When eHarmony meets B2B marketing—the under-appreciated value of couple-based referrals

This blog post would have been perfect right before Valentine’s Day, but hey, things don’t always happen when you want them to.

In the past two weeks we received two inbound marketing referrals that were the result of dinner conversations between significant others.

In the first case, the husband ran a demand gen team for a large multi-national corporation. He met Openprise at a recent tradeshow and we did an online demo for his team. Before we got any feedback from his team (which was great feedback), that evening we got an email from him introducing Openprise to his wife, who runs the analytics team for a large US health care provider. While he had challenges with improving the quality and correlation of his global marketing lead databases, she had the challenges of correlating patient data across a large number of electronic health record (EHR) systems. Very different businesses and job functions, but very similar technical data challenges.

In the second case, the wife was invited to an Openprise product demo by her colleague on Tuesday. The team really liked our product and we’re now working with them on an opportunity. In a parallel universe, our account executive was pursuing another prospect who visited our website a few weeks ago. The prospect was doing a very good job fending off our sales team. Two days later, our account executive was at the TOPO Summit in San Francisco, and happened to run into this guy. He said he’ was now very interested in having a conversation because his wife saw a demo of our product earlier in the week and thought it could help with his challenges, too. She worked in sales ops, he worked in marketing ops.

Ah, the power of dinner table conversations. This is where eHarmony meets B2B marketing. We think this is an underappreciated and undervalued partner referral channel! Word-of-mouth referrals don’t come stronger than that! And we thought couples try not to talk shop over the dinner table. Obviously we were wrong!!!

Being the innovative bunch we are at Openprise, we’re launching a Couples B2B Referral Program. This is how it works: If you refer your significant other to Openprise and she/he becomes a customer, Openprise will buy you two a dinner at any restaurant of your choosing. Yep, any restaurant.

Interested? Here’s where you can send us the referral, or just shoot an email to info@openprisetech.com.

Come on!  We’d love to meet your significant other. 🙂