Straight talking on business, brands, technology and employee engagement.

It’s common in B2B sales for a potential purchaser of your services to ask to speak to client references, often from a similar sector to the prospect. It’s a good idea to get a real view from an existing client and, in fact, I don’t know why prospective clients don’t do it more.

It’s almost always at the very end of the procurement process as a final check - but in fact I think an extensive set of reference checks could be employed right up front at the start of the process and used as a key part of the evaluation.

I read on Anxietyindex it looks like at least one company, a small Finnish insurer called “If” is trying to see if real customer references can help them in B2C sales. Insurance, and financial products in general, seem to suffer from poor levels of trust - we tend to think all financial institutions are as bad as each other. So If has assembled a panel of 800 consumers, all users of its service, who are available to be contacted during business hours.

I wonder if this will help give transparency or if it’s just a gimmick to get PR (which it has succeeded in). I’d hazard a guess that the 800 customers are being incentivised somehow to at least compensate for their time and if they are that’s likely skew them to respond in a more positive light. Would you criticise a company that has chosen (and is rewarding) you as a brand ambassador? 

So while the idea of crowd sourcing a sales team is clever and original, I doubt whether it will add any authenticity to an already opaque industry.