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How Metrics Can Super-Charge Your Reference ProgramBy Lee Rubin,Senior Manager, Global Reference Programs,Citrix

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Lee H. Rubin has more than 20 years of experience in corporate marketing and non-profit leadership. He is an avid social media devotee with more than 1,700 friends on Facebook, 2,400 connections on Linked-In and a Klout score of 63. A demonstrated leader in marketing and brand strategy for

leading technology companies including, France Telecom, Digex, Savvis, and Citrix. Lee has managed large scale marketing programs and celebrity endorsements, including programs with Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong, and stadium naming rights agreements. Lee has served on the national board of governors of the Human Rights Campaign and was board co-chair of the NGLTF Foundation. He currently serves on the board of directors for Our-Fund, a Ft. Lauderdale based community foundation.

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From Asking for Customer References to Creating a Movement

In a previous job, I spent time in marketing operations. That experience really opened my eyes to the importance of numbers and metrics. Since then, I’ve applied what I learned there to Citrix’ Reference Program. And I’ve discovered that the collection, tabulation and presentation of metrics

to your stakeholders can be a very powerful tool to advance your program. So in the pages that follow, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned along with how you can use that knowledge to strengthen your own program.

Numberless programs get no respect

I think that reference folks are storytellers at heart. That’s a vital skill for us. It’s how we connect with our audiences and it contributes to our success. But I think that coworkers, executives and other stakeholders get confused by this. They equate storytelling with movies, TV shows and plays. That’s something they do in their leisure time. During the day, they live in a world dominated by metrics. They are constantly being pressed to perform. So I think that in their minds storytelling isn’t serious business.

Think about the salespeople you interact with. Do you ever feel underappreciated by them? You know you’re providing valuable customer evidence (stories!) to help them close sales opportunities. But without the metrics to back it up, they think that you’re just that entertaining person over in Customer References.

Well, they kind of have a point. If we can’t measure and report, the impact that our programs have on corporate revenue, how can we ask them to respect us for contributing to our organizations’ goals?

Numbers tell stories too—and they boost your budget

Numbers are the story of your executives’ lives. If they deliver good numbers each quarter, they are praised and rewarded. If not, they’re gone. So they’re going to apply their resources (budget, personnel, support) to those areas that they believe are going to contribute the most value to posting good performance.

Numbers are the story of your salespeople’s lives. They are singularly obsessed with numbers for the simple reason that the more sales they close, the larger

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their paycheck. In their minds, the more time they make for “unserious” storytellers like us, the smaller their paycheck will be.

So you can see how reference managers who can use numbers to tell their story have an edge with stakeholders over those who don’t. Now it’s very, very important to understand the difference between metrics and using those numbers to tell your story. I think that people can confuse generating reports showing their program’s metrics with showing how these numbers impact the bottom line. They’re not the same.

The difference is this. If you focus on program metrics, you will be beaten out for budget, support, buy-in, etc., by your peers who show their impact on the company’s bottom line.

I’ll give you a real-world example.

When I came to Citrix in 2012, we were tracking our program metrics based on asset utilization. That’s very common in our field. We could demonstrate quarter over quarter growth, and we could show how we were supporting marketing and sales requests. (See Figure 1 below.)

Total 2012Assets*

Q4, 2012Q3, 2012Q2, 2012Q1, 2001

72

65 64

130

41 52 50

215

*Presentation Slides, PDF’s Transcripts, etc. Downloaded

Refference Assets Downloads

Reference Customers Utilized in Q4, 2012

TotalSalesMarketing

Figure 1: Reporting asset utilization isn’t very powerful.

Those are some nice charts huh? Looks like the stuff you’d see in an annual report. But they didn’t look that way to our executives. So our pleas for additional resources fell on deaf ears. Nothing. Nada.

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The problem was that I was speaking metrics. Our senior management knew that additional resources would help us to increase the number of requests fulfilled. Their response to this was, “So what?” What they really wanted to know was how our program would impact the bottom line. So to grab their attention, I knew that I had to link asset utilization with revenue.

Case study: How to capture metrics that matter

To prove our influence on sales, I started small. Citrix was having a user conference in Barcelona, Spain. So I looked at a list of confirmed attendees and cross-referenced those against those also listed as sales opportunities. Then, because my goal was to show we could impact the bottom line, I culled out those where salespeople had listed the probability of closing at greater than 60 percent. This narrowed the list to 36 attendees. These I invited to join us at a Customer Reference Forum event at the conference. Of those, 20 showed up to participate.

A month later, I ran a report that revealed that we had subsequently closed 1.5 million dollars in sales among the 20 people who had attended my Forum. From that data, I was able to create charts like Figure 2 below to show our impact on revenue (Closed/Won), as well as projected revenue (Pipeline +60% of closing.)

Refference Impact on Revenue

Opportunity ValuePipeline +60%Closed/Won

$1,500,013

$425,411

$1,925,424

Figure 2: Linking activity to impact reels in your stakeholders.

So with these results in hand, I sent my bosses an email. This led to inquiries, discussions, and, long story short, more budget.

Using Salesforce to track impact

Our reference tool is built into Salesforce.com. This allowed us to roll out Reference Program self-service capabilities to all of our users. It also provides the technology necessary to link our reference activities to sales.

But that’s only possible if our stakeholders—salespeople and folks in marketing—use the application exclusively when they work with us. So

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I established some rules of engagement. Chief among them was that all reference requests, had to be entered into Salesforce.com. No ifs, ands or buts. Today, the salespeople access us through their opportunities. By doing that, we can track the revenue.

We have about 600 reference records. Our sales and marketing users can review a detailed profile on the solutions and deployments of these customers.

Users also have self-service access to reference assets, like case studies, videos and sales presentation slides as well as to internal documents, like “win wires” and interview transcripts. We provide those materials to them so that they can tell the stories in their own way.

So the great thing about our system is that we’re tracking the revenue influence of our Reference Program exactly the same way that we’re tracking lead gen activities through Salesforce.com. And it all rolls up into the same Executive Dashboard. So, just like we track the effectiveness of, a direct mail campaign or an event, those metrics roll right up into the Executive Dashboards for reference activities.

Citrix numbers tell my story

Since we introduced Reference Program SLAs, processes and metrics, we’ve delivered impressive results. For example, in 2013, we showed that our reference assets “influenced” more than 110 million dollars in sales. What I mean by “influenced” is that we were able to link the consumption of reference assets (case studies, reference calls, videos, etc.) to prospects who subsequently became customers.

Figure 3 below shows the “influence” our reference had on both sales and projected sales (the Pipeline.)

PipelineTotal Closed/Won revenue

Total for 2013312 Deal & 648 in Pipeline

Q4 2013124 Deal & 156 in Pipeline

Q3 2013111 Deals & 18 in Pipeline

Q2 201334 Deals & 446 in Pipeline

Q1 201343 Deal & 28 in Pipeline

$112,566,309

$25,067,592

$3,594,996

$78,804,598

$5,099,122

$110,314,085

$30,280,851

$31,543,231

$36,538,508

$11,951,495

Figure 3: The Citrix Reference Program’s impact on revenue in 2013.

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The influence we had on both sales and the pipeline totaled over $220,000,000. I mean, that’s mind-boggling. When we set out two years ago, we were thinking maybe we could show five million dollars a quarter, and we showed 220 million dollars last year.

We’re seeing quarter over quarter revenue influence growth as well. It’s a numbers story that’s getting us greater mind share with salespeople. That in turn is driving more reference asset requests and ultimately, more revenue. So it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, an upward spiral where the more our salespeople sell using our assets the more they use them.

Just as important, is the fact that the story of our numbers captured the attention of our senior management. Their support for us has grown in every way. And that’s all because we’re able to demonstrate our impact on sales revenue by integrating our metrics into the company’s dashboards.

Getting more granular to close more sales

So I’ll tell you about what’s next for our program. Because we’ve integrated sales opportunities and revenue activities, we’re now looking at how we can determine the optimal point in the sales cycle to apply different reference collateral activities.

To do that, we deployed a SaaS software solution from SAVO. Their solution is replacing all of our sales libraries that formerly were in SharePoint. We really feel that that’s the next evolution in the program to deliver reference assets at the right time to help close deals. We have our fingers crossed that it will help shorten the sales cycle too.

One of application’s nice features is the ability for our sales reps to score individual reference assets. We can see which reference assets are used and when in the sales cycle. And most importantly, because it’s integrated in Salesforce.com, every time an asset is used it will be captured in our Executive Dashboard. So not only can we link reference activities to our

influence on revenue, but we’ll be able to do that for individual content pieces.

From that, we’ll be able to measure the ROI of each artifact. And we’ll be able to make informed decisions about how to use our budget more effectively. For example, we’ll be able to create more of the content types that deliver great value and do less of, or eliminate, marginal performers.

Final Takeaways

The main thing that I want you to take away from this, is that collecting and using metrics to boost your reference program is quite doable. This isn’t rocket science. The first thing you need to do is to start thinking about your program as a reference selling methodology. You aren’t a writer, or a publisher, or a content producer, you’re a sales enabler.

That being the case, everything you do should be measured for the impact it has on revenue. What that means, is that you should start looking at all of your activities as campaigns, the same way that lead gen does. I even give this concept a name. I call these “closing campaigns,” because unlike lead gen, where you’re trying to get leads in and convert them into opportunities, we’re taking those opportunities and helping sales to close them.

So once you start focusing on telling your story in numbers—and linking it to revenue, shortening the sales cycle, and helping sales to close their deals—your executives and salespeople will take notice. You’ll find them to be very receptive of your requests for more budget, more support and more leeway to implement new initiatives.

Bill Lee, Founder

bill@c4ce.comwww.c4ce.com+1.214.907.5600

3225 Turtle Creek Blvd, Suite 1801 DallasTX 75219

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