The use of customer references to facilitate marketing and sales in
business markets has received growing interest among practitioners and
academics. The importance of references has been highlighted in a wide
range of contexts, such as customer relationship management, customer
value management, sales, and marketing communications. Yet knowledge
about the effective application of references in business remains scant,
and studies have not addressed in-depth what constitutes customer
reference marketing or studied its relation to firm performance. This
study contributes to this important but underdeveloped business
marketing topic by 1) conceptualizing customer reference marketing based
on theory and an extensive qualitative field study, 2) building a
measure for the construct using survey data, and 3) demonstrating its
relevance by linking the construct to firms' selling performance with
additional collected data. The results broaden and specify the current
understanding of how to effectively deploy references in business
markets and provide evidence of the hypothesized performance, as well as
contingency effects. The established conceptual foundations for the
phenomenon provide substantial opportunities for practitioners and
theory-testing oriented business marketing research.