Six paragraphs of requirements, five layers of obstacles, and four levels of risk.
Melanie Paddock was starting to feel like every customer reference request that arrived in her inbox should carry that disclaimer.
Because more and more were following a familiar pattern:
- Receive detailed, plain-text reference request from Sales Rep
- Pull reports from many sources, then sort and sift data for potential matches
- Confirm customer’s account health and advocacy status
- Tap Customer Success Manager to assist with Step 3
- Return to Step 2 if Customer Success Manager advises caution
- Email customer if Customer Success Manager provides clearance
- Wait for customer to reply with availability
- Schedule customer reference call
“Identifying, validating, and facilitating an effective match could become a weeks-long task because we rarely had a clear path to the customer data we needed,” Melanie explained. “And as a small team aspiring to be the trusted source every colleague comes to when they need the support of a customer’s voice, I knew we were at risk of losing more than just efficiency.”
The Root of a Strong Reference Program
Pulling, sorting, and sifting. Doubting, debating, and confirming.
It didn’t take long for Melanie to recognize that most of her team’s detours related back to one of two roadblocks — data accessibility or data accuracy.
And the team all agreed there was one simple way to solve both — data integration.
(Simple, but not easy.)
“Gainsight has a highly-complex, multi-product, enterprise use case that calls for data from many different places,” Melanie noted. “Champion was the only partner that really understood my vision and felt ready to work together on making it happen fast.”
Her instincts were correct.
The Champion team came prepared to the first implementation call with detailed plans, phased instructions, and weekly workshops already on the calendar.
Within a few days, they were collaborating with technical stakeholders beyond Melanie’s team to create a stable platform for everything she hoped to build.
Within a few months, these behind-the-scenes integrations were improving top-line results.
A Different Routine, A Dramatic Result
Now that Gainsight employees submit every customer reference request through Champion, Melanie no longer dreads Slack and email notifications. (Because she knows the first thing she’ll see is a list of likely matches.)
Her confidence in these suggestions is high, since Champion draws on data ranging from titles and industries to product subscriptions and health scores. But if she’s ever worried about overburdening a customer, she can easily see their advocacy history at-a-glance.
Then, once she’s selected a match, she can move straight into scheduling the reference call.
“Control is now entirely in our hands,” Melanie concluded. “We save ourselves time, we save the Customer Success team’s time, and we get Sales the references they need to move deals faster.”
Exactly how fast? Exactly how influential?
During Gainsight’s first full quarter managing customer references through Champion:
- The average time from Sales submitting a request to Melanie’s team matching it with a current customer decreased 78% (8 days → 1.7 days)
- The average time from Sales submitting a request to Melanie’s team scheduling a reference call decreased 75% (16 days → 4 days)
- The annual recurring revenue closed in deals influenced by a reference totaled $383,000
Not surprisingly, news of that last result quickly reached the C-suite and eventually earned Melanie’s team a special shoutout during the company’s annual revenue kickoff meeting.
“The wider organization was beyond excited about our initial progress — and all that recognition was certainly appreciated,” Melanie added. “But the most satisfying part for me is the sense that we have the right partner to help us nurture and grow this project in response to whatever our business needs next.”
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