UserGems' new signal, Champion Referrals, has been live for one month. Our sales and CS teams collaborated on two playbooks, generating 10 demos from Champion Referrals! Of those, we’re in the final sales stages with a couple of opportunities.

Here's what we learned running Champion Referrals for four weeks and how you can get similar results. We'll show you how to set up a champion referral motion that drives pipeline.

What is the Champion Referral signal?

Champion Referrals identify which of your customers used to work at your target accounts, then surface the right prospects and automate the ask.

Referrals from former colleagues get higher response rates and faster deal cycles than cold outreach.

Once you define your target account list (e.g. ABM accounts, high-intent accounts, etc.), Champion Referrals:

• Identifies if any of your Customers used to work at those accounts

• Suggests persona-matching prospects at those accounts who might have worked with your Customers (Their employment time overlap)

• Sends a Slack or Email alert to your SDR/AE with the information and a suggested email blurb that they can send to the Customer.

UserGems Champion Referral Playbooks

The UserGems team has tried several outreach combinations using this new signal. We’ve identified two main playbooks that work best to drive booked meetings.

Here are the two playbooks:

1. Targeted Champion Referrals - This playbook relies on a highly personalized workflow for high-value champions

2. Champion Referrals at Scale - This playbook automates the referral process so that referrals where there is less or a relationship can be requested at scale

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Here’s how we execute these two playbooks at UserGems!

Champion Referrals Playbook #1: Targeted Champion Referrals

The Targeted Champion Referrals playbook is for your product's most high-value champions. These are users who often have a relationship with their CSM and act as the main point of contact between your company and theirs.

Step 1: Defining the audience

At UserGems, our audience for this playbook are contacts our CS team has specifically denoted as ‘Champions’ in Salesforce. If you don’t have this field in your CRM, pull in all Closed Won Opp contacts. Not every contact will have a CSM relationship, but you'll reach more potential referrers.

Step 2: Setting up the workflow

When we set up our Champion Referrals workflow for this playbook, we included the following criteria:

• Run workflow when current champion recently worked at target account (we limit to the last 2 years)

• Only run the workflow on a contact 1x every 6 months

• Set a maximum of 1 referral request per account per week

• Set a maximum of 2 referral requests total per day per CSM

We balance customer goodwill with referral volume by setting clear limits on frequency and volume. 92% of customers say they would give referrals.

Step 3: Adding an action

The goal of this playbook is to identify which of our current champions have worked at a target account and then ask them for a referral. It’s a little more complicated than simply sending them an automated email, however, because they already have a relationship with someone on our CS team. To respect our CSMs' relationships, we involve them in the process.

The action for this workflow uses one of our custom workflow actions: Group Slack DMs

When the workflow identifies a champion whose work history matches a Target Account, we set it up so that a Slack message containing relevant information is sent to the:

• Customer’s CSM

• Target Account (the customer’s past account) SDR

Here’s an example of an automatic Slack message. It contains relevant information for the CSM to use when contacting the Champion to ask for a referral.

The ‘Send email’ link in the Slack message opens to a pre-filled email that the CSM can send to the champion. This action automatically cc’s the SDR on this email to eliminate extra steps for CS and enable the SRD to follow up 1 - 2 times as a reminder.

Results

We’ve seen a response rate of over 80% to this playbook! The response rate is likely so high because these contacts have a personal relationship with our CSMs, though, and it’s just polite.

When a Champion follows up on a referral request, even if it’s to decline the offer, they often include valuable information. Champions often share insights about acquisitions, reorgs, or new priorities. SDRs use this intel to prospect more strategically, even when the referral doesn't pan out.

Champion Referrals Playbook #2: Champion Referrals at Scale

The second Champion Referrals playbook that we run at UserGems helps us automate and scale the entire process. It works in the background so that our CSMs don’t need to be involved and our SDRs can generate more meetings.

Step 1: Defining the audience

The audience for this playbook is all the other users and evaluators of your product who aren’t your main points of contact. They might love your product and be valuable voices, but they are unlikely to have a personal relationship with your CSMs. This group is much larger than your main champion list, which is why we automate the entire process.

Step 2: Setting up the workflow

This workflow handles a larger number of contacts, so it’s important to establish rules and limits to keep referral requests in check.

These are our entry criteria for this workflow:

• Only run the workflow when the current user has worked at a target account in the last 2 years

• Only run the workflow on a contact 1x every 6 months

• Set a maximum of 1 referral request per account per week

• Set a maximum of 10 referral requests per SDR per week

We set a maximum number of requests per account because we limit referral requests to one person per account at a time. This can result in crossed wires and cause confusion for our champions and our SDRs.

The maximum number of requests per SDR is set based on our sales teams’ bandwidth and the limits of your sequencing tools. If your team has capacity for more leads, increase this limit. Overloading reps with too many requests tanks response rates and wastes time.

Step 3: Adding an action

The signal-based action we attach to this workflow is an automated email via Outreach, our sales engagement platform.

When the workflow identifies a (non-champion) user who has worked at a Target or ICP account, it automatically adds them to a sequence in Outreach. This sequence emails the contact three times from the SDR. Twice within a couple of days, and once again after 30 days if there’s been no reply.

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Tip: For C-Suite prospects, try changing the “From” field in your email automation platform to your CEO, COO, or CMO’s contact for a better response rate!

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Here are some best practices we’ve discovered when sending these emails!

Mention the CSM’s name in the email

Use a custom field in your sequencing tool to pull it from your CRM.

Offer an incentive: this is required to get results

Try offering a monetary incentive to both the referrer and the referee. Try a $50-$100 Visa, Amazon, or DoorDash gift card.

Establish a referral program. The UserGems referral program offers referrers 10% of ARR on Closed-Won deals in the first year. Check out our referral program for inspiration: https://www.usergems.com/referral

Results

This scalable playbook has resulted in about the same number of meetings booked as the manual Targeted Champion playbook! The overall response rate runs lower without the established CSM relationship, yet the playbook successfully drives opportunities.

Test both playbooks. Your results will vary based on your customer relationships and team capacity.

Questions about setting up your champion referral motion? Reach out.