key feature that enable customer marketers to tie references to revenue and opportunities and ROI.
Point of Reference
ReferenceEdge by Point of Reference is a Salesforce-native customer reference management application. By organizing customer reference content, like testimonials and case studies, and providing automated features, ReferenceEdge enables customer marketers to tackle their day-to-day challenges with ease. This customer reference platform maintains references, recruits possible new advocates, and even measures advocacy program performance. Check out ReferenceEdge on G2.
G2 Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Influitive
Influitive allows marketing teams to build a community of customer advocates, employees, and partners to collect customer references at scale. Customers, employees, and advocates can leave reviews and complete challenges to earn redeemable points and prizes. Influitive’s customer reference platform provides sales and marketing teams with visibility into the entire feedback collection process. It even integrates with your existing CRM and automation platforms to guide your customers through their entire journey. Learn more about Influitive by reading their reviews on G2.
G2 Score: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Orca
Orca, a Salesforce application, makes gathering customer references simple. By directly integrating with vendors like Slack, Tango Card, and more, Orca aims to provide insights and visibility into your customer advocacy program. Providing sales and marketing teams with different ways to engage customers, this customer reference platform keeps advocates interested by rewarding them for participation or completed tasks. To learn more about Orca, check out their G2 profile.
G2 Score: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Upland
Upland offers an array of software options to automate different business processes, with one of them being the customer reference platform, Rant and Rave. This platform enables businesses to collect customer feedback at the right time during their buyer’s journey. This feedback provides sales and marketing enlightening data to influence their future customer marketing plans. To learn more about Rant and Rave by Upland, check out their G2 profile.
Rant and Rave by Upland G2 Score: 5.0 out of 5 stars
SlapFive
By simplifying the process of collecting customer feedback, SlapFive helps companies engage their customers and capture their voices with ease. Their customer reference platform is able to automate and scale daily activities for customer marketers while it captures and organizes references. The platform, dubbed the Customer Voice Engine, manages references in one singular location and is able to measure their impact on revenue. Dive into SlapFive’s G2 profile to learn more about their platform.
Base
By utilizing AI, the Base customer reference platform scales and simplifies customer advocacy. Base streamlines the customer reference collection process from start to finish with innovative and efficient solutions to common customer reference problems. By engaging customers during their buyers’ journey and generating references, this platform allows marketers to collect insights and feedback efficiently at scale. Check them out on G2 for more information!
G2 Score: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Final thoughts
With the right customer reference platform, customer marketers can simplify their entire reference management process with ease. With technology that utilizes AI, automation, and other innovative solutions, marketers and sales reps alike will benefit from streamlined and easy access to customer feedback at scale. By implementing a platform that collects customer feedback and automatically organizes it, your team will work more efficiently without the added responsibility of reference management on their shoulders.
Dive into our full Customer Marketing Technology Landscape, co-created with Captivate Collective, to learn more about customer marketing platforms.
