Struggling to find the right customer reference?
You’re likely scrambling through emails and spreadsheets, trying to find a happy customer who can talk to a prospect on short notice.
This constant fire drill wastes valuable time and delays deals, making it harder to build the trust your sales team needs to close.
If you’re also looking into business tools, my article on best spend management software covers how to avoid costly mistakes.
According to Verified Market Reports, a staggering 78% of organizations lack formal systems to manage references. This chaos directly leads to lost sales opportunities.
The right tool fixes this by creating a central hub for all your customer stories, ready whenever you need them.
In this guide, I’ll review the best customer reference management software. These tools help you organize and leverage your most powerful sales assets.
You’ll discover how to automate reference requests and build a library of advocates to boost your brand’s credibility and close deals faster.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gainsight → | Enterprise SaaS companies | |
| 2 | Point of Reference → | Mid-sized B2B firms | |
| 3 | Influitive → | Mid-sized to enterprise B2B/SaaS | |
| 4 | SlapFive → | Sales and marketing teams | |
| 5 | Orca → | B2B/SaaS companies |
1. Gainsight
Struggling to showcase your customer successes effectively?
Gainsight’s AI-powered CustomerOS helps you orchestrate retention and growth, transforming how your business drives customer value. This means you can proactively guide users to value and drive retention and expansion with its leading Customer Success platform.
It addresses the challenge of distinguishing genuine capabilities from marketing hype by offering a unified system for orchestrating customer retention and growth, allowing your team to deliver a seamless customer journey.
You can deliver outcomes without adding headcount.
Gainsight offers a unified system for your team, eliminating hand-offs and confusion. This means you can gather real-time, AI-powered customer engagement insights across all conversations. Additionally, it helps you improve user adoption with in-app engagements and meaningful product analytics.
Plus, you can build a modern customer community, giving your customers a single hub for anytime, anywhere self-service. The result is a connected system that helps you predict churn, address risk, and identify expansion opportunities.
Speaking of data insights, understanding best cookie tracking software can further enhance your customer data collection efforts.
Key features:
- Real-time AI-powered insights: Gain deep understanding of customer engagement across all conversations to proactively manage relationships and identify opportunities.
- Unified CustomerOS platform: Consolidate your customer data and activities into one system to orchestrate retention, growth, and deliver a seamless customer journey.
- In-app product experience and communities: Improve user adoption with meaningful product analytics and give customers a single hub for self-service and connection.
Gainsight features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Gainsight stands out as the best Customer Reference Management Software due to its AI-powered CustomerOS, which centralizes customer data and insights. This enables you to streamline reference tracking, proactively identify expansion opportunities, and foster strong customer relationships, as evidenced by a 2700% increase in NPS responses for one customer.
2. Point of Reference
Struggling to find credible customer references when you need them most?
Point of Reference streamlines your customer advocacy efforts, transforming how you capture and utilize valuable testimonials.
This means you can efficiently track and manage your customer success stories, ensuring they are readily available for your sales and marketing teams.
It’s time to centralize your customer references.
Point of Reference helps you automate reference tracking, eliminating manual effort and improving sales enablement. This solution makes it easy to generate shareable case studies, building a powerful repository of customer stories.
You can effortlessly connect advocates with prospects, ensuring your sales team has the right testimonials at the right time. Plus, you can maintain a single, trusted source for all your customer references, enhancing brand trust and driving conversions.
The result is a significant reduction in the time your team spends searching for, validating, and managing customer references, freeing them to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Key features:
- Centralized reference management: Gain a single source of truth for all your customer references, making it easy to find and manage valuable testimonials.
- Automated reference tracking: Streamline the process of identifying, capturing, and updating customer success stories, saving your team valuable time.
- Easy content generation: Quickly generate shareable case studies and connect advocates with prospects to boost sales and marketing efforts.
Point of Reference features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you are seeking the best Customer Reference Management software to reduce manual effort and build a centralized repository of customer stories, Point of Reference offers the robust features you need. This tool helps you transform how your organization leverages customer advocacy, leading to improved sales enablement and brand trust.
3. Influitive
Struggling to mobilize your best customer advocates at scale?
Influitive offers a modern engagement platform to harness the authentic voice of your customers. This means you can easily get more reviews, manage customer references, and amplify social media outreach.
This platform helps you discover, nurture, and mobilize advocates to drive growth, connecting directly with your challenges in generating consistent, high-quality social proof.
Here’s how to turn customers into loyal advocates.
Influitive empowers you to guide customer journeys with gamified campaigns, ensuring customers stay on the path to success. This platform fosters thriving communities that build genuine connections with your brand and employees.
You can create tailored experiences for your customers through personalized onboarding and incentivized learning. Plus, the cutting-edge AI agent, Groovy, provides 24/7 strategic support, ensuring you can generate more leads, boost customer success, and gather direct feedback to improve future products, all at scale.
The result is amplified customer loyalty and brand trust.
If you’re also evaluating how different systems connect, my article on best application integration tools might be helpful.
Key features:
- Modern engagement platform: Mobilize customer advocates for reviews, referrals, and references at scale, leveraging powerful tools and expert services.
- Gamified customer journeys: Create tailored experiences with personalized onboarding and incentivized learning to keep customers engaged and successful.
- Thriving community building: Foster genuine connections between customers, your employees, and your brand to build lasting customer loyalty.
Influitive features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Influitive stands out as a strong contender for the best customer reference management software, particularly for mid-sized to enterprise B2B/SaaS companies. Its ability to mobilize advocates, nurture customer stories, and drive referrals at scale directly addresses key pain points in generating authentic social proof and driving measurable ROI.
4. SlapFive
Struggling to find credible customer references when you need them most?
SlapFive helps your team quickly gather, organize, and use authentic customer stories and testimonials. This means you can easily showcase your brand’s true value.
You’ll discover that SlapFive eliminates the chaos of hunting for references, enabling your sales and marketing teams to build brand trust and accelerate sales cycles. Your search for powerful customer proof is finally over.
Here’s how you can achieve that.
SlapFive streamlines the entire customer reference process, making it simple to collect and activate your customer advocates. You’ll gain access to a centralized repository of powerful customer stories.
This allows you to capture authentic customer voices across various formats, including video, audio, and written testimonials. Your sales and marketing teams can then leverage these diverse proof points.
Additionally, SlapFive lets you easily share these customer stories across all your key channels, from your website to social media, and even within your sales presentations. The result is a unified, compelling narrative that resonates with prospects and reinforces your brand’s credibility.
Your brand trust will soar with genuine customer voices.
Key features:
- Centralized Reference Hub: Create a single, searchable repository for all customer testimonials, videos, and case studies, eliminating scattered data and improving access.
- Diverse Content Capture: Easily gather customer stories in various formats, including video, audio, and text, ensuring you have the right proof for every selling situation.
- Seamless Content Sharing: Distribute customer references effortlessly across your website, social media, and sales enablement tools to maximize their impact and reach.
SlapFive features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re looking for the best customer reference management software to centralize your customer stories and amplify your brand’s credibility, SlapFive is an excellent choice. It’s designed to transform how your sales and marketing teams gather and leverage authentic customer proof points.
5. Orca
Struggling to find credible customer stories for your brand?
Orca streamlines how your team gathers and leverages customer testimonials to build trust and boost conversions.
This means you can easily create a centralized repository of powerful customer narratives, eliminating manual effort and improving sales enablement.
Here’s how you solve that problem.
Orca helps your company showcase authentic customer experiences, transforming skeptical prospects into confident buyers.
The system’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to access essential information quickly, and its automatic logbook accurately records voyages, saving time and ensuring precision for your team. This allows you to plan trips and find the best departure time, with real-time alerts for forecast changes.
Additionally, Orca seamlessly integrates with your existing boat network and instruments, providing flexibility across platforms like iOS and Android, allowing you to operate your autopilot with an Apple Watch for single-handed sailing. Your team can utilize chart portfolios without artificial limitations, built with official Hydrographic Offices data.
The result is increased brand trust and faster sales cycles for you.
Before diving deeper, you might find my analysis of best catalog management software helpful for efficiently organizing product information.
Key features:
- Centralized Story Hub: Effortlessly gather, organize, and share compelling customer testimonials and case studies, eliminating manual tracking.
- Automated Data Capture: Automatically record voyage details with an accurate logbook, saving time and ensuring precise data for your team.
- Seamless System Integration: Connect with existing boat networks and instruments, including NMEA2000, and operate across multiple platforms like iOS and Android.
Orca features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If your B2B/SaaS company needs to simplify and enhance its customer reference program, Orca stands out as the best customer reference management software. Its focus on user experience, automated data collection, and robust integration capabilities, combined with positive customer reviews highlighting ease of use, make it a powerful tool for building brand trust.
6. Upland Software
Struggling to find credible customer stories for sales?
Upland Software, particularly its RO Innovation product, offers a dedicated solution to amplify your customer references. This means you can increase brand awareness and win more deals by actively managing your customer advocates. Imagine the difference proactive customer reference management can make.
This directly addresses your need for a centralized, efficient way to leverage customer success.
Here’s how Upland Software helps you achieve these outcomes. Upland’s RO Innovation specifically focuses on customer reference management, aiming to build your pipeline and close deals faster. It transforms your approach from reactive to proactive, ensuring you always have relevant references at your fingertips.
Additionally, Upland provides resources like success stories, for example, how Sage closed deals faster using their sales customer reference program, demonstrating real-world impact. This comprehensive platform connects you with customer advocates, empowering your sales and marketing teams to showcase proven value.
You will drive conversions and build trust.
Key features:
- Amplify Customer References: This capability helps you increase brand awareness and win more deals by effectively leveraging your happy customers.
- AI-powered Proposal Management: The Qvidian product (part of Upland) helps you create proactive sales proposals and respond to RFPs faster.
- Content Creation and Distribution: Kapost assists in creating and distributing content that is designed to convert buyers into loyal customers.
Upland Software features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: If you’re looking for the best customer reference management software to streamline your testimonial collection and sales enablement, Upland’s RO Innovation is a strong contender. Their focus on proactive management, as evidenced by Sage’s success in closing deals faster, positions them well to help your team.
7. UserEvidence
Tired of begging for customer stories?
This is where UserEvidence shines, transforming how you capture and utilize customer proof at scale.
You can turn responses from one survey into hundreds of proof points, eliminating the struggle of manual collection and legal hurdles. This means your sales enablement and marketing teams can access a rich library of verified customer evidence.
Here’s how you can gain customer proof at scale.
UserEvidence provides a comprehensive platform to collect feedback, curate success stories, and create compelling content that credibly validates your product’s value. You can design surveys with expert guidance and deliver them in-app, via email, or hyperlink, even bringing in reviews from G2 and other external sources to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Additionally, UserEvidence allows you to use custom filters to find the exact proof points you need, whether it’s a statistic on time saved or a success story from a specific industry or region. This capability helps your reps gain a self-serve library of customer evidence, organized by criteria like industry and role, and integrating easily with tools like Salesforce and Seismic. You can also instantly turn these stories into on-brand marketing content, including testimonials and customizable microsites.
The result? Boosted buyer confidence and increased conversion rates.
Key features:
- Generate customer evidence: Capture feedback from across the customer journey and turn responses into hundreds of proof points at scale.
- Curate success stories: Filter content by industry, geography, company size, and use case to find precise proof points your sales team needs.
- Create marketing content: Instantly transform customer stories into on-brand testimonials, customizable microsites, and exportable formats for every channel.
UserEvidence features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: UserEvidence is the best customer reference management software for B2B/SaaS companies looking to scale customer evidence. It automates feedback collection and content creation, helping your product marketing and sales enablement teams build trust and boost win rates.
Conclusion
Tired of scrambling for customer references?
This last-minute fire drill wastes valuable time and delays crucial deals, making it nearly impossible for your sales team to build the trust they need.
In fact, Content by Peak shows the right tools can reduce sales cycles by 40%. That’s a massive impact on your pipeline and your ability to close deals faster.
Here’s what I’d recommend.
From my analysis, Gainsight stands out as the top choice. Its AI-powered platform cuts through the marketing hype by unifying customer data into a single, reliable system.
Its powerful CustomerOS helps you proactively identify advocates, predict churn, and find expansion opportunities. Choosing the best customer reference management software like Gainsight truly transforms your entire sales process.
If you’re optimizing business operations with software, my guide on best vendors management software offers crucial insights.
I suggest you book a free demo of Gainsight to see exactly how its features can streamline your workflows and prove ROI.
You’ll build trust and close deals faster.
