We recently spoke with Ken Darby of HP's Customer Reference Program about HP Reference Edge - the reference team's education program targeted at all customer-facing staff. Read on to learn how this innovative training is helping to create a culture of customer stewards. TPG: What is HP doing to elevate reference customers within the company? Ken Darby: HP has always had a focus on customers; our reference customers in particular because they impact sales effectiveness by accelerating the sales cycle. They're also critical to our marketing messaging. In the last few years we've developed a program, specifically for customer-facing staff, that communicates how to engage customers in a way that leverages them as assets and honors the mutual benefits of our relationship. The HP Reference Education Program, also known as HP Reference Edge, formalizes those rules of engagement. TPG: Why do you think it's important to elevate reference customers? Ken Darby: Successful customers mobilize our competitive advantage in a market that has new entrants every day. Highlighting our successes through collective customer voices that speak of the real value of HP products, solutions and services gives us a strategic advantage over our competitors. With HP Reference Edge we have a collective foundation from which our sales and marketing professionals, product developers... basically anyone who interfaces with customers... may find a unified story to share and engage customers to help tell the story. TPG: Why did HP decide to do Reference Edge? Ken Darby: We really wanted to foster a culture of customer stewards within HP, meaning that all customer-facing staff feels responsible for cultivating very strong relationships with customers. HP Reference Edge is a way for the company to demonstrate the enormous benefits of customer stewardship, and to train our team on specific tactics that allow us to foster and leverage those relationships. So not only did we want to develop a program that builds a company of customer stewards, we also wanted to create consistency in our interactions with customers. In respecting our audience, we focused on a few guiding principles. First, Reference Edge needed to deliver easily accessible, self-paced courses that are available anytime, from anywhere. Second, the courses needed to be broken into high impact content modules no longer than 15-20 minutes to honor the professional development time constraints of customer-facing professionals. With these two principles firmly in place we've successfully activated Reference Edge. TPG: How is what you're doing innovative and unique? Ken Darby: Our program has really adopted a much wider perspective on reference customers in that we view them as corporate assets rather than as tactical tools. So instead of focusing on success stories, our team has become the internal resource for how to really leverage HP's relationships with customers. The actual success stories and case studies are one aspect of it, but HP Reference Edge is a dedicated effort to help all customer-facing staff engaged with those very important customers. Also, we worked very closely with the HP workforce development organization, and segmented the courses to provide customized learning for each unique audience. TPG: Who are the key audiences for this training? What's your desired outcome? Ken Darby: Each course module is targeted to a specific audience. At the highest level, the audiences can be broken into three categories-sales, marketing and customer reference program professionals. The exception is the first course, which is applicable to all employees at HP because it focuses on the strategic value of the customer relationship. I'd say there are three desired outcomes. The first is to build a company of customer stewards; the second is to create consistency in our interactions with customers; and the third is to develop our collective competencies with the most efficient time investment possible. TPG: What are some of the results? Ken Darby: The first course, Impact of Customer Leverage, rolled out at the end of January. In just the first week we had quadruple the number of participants that typically sign up through HP workforce development. We've continued to roll out courses; in fact we'll be releasing our third course shortly and the fourth is currently in production. TPG: What role did the Phelon Group play in supporting this effort? Ken Darby: The Phelon Group is a strategic partner of the HP Customer Reference Program. I wanted to tap into their expertise in customer reference programs, their perspective on Customer Leverage and their experience with e-learning to build out a comprehensive curriculum for our three audiences, to develop courseware and to support the implementation and rollout processes. Today, we're working together to measure the business impact of our program and to expand the program to Europe, Asia, Middle-East Asia and Latin America. TPG: What have been the most important lessons you learned? Ken Darby: First, that people are very hungry for this type of training. HP Reference Edge puts a formal framework around how to engage with customers; the interest from employees has been overwhelming. We're just about to roll out the fourth course and there's already a waiting list of participants. Second, we really benefited from engaging The Phelon Group to help develop the subject matter and morph it into an e-learning experience, which was critical to adoption. And third, we learned that working with the internal development group to use the existing training foundation was essential to wrapping HP Reference Edge into the overall training offerings. Do you have a story to share about an innovation in your reference program? Let us know! Promise Phelon, Partner promise.phelon@phelongroup.com