VLOOKUP can seem intimidating as it is a more complex Excel function, but this tutorial will walk you through the steps and explain common pitfalls when using the VLOOKUP function.

Emily joined Referential as a Customer Advocacy Consultant after a career spanning project and program management, partner relations, and talent pipeline recruiting. She pulls threads from each of these past lives to support her clients and their sales organizations through the recruitment of customer advocates.

Emily enjoys meeting new people and making connections for mutual advantage. She likens recruiting customer advocates to being a maître d'hôtel in a top restaurant: welcoming newcomers with individual attention and finding them a desirable table with stimulating dining companions.

Honestly, though, the most important part of working from home I’ve come across isn’t the ability to pop in a load of laundry or eat from your own refrigerator – it’s knowing the how and when of being done for the day.

Being one of the Managing Partners of Referential, David Feber has invested enormous amounts of time and effort in building the company up to where it is today. Dave’s academic background as an engineer serves as an inspiration and motivation to continually measure all aspects of advocacy, which always keeps work intellectually interesting and intriguing for him. It’s also what makes Referential a unique player in the market!

Apart from helping steer the company from a business perspective, he also handles the company’s IT strategy and oversees the asset creation team. To date, he’s edited well over a thousand case studies and he finds his hybrid technical/business background helps him train the writing team to translate the impact and success of clients’ offerings in a way that people can easily understand.

Perhaps one of the strongest driving forces behind Referential’s daily operations is Helen Feber, who also happens to be a Managing Partner alongside her husband and business partner, David Feber. She originally started the company in 1994, and from that point on the rest is history!

Helen built up her skill set and experience in customer advocacy after she “fell in” (as she puts it) to being a consultant after having left Hewlett Packard. Through a project she was asked to work on, she came to recognize the obvious lack of customers who would be able to talk about and provide insight on a product. And she credits that experience bringing her awareness to the absence of customer advocacy in so many corporations, and to the absolute necessity for these programs.

Pivot tables are one of Excel's most powerful Microsoft tools. A pivot table allows you to extract the significant data and trends from a large, detailed data set. When analyzing your customer advocacy program data, pivot tables can be excellent tools for efficiently gathering insights on your customer advocates and advocacy assets.

Are you looking to build a database of active customer references but don’t know where to start? Are you having trouble determining the ‘what, which and how’ of metrics you should track? Are there more questions than answers? …Or are you looking for a real, in-depth refresher course to help polish your resume and knowledge base?

With video meetings being our new normal, we want to present at least our top halves in the best way possible. So here are some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your video conferencing!

Have you ever dived into fulfilling an urgent reference request only to spend the next precious minutes hopping back and forth between your CRM and reference management systems, verifying that you’re using the most up-to-date customer data to identify the best-matching reference? Having easy, seamless access to current, real-time data – like account ownership, product usage, customer location and contact titles – can make a world of difference in how efficiently you can hone in on an ideal match for a reference request.

Though each of our consultants dedicate their time and focus to the programs of specific clients, our team regularly exchanges tips and best practices with one another. As a result, we’re constantly building on our collective knowledge and enhancing our ability to serve the needs of different clients.

Everyone has their own methods for working remotely but it’s easy to slip into bad habits. There are, however, simple things you can do to make working at home as productive and healthy as possible.