Customer advocacy brings a lot to an organization. It can be under the radar sometimes, but if I sum it up simply, customer advocacy gives a business credible proof from their customers and allows customers to share their experiences in a meaningful way. This ultimately helps the business prove their value to other customers, prove their value in the market, and allows customers to feel valued in return. That's one of the core aspects of a customer advocacy program: people sharing their experiences, helping each other through a more formal process, so it’s more than just transactional. Having an advocacy program helps provide the business with more proof points, more content, and more ways of supporting the sales cycle, and ultimately supporting our business.
One of the things leadership values mostis our ability to provide public-facing evidence from our customers that helpstell the story they're trying to put out in the market. Having that validationfrom people who aren't just internal helps tell the story as it makes itstronger and gives us credibility when our own customers can validate thethings we're saying. Our leadership sees that quite a bit in the content we putout there.
The approach we've taken, not necessarily with leadership (because I've been fortunate to be part of a program that already has a lot of support), but on the front lines to gain the support of our sales teams and our customer success managers, is to ground it in examples that resonate with them.
One example I use is peer-to-peer reviews. You leave a review for a restaurant on Google, and you know people are going to read it, and it will help them decide where to eat. Grounding it in ways people can see helps them understand that it's important to have our customers willing to speak up for our products. I'd want validation from somebody else before I made a purchase, and what's so different about this space? So that's one approach: opening the conversation by asking how this would impact them if they were in that position.
Then, from the leadership perspective,there's always the importance of showing the influence the customer advocacy program has on revenue. When we can show how we're able to match customers with prospects during sales cycles and get validation from a seller that a call took place and it really helped move the needle for the deal, it creates a tangible link between advocacy and business outcomes.
One of my favorite features of ReferenceEdge is that it centralizes everything needed to make the case for advocacy. One of my favorite features is the reporting and tracking. When I started working with ReferenceEdge, most of my calls with Jess in the first couple of months were about different reports and dashboards we could build, because I loved being able to see: this is what our reference program looks like, this is the number of customers we have, this is the number of reference requests I'm getting, this is how many opportunities we're impacting. That tracking ability, being able to tie reference requests to opportunities, is a huge benefit of having ReferenceEdge. Having the ability to show that in Q3 we supported X number of deals and contributed X to closed bookings is a great metric to validate the importance of our program.
Another benefit for me is specifically tied to keeping track of the projects I work on with the marketing managers. When they need a customer for a speaking engagement, a webinar, an in-person appearance, or an analyst activity, it [ReferenceEdge] lets me track the process I go through to find customers and who's participating in what activity.
And when collaborating with the marketing teams to find customers, it shows them that it's not as simple as saying, "We need a customer for a webinar, how fast can we get one? "It's about finding a customer who fits enough of the criteria with product use, is comfortable speaking live, is in a good place to speak on a webinar, and works with the timing. That's helped those counterparts understand more about what goes into being an advocacy manager and running an advocacy program. ReferenceEdge, from an internal perspective, supports that tracking ability of seeing the process it needs to go through to get from point A to point B.
We predominantly track how many new advocates (new reference members) we get. We call them advocates because our program is called Ivanti Advocates; that's the brand we've given to our reference program. We track and set a goal against how many customers are part of the program.
On the flip side (not for reportingpurposes, and not necessarily as a KPI, but just for tracking), we also look athow many customers leave the program, because having both sides gives a cleanerpicture of how the program is doing and its overall health.
We keep track of how many activities customers do, which is one of the features I appreciate about ReferenceEdge, being able to clearly see how many activities a customer participates in, and how many points they earn from those activities. We have a reward system based on the number of activities they participate in within a six-month period, so being able to track that in a report with ReferenceEdge is really helpful once we go through the rewarding process.
We track our contributions to newbookings on a quarterly basis, and we also track revenue influence to pipelinefor open opportunities that have had a reference request attached to them.
For our team, we like to see how many requests overall I'm working on each quarter and see the breakdown of how many fall into each category. Was it more reference calls, more name drops, or more speaking opportunities? We also have metrics for how many customer success stories we hope to publish in the year.
For customer advocacy specifically, data is so important because it helps you know, as best you can, how a customer is doing. Whether they're in a space where you can reach out to them, whether they're even still with the company they're attached to, whether they're in the middle of an escalation or at high risk. Having access to that data is really helpful when working through a reference request, so you know: this customer is marked caution, I can't reach out to them, or this customer is on an escalation, now isn't the right time, we can check in in the future.
Having that data and being able to track it within ReferenceEdge helps make sure you're providing the best experience to the customer, but also to the salesperson or customer success manager you're supporting on the request. It helps with both experiences, you get the best customer possible, one who's happy and in a position to do the activity. You wouldn't be able to get that if your data wasn't clean, because you could risk reaching out to someone who's extremely unhappy without knowing it, simply because the data didn't tell you. That's one of the areas I find really important.
On a more content-focused scale, what's also important with advocacy is being able to surface approved advocacy content when people need it. Not necessarily just reference calls, but if someone's looking for customer stories, they can use AI to ask, "I'm looking for a customer in this industry with this product, can you show me customer stories we have that we can use?" It's able to pull in the right data we've provided and help sales or anyone else give their customers the most accurate, up-to-date customer stories that support their motion. So those are two ways I see the data being extremely important.
It was exciting. I felt like having the ability for someone to make a request from a chat with Copilot, or Claude, or whatever they use, would make such a difference in the adoption of the tool. Not that the way it's structured right now is challenging, having to go through the opportunity within Salesforce, but given the direction AI is pushing all of us, being able to ask a chatbot "I'm looking for a customer reference with this criteria, can you help me?" and having it start that process takes away a lot of the manual work that I, or other customer advocacy managers, typically have to do with the back-and-forth between you and a seller requesting the reference. If they're able to do it all within the chat, and the chat gets the request to a near-perfect output, it then helps me in how I go search for the customer if they're not already in the program, or start the outreach, and things like that; it’s exciting.
There are two parts to that answer. The first is that ReferenceEdge is a great tool that gives us the operational foundation for our program and helps us balance both governance, protecting our customers, as well as being as efficient as we can be. The other half is that the relationship our team has built with Point of Reference is a big part of why we continue to use the tool and partner, because relationships are really the core of the work we do.
For us, one of our biggest avenues for finding advocates is definitely our customer community. We have a very strong customer community called Ivanti Innovators. We have user groups, different versions of them, and customers who lead them, and that's definitely a space we try to source advocates from, because a lot of time, they're already meeting with each other, already open to sharing best practices and the issues they're having, and already a bit more inclined to be collaborative. So that's an area we lean into for finding advocates.
The other spot is that we need to rely on our customer-facing teams, because they're closest to the customer. We are constantly trying new ways to get them to get engage their customers more on the program. Additionally, this year, we were fortunate to have more of a presence at our event series, so being able to be on stage and talk more about the Advocates program, what being part of it means, and getting more awareness and exposure to it, helps bring people to raise their hands and want to be part of it.
And finally, in my experience in this role, a lot of times people don't want to ask their customers to do things, so they turn it down before they even get the chance to ask, when really, what's the worst the customer could say? No, right? So sometimes it's just getting past that hurdle of asking the question. We've tried exploring different ways to reach a customer who might be interested in participating but has just never been asked, such as different types of email campaigns, or, like I said, going to events and having a sign-up sheet right there to get involved.
So that's a multitude of ways of finding advocates, but there's always more, and I think the most important piece is really leaning into the relationships you have with your customers. I've personally found that going to events helped me develop my relationships with some of the key advocates in our program as well.
From a sustainability perspective, making sure the advocacy program continues to thrive and survive means continuing to show up, not just for specific customers, but by continuing to offer a space for customers to connect, share their experiences, and be encouraged to share more openly. I think that's a way to help ensure the program is sustainable.
Also, extending the lifecycle of advocate content and advocates' participation. Taking something we've created with them, like a story or a video testimonial, and stretching it further than just that one moment, and giving them the opportunity to circle back and ask, do you want to expand on your story, are you open to speaking more about it, things like that. So, consistently being able to come back and grow what they've done with us beyond just our needs, but also their side of it, why they participated, whether that's professional growth, exposure, etc.
From an efficiency standpoint, I'd be a fool not to talk about AI again, I think that's one of the key things AI helps with, making these systems more efficient, which opens us up to create more content, more opportunities for advocates, and also frees up more time to actually build relationships with our advocates. Not having to rely so strictly on processes but being able to have more of a relationship with the people we're asking to do these activities.
The advice I would give is to always put the customer at the forefront of everything you do. Think of the customer's experience at the start and branch out from there. You may not have relationships with the customers, depending on how big your program is, but when you can lean into that, it makes a massive difference. So, take the time to build relationships with the customers you can, because it goes a long way.
The other part is understanding the many different ways advocacy can show up in a business, and strategically figuring out: if, for example, reference calls might not be the most efficient way to spend your time, what's something else the business can benefit from that advocacy can provide? Continuing to be agile with change, showing up, and trying different ways to keep advocacy relevant.
