How Xentral turned a careful approach to referrals into a strategic growth channel

Xentral is a cloud-based ERP platform built for growing SMBs, sitting at the center of operations handling everything from order management to warehouse logistics and fulfilment. That operational complexity shapes how Xentral approaches referrals. Rather than broadly prompting their entire user base to share, they focused on identifying the right moments, the right incentives, and the right infrastructure to build a referral program that could scale sustainably. Since early 2024, that infrastructure has been Cello.

The result: Referral ARR grew ~60% between February 2025 and April 2026, making Cello one of the lowest CAC channel with a high LTV/CAC. Hence making referrals an explicit pillar of Xentral’s growth strategy.

How they built it

A reward structure built for trust

Xentral’s referral program runs on a two-sided incentive: referrers earn a €2,000 cash reward per successful referral, paid out via PayPal, while the referred customer receives a 15% discount. The reward size reflects Xentral’s high ACV: to motivate users to tap into their professional networks and identify serious buying personas, the incentive needs to be genuinely compelling. At €2,000, it is so while still leaving the unit economics firmly in Xentral’s favour, as the high LTV/CAC ratio demonstrates.

Right touchpoint, right moment

Because Xentral is careful about when and how they ask for referrals, placement and timing matter enormously. Two in-product approaches produced clear, measurable lifts.

The first is surfacing referral prompts at moments of delight i.e. specific points in the user journey where someone has just had a positive experience with the product. This is something Xentral is actively planning to implement. Across Cello customers, surfacing referrals at these high-satisfaction moments typically produces up to 3.4x higher sharing rates. The logic is straightforward: people share when they’re reminded they value something, not when they’re navigating a support ticket.

The second was in-app announcements. When Xentral reactivated their Essential Announcements, in-product messages surfaced to existing users, they saw a clear step-change in both sharing and new subscriptions. Across Cello customers, in-app announcements typically see around 20% of recipients open the referral widget directly from them. That’s a meaningful engagement rate for a channel that requires zero incremental budget once set up.

Converting referred visitors without friction

Getting someone to click a referral link is only half the job. What happens when they land matters just as much. Xentral uses a standalone referral landing page with a simplified signup form embedded directly on the page, reducing friction for referred users without a multi-step redirect. The page also prominently features the new user discount in both the page content and the CTA.

This approach converts better and it required zero development effort to implement on Xentral’s side.

Keeping it going

Because Xentral is deliberate about not over-communicating on referrals, the ongoing work is about quality. Cello’s customer success team has worked alongside Xentral throughout the program’s life: monitoring performance, flagging technical issues proactively, running growth syncs, and making personalised recommendations for where to test next.

The reactivation of announcements, for instance, came out of exactly this kind of ongoing collaboration, identifying a dormant lever, testing it with a specific audience, and tracking the step-change in results. That pattern: incremental optimisation, not big-bang campaigns, is well suited to a company that wants referrals to compound quietly over time.

The story so far

Referral ARR grew about 60% between Feb 2025 and April 2026

Referrals now sit alongside organic, SEO, and outbound sales as an explicit pillar of Xentral’s 2026 growth strategy

For a company that deliberately doesn’t push hard on referrals, these numbers are notable. A ~60% growth in referral ARR wasn’t driven by a high-frequency campaign strategy, rather it came from thoughtful placement, clear incentives, and consistent optimisation over time.

What’s next

With referrals now a committed part of Xentral’s growth plan, the focus shifts from proving the channel to deepening it.

The focus is on finding more high-quality moments to surface the program - specific triggers in the user journey where someone has clearly gotten value, and is more likely to want to share it. For Xentral, the goal isn’t more touchpoints. It’s better ones.

Cello will continue working closely with Xentral as the program grows - finding new triggers, running experiments, and helping referrals compound as a core part of the growth strategy.

Cello’s CS team now actively surfaces referral opportunities in QBRs with Xentral, which is a shift from reactive support to proactive growth partnership. On Xentral’s side, the channel’s strong unit economics have earned it real investment: they’re willing to increase in-product referral communications, even accepting pushback from individual users, because the returns justify it.