RO Reference Enablement vs. SocialPort

BL is great is you're going from a manual process to something more sophisticated. I'm not sure what the competitive landscape looks like with regards to Reference Software nowadays, but when we were evaluating a few years ago, BL was ahead of all other vendors in terms of functionality and integrations with SFDC

How does this platform improve the efficiency and productivity of my team? How much time should my team be spending in the platform each day? What is your history of deploying B2B sales technology and training? How does this integrate with my CRM?

• The system provides more visibility into available references and prevents references from being over-used. It allows the client (reference) to choose how often they can be contacted in a given time period and provides a closed-loop feedback mechanism to make sure the client is providing positive responses.
• Allows account executives (sales people) to easily request references based on: product Used, customer vertical, location, account size, expertise, etc.
• Uses a “Five Star” method to show how relevant the answers are when a results are returned from a search.

• Expertise, Strategy & Training - They are true experts and have years of B2B sales technology deployment and training to offer.
• Content Syndication - By far the easiest and most efficient platform I've seen to share approved content controlled and at scale.
• CRM Integration - Most of the other platforms we trialed had far less superior integrations with our CRM allowing us to close the loop.
• More Leads - SocialPort allowed our team to identify and engage with leads and weed out useless activities.

• It could be cool if there was some automated built in surveys that could be used and attached to the reference. For example very short quick survey to the potential customer about how they felt about the reference, a short one to the sale rep involved to show if it was a good fit to bring the reference and potential customer together. Then show those collective results on the reference record and when searching for a reference.
• I would like a better way to build and track points for those at the contact level of a reference and a the account level.

• Auto-Posting - I'd like to see a way to syndicate certain content directly through our internal advocate's social channels.

Boulder Logic is just so easy and is in Salesforce

No known issues

No known issues

The process of asking each reference how often they’d be willing to be contacted was the biggest task.
We made assumptions for current clients, and ask each new client once they become a customer.
Along with which specific skill-set they’d be willing to be a reference

While I was one of the decision makers in this process, I didn't sit on the demos for the other providers (I was brought in further in the sales process). My understanding from my team was that BL was much more configurable and support more robust integrations that the competitors

• Increase time to fill: All references are filled within 2.5 days or less. For a program that isn't managed by one person, full time, we look at this stat as a win for our organization. BL def. helped us in cutting down the time it takes to find a reference.
• Increased employee efficiency: The customer marketing team still owns the day to day administration (approvals) of the system, but we've drastically cut down their effort. We no longer need to search for the reference (the sales reps now do this themselves) - and the triggers to the account managers have been a huge help in cutting down the time to approve.
• Greater visibility: BL has allowed us to capture denial reasons - which means we know why a references is being denied - which means we can hide them from coming up in future search results.

• Increase in pipeline and opportunities created
• Increase quota retirement
• Decreased the average "time to close"