We’ve got a busy week on deck here. The Customer Reference Forum, the industry event that brings together customer referencing managers from across the technology industry, is being held this week in Berkeley, CA. Its a great venue for peer networking and best practices of how to manage and enhance your customer referencing and advocacy programs.
However, that isn’t the big news (at least from a TechValidate perspective). One of the featured keynotes at the show is being given by Craig Nunes, Vice President of Marketing at 3PAR. Along with being a good guy and a thought leader on the marketing side, Craig is going be talking about how 3PAR has been using TechValidate to tap the other 90% of 3PAR’s customer base.
Craig sat down with Bill Lee, the chairman of the Customer Referencing Forum, in advance of the forum and you can read the transcript of that interview here on Bill’s blog. Two quotes that stood out to me were:
“If you like immediate gratification, you will love applying social media to your customer base — responses to the survey arrive in real-time with nuggets of pure gold.”
“Another important result: we’re picking up additional new references from this platform as well. That is, we’re converting about 10-20% of that 90% who weren’t referencing in the traditional way, and converting them into traditional references.”
Should be a good presentation…
