"Who Else Like Us Is Using This?" — The Reference Objection From a Buyer Who Refuses to Go First

A prospect asks "who else like us is using this?" and most reps hear a request for information. It is not. It is a request for cover.

There is a difference. Information means they want to evaluate your product and a customer list helps them do it. Cover means they have already decided your product might work and they are now solving a completely different problem: how do I say yes to this without it being my fault if it goes badly? Those two questions get answered in two totally different ways, and the reason so many reps fumble this one is that they answer the first question when they were asked the second.

I have watched a lot of calls die right here. The rep hears the question, panics slightly, and does one of two things. They name a logo that has nothing to do with the buyer's world — "oh, we work with a big retailer, a fintech, a couple of SaaS companies" — which tells the buyer that nobody in their situation has taken this risk yet. Or they get honest in the worst possible way: "you'd actually be our first in local government, which is exciting." Exciting for you. Not for the council officer whose name goes on the procurement paperwork.

Some buyers physically cannot go first

Before you can handle this objection you have to understand who is asking it, because the same words mean different things from different chairs.

A VP of Sales at a Series B startup asking "who else uses this" is mostly doing diligence. They want to know they are not buying vapour. If you give them a decent answer they move on, and if you give them a mediocre answer they still might buy, because their upside from finding a tool that works is enormous and their downside from a bad vendor is a wasted quarter and a slightly awkward conversation.

Now put the same question in the mouth of a council procurement officer, a claims committee, a litigation chair, a hospital operations director, a compliance lead at a regulated insurer. For those people the maths is inverted. If they buy a great tool, the organisation gets a bit better and nobody sends them a note about it. If they buy a bad tool, there is a paper trail with their name on it, and somebody will find it. Their downside is unbounded and their upside is capped. That is not timidity. That is a rational response to their incentive structure, and if you treat it as timidity you will lose them.

So when this kind of buyer asks who else is using it, they are not really asking for a customer list. They are asking: if this goes wrong, what can I point to that shows I did the responsible thing? A named peer who already made the same decision is the cheapest possible answer to that question. It is not the only one, which is the whole point of this post, but it is the cheapest one, so it is the one they ask for first.

I have found the same pattern across pretty much every long-cycle vertical I have sold into. It is baked into the government and public sector cold call motion — a council officer will let you talk for twenty minutes and then ask which other councils you work with, and everything you said before that moment gets re-weighted based on your answer. Same in legal. Same in claims.

The two ways reps blow it

The first way is the irrelevant name-drop. You have logos, they are just the wrong logos, and you say them anyway hoping volume covers relevance. What the buyer hears is: this person does not understand that a mid-market e-commerce brand and a metropolitan borough council are not the same buyer. And now they are not just unconvinced, they think you are either naive or hoping they will not notice.

The second way is the naked confession. "We don't have anyone in your space yet." Sometimes reps dress it up as an opportunity — "you'd be first, we'd work really closely with you, you'd shape the roadmap." Roadmap influence is a real and valuable thing to some buyers. It is worth almost nothing to a buyer whose entire concern is downside protection. You have offered them more upside when their problem was risk.

There is a third failure that is subtler and I see it from good reps. They answer honestly and completely and then stop talking. Silence after "we don't have anyone in your sector yet" is where the deal quietly ends. The answer is not the problem. The absence of a next sentence is the problem.

Play one: adjacent proof, correctly framed

You almost never have a perfect logo. You often have an adjacent one, and adjacency is a legitimate answer if — and only if — you name the axis of similarity before you name the customer.

The mistake is to say the logo and let the buyer decide whether it is relevant. They will decide it is not, because they are looking for reasons to stay safe. Your job is to establish the dimension that matters, get agreement on it, and then produce the reference as proof on that dimension.

Here is roughly how I would say it to a claims leader at an insurer when my closest customer is a large NHS trust:

"Not in general insurance yet, no. The closest analogue I have is an NHS trust, and the reason I think it is a fair comparison is not the industry, it is the shape of the problem — high volume of inbound cases, a fixed pool of assessors, and a regulator who cares about how long people wait. If your bottleneck is different from that, tell me now and I will stop wasting your time. If it is the same bottleneck, I can tell you exactly what happened when they ran this."

Three things are happening in that answer. You conceded the literal point immediately, which buys you credibility for everything after. You named the axis — volume, fixed capacity, regulated wait times — and you invited them to reject it, which makes it feel like a test rather than a sales move. And you made the industry difference irrelevant by making something else the relevant variable.

Buyers will accept adjacency far more often than reps expect, but only when the rep has done the work of defining what adjacent means. If you leave it to them, adjacent means "same industry" and you lose.

One warning: pick the axis honestly. If the real reason your NHS example worked was something the insurer does not have, and you know it, do not run this play. You will get a reference call scheduled and it will fall apart in the first five minutes, and now you have burned a customer's goodwill as well as the deal.

Play two: explain the mechanism so the result transfers

This is the play almost nobody uses and it is the strongest one.

A case study is a result. "Company X reduced their handling time." A result only transfers if the buyer believes their situation is the same as Company X's, which is exactly the belief they are refusing to grant you. A mechanism is different. A mechanism is the causal chain — this input produced this behaviour change, which produced this outcome. If the buyer can check each link against their own operation, they can decide for themselves whether it transfers, and a decision they reach themselves is worth ten decisions you argue them into.

So instead of "we cut their intake backlog," you say: "here is what actually happened. Their intake team was re-keying details from email into the case system, and every one of those keystrokes was a chance to fat-finger a policy number, which meant a chunk of cases got kicked back and re-opened later. We took the re-keying out. The backlog did not shrink because we made anyone faster. It shrank because the rework stopped. So the question for you is not whether we are good at this, it is whether you have rework in your intake. Do you?"

Now the conversation has moved. You are no longer being asked to prove you are safe. You are diagnosing their operation with them, and the reference has quietly become a diagnostic tool instead of a security blanket.

This works particularly well with technically confident buyers — litigation chairs, senior claims people, engineering-adjacent operations leads — because they would rather reason from first principles than take somebody's word for it. When I am working a legal cold call into a managing partner or litigation chair, the mechanism answer lands better than any logo I could name, because partners are professional sceptics who have spent careers taking arguments apart. Give them a causal chain and they will stress-test it, and if it survives their stress test they own the conclusion.

The cost of this play is that you have to actually know how your product creates value at the level of behaviour, not at the level of marketing claims. Most reps do not. If you cannot describe the mechanism in three sentences without using the word "solution," go find the person at your company who implemented the last deal and make them explain it to you until you can.

Play three: the reference call you actually control

At some point somebody will want to talk to a customer, and this is where deals go to die from neglect. The rep says "sure, I'll set something up," fires off an email to a happy customer, connects two calendars and hopes.

That is not a reference call. That is a coin flip with your commission on it.

A reference call you control has four parts. First, you pick the reference to match the specific fear, not the specific industry. If the buyer's fear is implementation chaos, do not send them your most enthusiastic customer, send them the one who had a messy rollout and came out the other side, because that person can say "week three was rough and here is how we got through it" and be believed. Enthusiasm reads as coached. Specific difficulty reads as true.

Second, you brief both sides. To your customer: here is who they are, here is what they are worried about, here are the two or three things I would love you to speak to, and please be honest about the bits that were hard. To your prospect: here is who you are speaking to, here is why I picked them, and here are the questions I would ask if I were you. Handing your prospect the questions sounds insane the first time you do it. It is not. It signals that you are not afraid of what they will find, and it stops the call wandering into topics your reference cannot speak to.

Third, you set a length and a purpose. Twenty minutes, three topics. Open-ended reference calls drift into war stories and the prospect comes away with a vibe rather than an answer.

Fourth — and this is the part reps skip — you debrief the prospect afterwards. "What did you hear that helped, and what did you hear that worried you?" There is almost always a worry. If you do not surface it, it goes into the internal discussion where you cannot defend it.

The logo you are not allowed to name

Sometimes you have exactly the right customer and you cannot say who they are. Enterprise contracts, public sector confidentiality, a customer who does not want competitors knowing what they run.

Handled badly this sounds like a bluff. "We work with one of the big four banks, I can't say which one." That is the sales equivalent of a guy telling you his girlfriend goes to another school.

The fix is to be specific about everything except the name, and to be upfront about why you cannot say it. Something like: "I have one I cannot name — they are a top-five general insurer in this market and their contract with us has a no-publicity clause, which I am guessing you can relate to. What I can tell you is the scale: their claims intake team is about the size of yours, they run the same case management platform you do, and they went live in a single region before rolling out nationally. If it becomes important, I can ask whether they will do a private call under NDA, but I would rather not spend that ask until we know we are serious about each other."

That last clause does a lot of work. Treating the named reference as a scarce, expensive resource that you spend deliberately makes it more credible, not less, and it quietly moves the conversation toward mutual commitment. A buyer who says "yes, ask them" has just told you they are real.

What you must never do is imply a customer you do not have. Every experienced buyer has a mental catalogue of vendors who did that, and the day they find out is the day you are done, in that account and in every account that person moves to.

Stop letting this be a wall: manufacture references as you go

The reason this objection feels like a wall is that most reps only think about references when they need one. By then it is too late — you are asking a customer you have not spoken to in eight months for a favour on a two-day turnaround.

Build the asset while you are winning the deal instead.

At the point where a new customer is happiest — not at signature, but somewhere after the first real result — ask for three things and ask for them in ascending order of cost. The cheapest is permission: "can I mention that we work with you, by name, on calls with people in your sector?" Most will say yes and it costs them nothing. The middle one is a short written quote about a specific outcome, which you should draft for them so all they have to do is edit it. The expensive one is agreeing to take occasional reference calls, capped — "no more than one a quarter, and I will always ask first."

Capping it is what makes people say yes. Unbounded requests get refused; "one call a quarter, I ask first, you can always say no" gets accepted.

Then keep a real list. Not a spreadsheet of logos — a spreadsheet of situations. Who they are, what their bottleneck was, what the mechanism was, what went wrong during rollout, which fear they are good at addressing. When a claims director asks who else like them is using this, you should be able to answer in one breath with the closest match on the axis that matters, not scroll through a case study page hoping something jumps out. That preparation is the difference between an insurance cold call that keeps a claims leader on the phone and one that ends politely at the ninety-second mark.

And if you genuinely have nobody — new product, new market, no adjacency worth claiming — then say so plainly and change what you are selling. Do not sell a rollout to a risk-averse buyer with no proof. Sell a bounded pilot with a defined success metric, a short exit, and a named internal sponsor who is not them. You are not asking them to bet their reputation on you. You are asking them to run a small, reversible experiment. Risk-averse buyers can say yes to experiments. They cannot say yes to leaps.

Where I would put the reps

The hard part of all this is not knowing the plays. It is producing the right one under pressure, in the two seconds after a buyer asks the question, in a tone that sounds like you have nothing to hide. Reading it here will not do that for you. Getting asked "who else like us is using this?" forty times by a difficult buyer, and having to answer differently each time, will. That is what I built DrillCall for — if I had a team going into insurance or public sector next quarter, I would have them run this exact objection until the concession-then-axis answer comes out flat and unbothered rather than defensive.

The underlying shift is small but it changes everything. You are not trying to prove you are popular. You are trying to make it safe for one specific person to say yes. Popularity is one route to safety and usually the one you do not have. Mechanism, adjacency, a controlled reference call and a bounded first step are the others, and unlike a customer list, you can build all four yourself.