The Playbook to Building a Customer Reference Program with Talkdesk | SaaStr Software Community

Hi, everyone, my name is Gillian Hiltai. I'm the senior vice president of client services at Talkdesk. At Talkdesk today, the client services organization is 90 people strong. And we are responsible for making sure that our customers, both in the pre sale and the post sale process, are able to design and then achieve their desired outcomes. So I've been at talkdesk for a little over two and a half years. In that time, we became the first ever or the youngest company ever to enter the Gartner Magic quadrant. The Gartner CCAS Magic Quadrant. We raised $100 million. We became a unicorn. And really importantly for the purposes of today's topic, our average deal size increased by 3.5x over that two and a half years. So customer reference program went from something that was nice to have and important to absolutely critical to our new business sales cycle. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I also am entered the customer reference program space totally cold. I came from a company where I worked for 10 years. It was very well established. She was a category leader. We had really high saturation of the market, so we didn't really have to do customer reference programs. And I remember in my first week or two at talkdesk, I had one of the sales leaders come up to me and say, hey, like, we're gonna need a reference for this customer that we're trying to close to help us sell the deal. And like, frankly, my honest reaction was like, wait, isn't like, isn't it this the sales team's responsibility to me closing this customer? Like, why do I have to go ask one of my customers that I'm trying to protect and to focus on kind of core talk desk, product advocacy or product adoption? Why do they need to be involved in that process? I don't know if any of you have ever experienced that, but me coming into talkdesk, I wasn't unfamiliar with this. So a lot of what I'm gonna talk about today is my learning experience and how we went from a relatively small customer reference program to what we have today, which is really a kind of a humming machine. So if you're anything like me, you may have entered a situation at some point saying, do I really have to do this? Do we have to do these customer references? Is there another way? Do we really want to be introducing this motion to our customer team? And the answer is probably there are very few situations in which customer reference programs aren't going to be really, really critical to your new business sales cycle. So you're probably going to have to be doing customer references unless there's very small contract value, right, where there's not a ton of pressure in making the right decision on the part of the prospective buyer. Another reason you may not have to do references is very flexible contract terms. Or maybe your company's already huge, right? Like you are very well established and you don't necessarily need to run this program. My guess is that if you guys chose to attend today's session, these do not apply to you. So I'll just kind of move forward into thinking about how you actually build a customer reference program. I'll come back to some of these buts a few minutes later. You're going to create a customer reference program, but there needs to be some criteria, boundaries in order to supply customer references. And we'll talk a little bit about how you create those boundaries and norms with the sales team. And then you should also really be striving to amplify your advocate's voice through one to many activities. Those one to one customer reference calls are really critical, but there's so much more that you can do to amplify their voices to create one to many opportunities for them to share their voice with multiple prospective customers. So I wanted to start by talking a little bit about the Talk Desk evolution. So I joined kind of at the second stage. So at the very beginning, right, you're, you're in your earliest days as a company, you're excited to be closing your first customers. It's often really rocky, but if you're in this stage and you probably already know this, it is so, so, so critical that you do everything to keep these customers happy. Years from now, they're going to be your absolute best references. Today at TalkDesk, we had a lot of our kind of big Momentum starting in 2014, 2015, those customers are some of our most powerful references. And because we get to bring them in and they tell the story not only of what it's been like to work with talkdesk over many years, but they also get to tell our innovation story for us. So much of what talkdesk sells on is innovation and trust. And to be able to have a customer who's been with you for years and even from the early days to come in and tell that story with you is really helpful. Now I joined talkdesk kind of in the second stage, which is hooray, you've got enough customers that you're able to do references potentially at scale, scale, and it's really nothing A little bit of elbow grease can't solve. So at that point, often you're using your customer success team, your AE team to really kind of manually manage this process. It probably looks something like this. AE has a deal that is getting close to closing. The customer that they're trying to close says, hey, you know, I'd like to talk to some of your customers. Maybe they send out a message on Slack. Maybe they send you a text message message and they say, hey, do we have anyone who, you know, in talkdesk would probably say like of a certain size with certain number of integrations, maybe in this regional vicinity or in this country and you know, maybe you send out an email to a bunch of folks and like, hey, do we have any customers like this? And like, and that's kind of how the process runs. And that was what it was like when I joined talkdesk. And that was okay for six, nine months. And then we started hiring really aggressively on sales. We started investing a tremendous amount on the enterprise side. This is where that growth into kind of mid market and enterprise really kicks in as I referenced that 3.5x deal size growth. So we hire all these new enterprise account executives and now they're coming to my team not with a, hey, could we get a customer reference? It's hey, I need three customer reference calls, I need an on site visit and I need all of that done within the next 48 hours. And some of the emojis that I had built into the slide are missing. But it's like that big yellow face with the big eyes and the red cheeks. I think it's called Bashful. That was the emoji that I had on this slide because it's literally like, oh my God, how are we going to accomplish this? So that was a very short window for us because that is the point at which you need to hire specialists. That is the point where your regional vice presidents, your managers of customer success, your vice presidents of client services can no longer manage this on their own. Like, you really need to start building a machine. That's the point at which we hired a customer marketing team and they helped us to refine the reference program and focus on this notion of scale. So how do you start to amplify those voices and get from a one to one customer call to a one to many customer advocacy program. So how do customers become advocates? There are a couple things that we need to consider in thinking about, like, okay, I'm now in a position where I know I need to invest potentially I'm hiring customer marketing. What are the things that I need to be thinking about in building an advocacy program? I need to know how do customers become advocates, right. So that I can try to harness that. Then we're going to need to talk about how do I find them? What are the tactics that I can use to identify who my advocates are. And then once you started to identify like what is the composition, look and feel size of my advocacy pool, then we're going to talk about what do you actually do to start building that program out. So in terms of answering the question how do customers become advocates? We can probably all relate to this emotionally, right? Because we're all buyers of one service or another. The number one reason is going to be love for your product. This is something that when I joined talkdesk I was so fortunate. Engagement with our product was already so high. Our net retention rate was over 130%. So we have this really great pool of customers that all we needed to do was kind of find them. So one great way is to to figure out who your advocates are or who are the people that love your product. And we'll talk in a couple minutes about how do you actually find those people. Another great opportunity is improvement versus the prior provider. So many times your customers may be choosing your service because of some sort of pain that they had in the past. So if you're able to identify the customers who had really explicit pain with their prior provider that drove them to choose your solution, these are going to be really great customers to enlist as advocates as well. This also ties by the way into a really good pre sale process around documentation of new business opportunities. What's the pain point? Why are they going to choose Talk Desk over another provider? What are we trying to solve for? Making sure that all of that is documented on the new sale opportunity allows us to very quickly mine that to identify who may be an advocate for us. Another way that customers become advocates is a personal relationship with the account team. They're going to develop a really close relationship with the sales representative. Hopefully you've got a good client services team. A customer success or support organization that's building one to one relationships. You can seek to find customers that talk about those relationships as well. Great support experience. And then finally one that I love and we spend a lot of time talking about at Talk Desk is this notion of overcoming a challenge together. I think often we think about the customers that have experienced pain with our company as customers that we need to kind of tiptoe around or that may be Unlikely to want to be an advocate for us. But honestly, it's generally the exact opposite when you are able to overcome a challenge and sometimes it's even talk desk fault, right? So let's say we mess something up in the implementation. We thought we were going to be able to do something in a week and it takes 10 days or 14 days. You may think like, oh, that customer is going to be angry. But actually if you manage that communication really properly and then you end up succeeding in the implementation, that's someone who gets to join you in telling this kind of the story of overcoming a challenge together and coming out stronger on the other end. So these are really, really great customers to look at as potential advocates. So then you've got a profile of the types of experiences that advocates have. How are you actually gonna find those people? And there are a lot of really great tactics that you can use for this. The first one are your support CSAT surveys. So I imagine if you're not, you should be after completion of a support related case, there should be some sort of a CSAT collection for those users. People who you find that are repetitively thanking your support team, they've got an emotional connection to your organization. These are great people to target as advocates. NPS surveys. We run a NPS survey right within Talkdesk, so we get a couple thousand responses every single month. We look at those in real time. We've got a slide Slack bot setup and we see every NPS survey that comes through one by one. Those are great people for us to engage with to be advocates. This is for references, but also the broader advocacy program, targeted customer feedback surveys. This is actually something that we've only just started. So we're identifying our, what we consider to be our primary contacts for a customer relationship. Technical users, business users, budget decision makers, primary administrators of the product. We're sending them surveys that help us collect key information for the marketing team, the product team, but also general feedback on the services organization, positive sentiment around that and willingness to fill that survey out. These are going to be people who are willing to be your advocates. The way we normally do this as companies is really this fourth bullet. But there's so much else that we could be considering. But let's not forget the one to one relationship. Csm, account manager, ae, whoever is kind of running point as the quarterback of the relationship. They can also just ask. They can ask formally in a QBR setting. You could create some slideware that says talk to U.S. customer Advocacy Program. Here are the benefits to you. Here Are the benefits to us? Are you willing to sign up? We have to be brave enough to just kind of throw it out there and ask the question bluntly. We can also ask informally during a catch up call, a site visit, personal email out to a, you know, a ball game. Would you be willing to be an advocate for talkdesk? And then a third thing that you can do is is incorporated into the contract. So either in a new business deal or in a renewal engagement, there's always that, that negotiation that's happening. What am I going to give? What am I gonna get? One of the things that talkdesk likes to think about at that contractual phase is, okay, so customer may be asking for discount or customer may be asking for like specific payment terms that we don't want to offer. Whatever it is, we can say, okay, well if we're willing to give this to you, might you be willing to be an advocate for us? That's another point in time where you can start to engage around that topic. And then finally, local event attendance. TalkDesk has invested a lot in the last year in local event attendance for both customers and prospects. And this is a really great way to find your advocates because, because generally speaking, the customers who sign up and come out to the happy hour or the luncheon or whatever it is, they like you. So they're good folks to talk to, to engage with in your advocacy program. So now we've talked about who your advocates are and how you can find them. So now we need to start thinking about, I'm ready to build and scale my advocacy program. What are the things that I need to be thinking about? What are the decisions that I need to make as I build that program out? So what are the considerations? I want to spend a couple of times on, a couple minutes on each of these because I've debated them. And we've also changed our tactics a little bit over time at Talk Desk. The first one that we go back and forth with a lot, and it is a basically philosophical decision is, is this going to be an incentivized program or is it going to be a rewarded program? An incentivized program, you often use a software solution, one that's very popular, is influitive that you encourage people to join this program and they know that if they do whatever it is, the customer reference call, the case study, the live presentation, the webinar, the on site visit, that they're going to get something right. It's almost like a point system where if you do this, then you get why that is an incentivized program. It works really, really well in some industries. It tend to work. It tends to work really well also with more junior folks. So if you are in an industry where what you're trying to do is kind of engage maybe at the kind of independent contributor or supervisor level, this may work really well for you. It tends to work not as well for kind of VP plus budget holders because they are less interested in participating in a sort of an incentivization program. The other way you could do it is through ad hoc rewards. So rather than saying to the customer, if you do this reference call, then you will get X. You ask the customer for the reference call, you ask the customer to do the webinar and then you thank them with a reward. So it isn't something that is always consistent. The reward doesn't always happen. But. But it is a generous thank you approach for rewarding people, for signing up, for being your advocate. So again, this is a big decision that you have to make. There's big cost decision with this. In one situation you probably need some sort of a software solution. In the other you could probably manage it in a Google sheet. So that's one big decision you need to make. The next is who is going to ask. And I have seen companies totally fall apart over this because if you don't define who's going to ask and then either everyone is going to ask or no one is going to ask. So it's critical that you figure out who is going to be the voice of talkdesk or the voice of your customer in making the decision to a who are we going to ask to do this advocacy event and how are we going to ask them? The worst thing that can happen is no one makes the ask. And then the second worst thing can happen is that that customer gets an email from three different folks at the Talk from Talk Desk making the same ask. That that makes us look very disorganized and it's not something that we would want our customers to experience. The third consideration is do you want this to be a wide program or a deep program? What I mean there is TalkDisk has 1,800 customers. We need to make the decision. Do we want our advocacy program to tap into all of the happy people within that 1800 customer base or do we want to identify maybe 100 of those customers that are going to be like our identified advocates and they're going to do higher volume of activity? Again, this is a really important decision to make because it's going to frame how you hire, how you structure and how you incentivize. If you're doing a very deep program, what you might do is kind of engage with a large organization and say, hey, we want you to be part of our advocacy program. Here are the handful of things that we're going to ask you to do on a monthly basis and this is how we're going to reward you or thank you or incentivize you for this. If you're doing a very wide program, you need to rethink that because there's going to be higher volume, higher velocity. You're going to have to manage business decision, business decision, maker turnover. But you're strengthening your capabilities by widening the pool of folks that you can talk to. And it means that you can do better matching of advocacy program needs. And then finally, and this is where I'm spending a lot of my time right now is what are our effective alternatives to one to one references. A lot of times the ask from the sales team is going to be can you get someone on a call with my prospect to help them tell the story of what it's like to be a talk desk customer? But, but as we get bigger and bigger and our sales team gets larger and larger and our pipeline gets bigger and bigger, this just becomes harder, right? It's like we're having a hard time fulfilling those in a timely manner. It's a lot to ask of our customers. So now we're starting to spend a lot of time thinking about what are the things that we can do to amplify our advocates voices so that we don't have to do so much of that one to one matching. Great examples of this are webinars, particularly vertically based webinars, customer video testimonials, case studies, reference letters, local events, either social or kind of more targeted in nature. These are all really great ways that you can create content and experiences that deflect the need for a one to one customer reference. And I'll come to this in a minute, but you need to start coaching the sales team on how to introduce those opportunities or that content earlier in the sales process. Because that helps to again, kind of deflect the need for a customer reference call. And I'll talk about that in just one minute. So then the principles, the principles that you need to be thinking about as you're building and scaling your customer reference program. First of all, it needs to be 100% measured. This is something that I am really dogmatic about. You do not want to be doing dozens or hundreds of customer reference engagements in a given month or a given period and not have all of that measured. Because whether or not it's rewarded or incentivized, do not forget to thank your advocate. If you do not have this measured, you are going to forget to thank someone and then you have turned an advocate into someone who is never going to do that again for you. Because there's no worse feeling than doing something for a partner and then like not even getting a thank you for it. So if you're not measuring it, you're not going to thank them them and you're not going to be able to move into measured outcomes, which I'll talk about now. So the third principle that I have here is that boundaries must be defined. You do not want your advocacy program to be a free for all. At talkdesk, we define boundaries based on what stage the deal is at, certain criteria that the AE must meet for us to be able to engage in a one to one customer reference. If you're not measuring, then you're not going to be able to use a measured outcome approach to define what that stage is. What I mean there is, let's say you start with everything. We're only going to be able to do customer references if a customer or a prospective deal is at a certain stage. Let's say, you know, in, in verbal stage, if you're not measuring the outcome of that and whether or not those are actually converting, you can't decide whether or not that that stage requirement is too early or too late. So again, that's why the measurement is so critical and why defining those boundaries is informed by that measurement process and then finally protect your customers. I think there is so often this habit of focusing on the new business deals. Right. So this advocacy program, the purpose of it of course is to help Talk Talk Desk grow on the new business side. But our customers, frankly, they matter more. They already made the decision to join Talk Desk. They're staying with us, they're working with us, they're growing with us. So it's really important that sales leadership is aligned with that value of making sure that customer is the number one priority. They said to leave a couple minutes again for Q and A. I don't know if there anyone with a mic, but I'll just reiterate your question. Yeah.

What are some of the examples of the local events you mentioned before?

Yeah, so the question was what are some examples of local events that we do? We invested a lot in a local event marketing team. So We've got events that go on all over the US and in Europe as well. But these are going to be like one of the kind of themes that we do is cocktails and conversations where we'll give a CX related topic that's going to be the primary point of the conversation or the primary point of the event and then we promote it to prospects and, and customers who attend like kind of in a happy hour setting. We've done these CX tours where again the intention is in this case a little bit more around thought leadership. But we do half day events where we seek to get, you know, in those happy hours. It's looking more for like 30 to 50 people for these tour events. We're looking more like 100 or 200 attendees to engage in a little bit more structured learning exercises around CX and then just kind of general meetups on topics that our customer success or sales team hears about that we think will lure people into attendance. Yeah, yeah.

Can you tell us the strategy a little bit around your G2 crowd and Captira reviews and specifically how do you incentivize customers who have a corporate policy that they can't accept?

Yeah, okay, so, so good question. The, the question is talk a little bit about Talk Desk's online reviews strategy, specifically G2 and Capterra and then separately how do you reward customers that aren't allowed to be rewarded by their own, by their own company policy. So on the first one, online reviews is a huge area of focus for our customer marketing team. They leverage. You know I, I mentioned on the. How do you find them specifically support CSAT and nps. Those are our highest volume opportunities to identify advocates. We've built a process, it's actually still manual. We don't have any automations around it where a human reaches out to them and asks them to go say something nice about us online. And generally speaking, these people are primed to give us good feedback. They love our product, they love our services team, whatever it is and they're willing to go do that. We see pretty high response rate on that. And then related to your second question about what do you do when people can't get incentivized? You have to ask before you give them something. Right? So they have to, if it's something that's online, like a gift card or something, they have to press accept and if it's something that we're going to mail them, we have to ask them for their mailing address anyway. And we usually uncover in that moment like hey, actually you know, don't send me anything, it's against policy. And then we just note it on the account level so we don't make that mistake accidentally. Yeah.

Have you been able to measure how much a video like the one you just showed us has reduced the need for one to one references?

Oh, I, I wish I could say yes to that. We haven't worked on actually measuring the impact of that. We've invested a lot in our video content over the last year or so. So one of the things I'm actually still working with the AE team on is can we insert into the, the general flow that they send these sorts of content ahead of time so that we can see if that helps to kind of self manage deflection. We're not quite there yet, but I'm, I'm hopeful that it does serve that because it's, it's so powerful. Right. It's like if you got a bunch of this content ahead of time and you're making a buying decision, you see all these people, they've got like the right title, they look friendly and knowledgeable. You can, you can look them up on LinkedIn. So maybe we don't need to kind of go through the whole rigmarole of the one to one reference, but I don't have data on that yet. Yeah, yeah.

So I have a question for you. So does your CSM teams, do they own renewals and upsells and if you can talk briefly about the comp plan that you follow.

Yeah. So CSMs do own upsell and renewal. We have a bonus program. So it's not, it's not commissionable, but we've got a percentage based bonus that is entirely focused on, on retention. So what's the logo retention and the revenue retention? Yeah.

At what point in time did you.

Implement.

Reference program in terms of size or company revenue or employees?

So I joined in April 2017 and we already had, we were already doing references, but we weren't calling it a reference program yet. Right. It was literally what I talked about. Like someone sends a Slack or an email or a text and we just kind of shoot an email out. We weren't measuring it. We also weren't really thanking our customers, which was a problem. We would implicitly, but we didn't have any gifting strategy. We really started to invest in customer marketing at the end of 2017 and that's when we started to look at software options. We gave a dedicated headcount to all of our customer marketing activities. That's now a five person team. So We've seen the benefit of that investment, but that was, that was when we started investing. And I would say we, I feel like we really started to get good probably like middle of 2018. So it takes some time. Yeah.

What was, at what stage were you or what percentage of the employee population did that make up?

So we hired customer marketing when we were about, I want to say 400, 500 employees. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we're talking about the net retention and the logo retention. What's kind of like you guys set goals for net retention and logo retention and has it changed over time?

Yeah, so we set goals for net retention and logo retention. You know, I talked about our enterprise segment being really high growth. Our logo retention target on enterprise side is 100%. So we work really, really hard to retain those customers. Our net retention target gets are probably between 120 and 130% with, you know, some, some benefit to the customer success manager if they're able to exceed that. Yeah. Who really should own making that is sales or the marketing or customer success? Okay. It, it really, it really depends on who owns the relationship. Right. So ideally you, you get to the point where customer marketing is able to make that ask. Right. But they can't go in cold. Right. If you're, if you've got an AE that owns this relationship and they talk to that customer, let's say a couple times a month, like some random customer marketing person making that ask is going to have a lower yes rate than the ae. So what you have to do is like invest in that team, start getting them into the mix on customer engagements. Like maybe they're attending conferences with your customers. They're doing your customer advisory board board. They're building trust somehow. Maybe they're sending out the customer newsletter so it becomes a name that they get used to. Then they can start kind of being empowered to make that ask. Yeah. And csm, do they work on the same accounts? If so, how does that relationship work? So we actually, we have customer success managers and we have account executives. We don't have an account management function. I was more meaning my point. There was like whoever owns the relationship is often the one who starts to promote the advocacy program. Yeah. Okay.

Talking about like the, you know, you were talking about the references and getting them ready.

Yeah.

Let's say if an AE has 20 accounts, does it often happen that an AE actually bypasses you guys and reaches out to their accounts directory and would you think it up?

And so the question is, do the AES sometimes bypass the program and make the ask directly. The answer to that is yes, and we try. That's why the measurement piece is so important. What we try to instill with the account executives is trust, which is okay. I know that sometimes you're not going to want to follow our process. That's okay. Like, at the end of the day, what we want is to connect the customer to the prospect. But you have to tell us. And like the where all of this falls apart is, if you don't tell us, then you get reprimanded. Right. Otherwise, as long as you're being honest with us, we'll be okay. Okay. All right. Thanks, everyone.