When one's job depends on making the right decision, one is far more comfortable throwing open the corporate coffers if one's jitters are first quieted by strong testimonials. A well-blazed trail is much more inviting than a trackless wilderness. So the need for the Leverage Program was clear. Customers get annoyed when they're bothered too often. They have businesses to run, after all, and must be approached with care and used judiciously, lest they decide the hassle's just not worth it and take their business to a less bothersome vendor.
Editors get suspicious if an agency trots out the same old customer over and over again.
And they get annoyed when PR people waste their precious time by foisting upon them customers whose experiences are irrelevant to the particular story at hand. Everybody's hoarding their references and guarding them fiercely. UpStart solved these various concerns with a sophisticated custom Leverage database application. And we solved the problems for our clients' customers by carefully qualifying the kinds of references they're willing to provide, whether it's returning a call to a sales prospect, showing up at a company press conference, or being cited as examples in press releases or profiled in full-fledged case studies. And the UpStart Leverage database application solves the editors' concerns by enabling customer data to be sorted and searched by a variety of criteria.