Lee Rubin, Metrics

1. State of the Profession Series
Case studies from the world’s top customer advocacy
and engagement programs, showing how to grow the
business in today’s buyer-empowered world.
HowMetricsCanSuper-ChargeYour
ReferenceProgram
By Lee Rubin,
Senior Manager, Global Reference Programs,
Citrix

2. 1
Lee H. Rubin has more than 20 years of experience in
corporate marketing and non-profit leadership. He is an
avid social media devotee with more than 1,700 friends on
Facebook, 2,400 connections on Linked-In and a Klout score of
63. A demonstrated leader in marketing and brand strategy for
leading technology companies including, France Telecom, Digex, Savvis, and Citrix.
Lee has managed large scale marketing programs and celebrity endorsements,
including programs with Shaquille O'Neal and Lance Armstrong, and stadium
naming rights agreements. Lee has served on the national board of governors of
the Human Rights Campaign and was board co-chair of the NGLTF Foundation.
He currently serves on the board of directors for Our-Fund, a Ft. Lauderdale based
community foundation.

3. 2
FromAskingforCustomerReferencestoCreatingaMovement
In a previous job, I spent time in
marketing operations. That experience
really opened my eyes to the
importance of numbers and metrics.
Since then, I’ve applied what I learned
there to Citrix’ Reference Program.
And I’ve discovered that the collection,
tabulation and presentation of metrics
to your stakeholders can be a very powerful tool to advance your program. So
in the pages that follow, I’ll share with you what I’ve learned along with how you
can use that knowledge to strengthen your own program.
Numberlessprogramsgetnorespect
I think that reference folks are storytellers at heart. That’s a vital skill for us.
It’s how we connect with our audiences and it contributes to our success. But
I think that coworkers, executives and other stakeholders get confused by this.
They equate storytelling with movies, TV shows and plays. That’s something
they do in their leisure time. During the day, they live in a world dominated by
metrics. They are constantly being pressed to perform. So I think that in their
minds storytelling isn’t serious business.
Think about the salespeople you interact with. Do you ever feel underappreciated
by them? You know you’re providing valuable customer evidence (stories!) to
help them close sales opportunities. But without the metrics to back it up, they
think that you’re just that entertaining person over in Customer References.
Well, they kind of have a point. If we can’t measure and report, the impact that
our programs have on corporate revenue, how can we ask them to respect us
for contributing to our organizations’ goals?
Numberstellstoriestoo—andtheyboostyourbudget
Numbers are the story of your executives’ lives. If they deliver good numbers
each quarter, they are praised and rewarded. If not, they’re gone. So they’re
going to apply their resources (budget, personnel, support) to those areas that
they believe are going to contribute the most value to posting good performance.
Numbers are the story of your salespeople’s lives. They are singularly obsessed
with numbers for the simple reason that the more sales they close, the larger

4. 3
their paycheck. In their minds, the more time they make for “unserious”
storytellers like us, the smaller their paycheck will be.
So you can see how reference managers who can use numbers to tell their
story have an edge with stakeholders over those who don’t. Now it’s very,
very important to understand the difference between metrics and using those
numbers to tell your story. I think that people can confuse generating reports
showing their program’s metrics with showing how these numbers impact the
bottom line. They’re not the same.
The difference is this. If you focus on program metrics, you will be beaten out
for budget, support, buy-in, etc., by your peers who show their impact on the
company’s bottom line.
I’ll give you a real-world example.
When I came to Citrix in 2012, we were tracking our program metrics based on
asset utilization. That’s very common in our field. We could demonstrate quarter
over quarter growth, and we could show how we were supporting marketing
and sales requests. (See Figure 1 below.)
Total 2012
Assets*
Q4, 2012Q3, 2012Q2, 2012Q1, 2001
72
65 64
130
41 52 50
215
*Presentation Slides, PDF’s Transcripts, etc. Downloaded
Refference Assets Downloads
Reference Customers Utilized in Q4, 2012
TotalSalesMarketing
Figure 1: Reporting asset utilization isn’t very powerful.
Those are some nice charts huh? Looks like the stuff you’d see in an annual
report. But they didn’t look that way to our executives. So our pleas for
additional resources fell on deaf ears. Nothing. Nada.

5. 4
The problem was that I was speaking metrics. Our senior management knew
that additional resources would help us to increase the number of requests
fulfilled. Their response to this was, “So what?” What they really wanted to know
was how our program would impact the bottom line. So to grab their attention,
I knew that I had to link asset utilization with revenue.
Casestudy:Howtocapturemetricsthatmatter
To prove our influence on sales, I started small. Citrix was having a user
conference in Barcelona, Spain. So I looked at a list of confirmed attendees and
cross-referenced those against those also listed as sales opportunities. Then,
because my goal was to show we could impact the bottom line, I culled out those
where salespeople had listed the probability of closing at greater than 60 percent.
This narrowed the list to 36 attendees. These I invited to join us at a Customer
Reference Forum event at the conference. Of those, 20 showed up to participate.
A month later, I ran a report that revealed that we had subsequently closed 1.5
million dollars in sales among the 20 people who had attended my Forum. From
that data, I was able to create charts like Figure 2 below to show our impact on
revenue (Closed/Won), as well as projected revenue (Pipeline +60% of closing.)
Refference Impact on Revenue
Opportunity ValuePipeline +60%Closed/Won
$1,500,013
$425,411
$1,925,424
Figure 2: Linking activity to impact reels in your stakeholders.
So with these results in hand, I sent my bosses an email. This led to inquiries,
discussions, and, long story short, more budget.
UsingSalesforcetotrackimpact
Our reference tool is built into Salesforce.com. This allowed us to roll out
Reference Program self-service capabilities to all of our users. It also provides
the technology necessary to link our reference activities to sales.
But that’s only possible if our stakeholders—salespeople and folks in
marketing—use the application exclusively when they work with us. So

6. 5
I established some rules of engagement. Chief among them was that all
reference requests, had to be entered into Salesforce.com. No ifs, ands or buts.
Today, the salespeople access us through their opportunities. By doing that, we
can track the revenue.
We have about 600 reference records. Our sales and marketing users can
review a detailed profile on the solutions and deployments of these customers.
Users also have self-service access to reference assets, like case studies,
videos and sales presentation slides as well as to internal documents, like “win
wires” and interview transcripts. We provide those materials to them so that
they can tell the stories in their own way.
So the great thing about our system is that we’re tracking the revenue influence of
our Reference Program exactly the same way that we’re tracking lead gen activities
through Salesforce.com. And it all rolls up into the same Executive Dashboard.
So, just like we track the effectiveness of, a direct mail campaign or an event,
those metrics roll right up into the Executive Dashboards for reference activities.
Citrixnumberstellmystory
Since we introduced Reference Program SLAs, processes and metrics, we’ve
delivered impressive results. For example, in 2013, we showed that our reference
assets “influenced” more than 110 million dollars in sales. What I mean by “influenced”
is that we were able to link the consumption of reference assets (case studies,
reference calls, videos, etc.) to prospects who subsequently became customers.
Figure 3 below shows the “influence” our reference had on both sales and
projected sales (the Pipeline.)
Pipeline
Total Closed/
Won revenue
Total for 2013
312 Deal & 648 in Pipeline
Q4 2013
124 Deal & 156 in Pipeline
Q3 2013
111 Deals & 18 in Pipeline
Q2 2013
34 Deals & 446 in Pipeline
Q1 2013
43 Deal & 28 in Pipeline
$112,566,309
$25,067,592
$3,594,996
$78,804,598
$5,099,122
$110,314,085
$30,280,851
$31,543,231
$36,538,508
$11,951,495
Figure 3: The Citrix Reference Program’s impact on revenue in 2013.

7. 6
The influence we had on both sales and the pipeline totaled over $220,000,000. I mean,
that’s mind-boggling. When we set out two years ago, we were thinking maybe we
could show five million dollars a quarter, and we showed 220 million dollars last year.
We’re seeing quarter over quarter revenue influence growth as well. It’s
a numbers story that’s getting us greater mind share with salespeople. That
in turn is driving more reference asset requests and ultimately, more revenue.
So it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, an upward spiral where the more our
salespeople sell using our assets the more they use them.
Just as important, is the fact that the story of our numbers captured the
attention of our senior management. Their support for us has grown in every
way. And that’s all because we’re able to demonstrate our impact on sales
revenue by integrating our metrics into the company’s dashboards.
Gettingmoregranulartoclosemoresales
So I’ll tell you about what’s next for our program. Because we’ve integrated sales
opportunities and revenue activities, we’re now looking at how we can determine
the optimal point in the sales cycle to apply different reference collateral activities.
To do that, we deployed a SaaS software solution from SAVO. Their solution
is replacing all of our sales libraries that formerly were in SharePoint. We really
feel that that’s the next evolution in the program to deliver reference assets at
the right time to help close deals. We have our fingers crossed that it will help
shorten the sales cycle too.
One of application’s nice features is the ability for our sales reps to score
individual reference assets. We can
see which reference assets are used
and when in the sales cycle. And most
importantly, because it’s integrated
in Salesforce.com, every time an
asset is used it will be captured in
our Executive Dashboard. So not only
can we link reference activities to our
influence on revenue, but we’ll be able to do that for individual content pieces.
From that, we’ll be able to measure the ROI of each artifact. And we’ll be able
to make informed decisions about how to use our budget more effectively. For
example, we’ll be able to create more of the content types that deliver great
value and do less of, or eliminate, marginal performers.

8. FinalTakeaways
The main thing that I want you to take away from this, is that collecting and
using metrics to boost your reference program is quite doable. This isn’t rocket
science. The first thing you need to do is to start thinking about your program
as a reference selling methodology. You aren’t a writer, or a publisher, or
a content producer, you’re a sales enabler.
That being the case, everything you do should be measured for the impact
it has on revenue. What that means, is that you should start looking at all of
your activities as campaigns, the same way that lead gen does. I even give
this concept a name. I call these “closing campaigns,” because unlike lead gen,
where you’re trying to get leads in and convert them into opportunities, we’re
taking those opportunities and helping sales to close them.
So once you start focusing on telling your story in numbers—and linking it to
revenue, shortening the sales cycle, and helping sales to close their deals—your
executives and salespeople will take notice. You’ll find them to be very receptive
of your requests for more budget, more support and more leeway to implement
new initiatives.
Bill Lee, Founder
bill@c4ce.com
www.c4ce.com
+1.214.907.5600
3225 Turtle Creek Blvd,
Suite 1801 Dallas
TX 75219
CONSULTING
We help firms create “rock star” (aka
"marquee, " "champion," "MVP," etc)
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”Jackie Breiter
Vice President, Customer Success &
Flagship Program
CA Technologies
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