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.