|
Marketers of IT services and solutions well understand the importance
of client references for building credibility and closing the deal. All
too often, however, reference programs suffer from loose organization,
under-investment, and ad hoc processes and responsibilities. The resulting
shortcomings result in missed opportunities at every stage of the sales
cycle.
This ITSMA briefing reviews the key challenges and obstacles to successful
reference management, and provides a detailed five-stage framework for
building an effective program:
- Structuring the program
- Determining criteria for reference collection
- Aligning and incenting to collect data
- Managing data in a central repository
- Determining potential uses of each reference account
The briefing also includes specific tips on producing compelling success
stories and a case study on how Lucent Technologies has applied the ITSMA
framework in building a reference program for the Worldwide Services organization.
|
