Scale your Customer Referrals program

What are Champion Referrals?

Champion Referrals give teams a new way to turn referrals into a scalable source of pipeline by connecting your current customers with your target accounts and automating the ask for a referral to their past company.

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Define which customers to ask for referrals

Good fit customers for this play would be those who are willing and able to introduce you to their old coworkers. These customers could any/all of the following criteria:

• Closed Won Opp Contacts - involved directly in the deal
• Customer Success key POC - works really closely with your team already
• Power User - hits specific usage metrics making the tool valuable to their work

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Define your target account list 

If you don’t have target accounts it’s no problem. This should just be a list of accounts your team really wants to break into. e.g. ABM accounts, high-intent accounts, etc

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Playbook Options

Playbooks are dependent on many factors, but one we found works well is based on current relationship strength.

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

This would consist of customer contacts that the  CS team has specifically denoted as ‘Champions’ in your CRM. If you don’t have this field in your CRM, you could define your Champions by pulling in all Closed Won Opp contacts. Not every one of these contacts will have a relationship with their CSM, but it’ll cast a wider net. 

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

Step 3: Adding an action

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

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.

Champion Referrals at Scale

This is a fully automated workflow that works in the background so that our CSMs don’t need to be involved and 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.This group of contacts is much larger than your main champion list and can benefit from even more automation.

For this audience use all persona matching  customer contacts and remove the CS champions. 

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.

Suggested  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 don’t want to ask too many people from the same account for referrals at the same 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 is hungry for as many leads as possible, try increasing this limit! Just remember that you don’t want to overload your reps with outbound initiatives. Too many requests and your efforts just become noise.

Step 3: Adding an action

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.

<div class="pro-tip">Pro 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.</div>

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.
• 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. Check out our referral program for inspiration: https://www.usergems.com/referrals

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Additional Resources

• Scale your referral program with UserGems' new buyer signal