Custom Vendor Landscape
Marketing Referral Platforms
An Important Note
Understanding a Custom Vendor Landscape
- Info-Tech’s Custom Vendor Landscapes are custom deliverables that are built with a heavy emphasis on the use cases and selection criteria of the requesting client. They are intended to provide an external point-of-view on a smaller or niche software marketspace. They are built over the course of one week based on secondary research by one of our Software Selection Services analysts.
- These deliverables may be sanitized and published for convenient access by our other members; it is important to understand that they are not intended to be general market analysis reports like our SoftwareReviews Data Quadrants or Software Selection Guides.
- This report is bespoke to the client that requested it and is not intended to be an omnibus view of the entire marketspace (these deliverables are limited to ten vendors, and the vendor shortlist is often dictated in full or in part by the requestor).
- Please ensure that you are conducting your own due diligence on vendors within the space; the sanitized version of this report may be a helpful starting point for initial vendor shortlisting; the limitations of its scope and the highly custom nature of the vendor list and analysis contained within does not make it synonymous with the analysis in our omnibus market analysis research (SoftwareReviews Data Quadrants and Software Selection Guides).
Understanding the Selection Initiative
Objective
The client is seeking a marketing referral platform which supports referral activities of B2B clients for products and services. The current process is largely manually moderated by the referrer’s assigned sales rep with challenges and workaround present in the process of linking the referred and referring parties. The referral program is in the process of being updated with a smaller initiative being tested with a provisional rewards system that requires further formalization and an expected increase in volume. A major cause of the manual effort required of salespeople is the aim of maximizing the ease of client experience.
The ideal solution will be able to scale and handle increasing volumes, provide extended capability over time, support use across different brands and teams, provide some level of pre-established incentives frameworking, integrate with Salesforce, and provide sufficient focus on data and security.
Vendor Selection Criteria
In evaluating the marketspace for marketing referral programs, Info-Tech’s analysts looked at the following vendor attributes:
- Breadth and depth of capabilities for marketing referral programs.
- Vendor footprint (vendor market presence, vendor share of mind, vendor stability and long-term viability)
- Focus on vertical-specific capabilities
- Customization potential and ease-of-use
- Affordability transparency
Selection Rigor Matters.
Enterprise software is a key driver of digital transformation - having a strong approach to vendor selection is essential. Info-Tech’s research shows that 70% of application selections fail because of poorly defined requirements and inadequate vendor validation.
Defining the Referral Software Market
Market Definition
- Referral marketing is the process in which loyal customers are mobilized to promote the brand, product, or service to someone else. This can happen naturally by word-of-mouth or through marketing influence via a referral marketing program.
- Referral marketing software supports this process by automating promotions and communication campaigns, providing analytics, and incentives frameworks.
- Many referral marketing software focus on supporting B2C referral efforts with a focus on influencer and affiliate marketing or as a part of the product bundle for SaaS offerings. For this client, it is imperative to identify a vendor which has the capabilities to support service-based businesses.
- Extended related capabilities often include consumer loyalty, affiliate marketing, and other forms of customer engagement.
Key Trends in Marketing Referrals
4X
Referred accounts are 4X more likely to buy a product and have 16% higher lifetime values.
84%
84% of B2B sales begin with a referral
Top Level Features for Marketing Referral Software
Feature Name |
Description |
| Tracking & Reporting | Supports better data visibility. Conversion tracking, performance metrics, ROI tracking, referral tracking, reporting + statistics, data import/export. Software to track referrals, measure program effectiveness, and refine approach. |
| Incentives Program | Rewards program, lead engagement, lead management software, lead generation, affiliate management. Compelling rewards for referrers, referred customers, and involved salespeople. Foundational customizable incentive structuring framework that encourages participation and drives referrals. |
| Multiple Brands | Capability for usage by multiple different brands and teams across one account. |
| Scalability + growth volume | Ability to handle large referral volumes and to grow and scale as the program does, exponentially increasing volumes and increase capability over time. Potential increase of capabilities extending into other marketing areas. |
| Data & security | Client ownership of data, other strong security practices including encryption, access controls, regular audits, data privacy compliance, secure hosting, infrastructure and APIs, as well as user authentication and authorization and third-party risk management. |
| Integrations | Integration with Salesforce as well as other programs in use by the client including Pardon, Salesloft and Cendoso. |
| Promotions and Communication | Multi-campaign, email marketing software, multi-channel marketing, campaign analytics, campaign management. Communications systems which integrate the referral into the customer lifecycle (e.g. through embedded email capabilities) and regularly promote the program. Email and other messaging functionality. |
| Customer experience | Ease of use for referee and referrer, minimization of amount of manual engagement required of clients, automatic data sharing, easy link sharing, intuitive process that empowers independent use according to client initiative. |
Key Players
Info-Tech identified 8 platforms applicable to the use case. The platforms are listed in alphabetical order.
