Trust has been gradually eroding across many areas of life. AI can generate content indistinguishable from human writing. Deepfakes blur the line between real and fake. Review sites are flooded with bots, influencers are paid to promote anything, and even once-reliable institutions are under scrutiny.
In a world where authenticity is getting harder to discern, we in the customer advocacy community have both the opportunity and the responsibility to protect what’s real. We may not control the chaos of the broader digital landscape, but we do control our part of it—how businesses communicate, market, and sell their solutions to real people making real decisions.
Our work is personal. It’s meaningful. When done with integrity, we’re not crafting fiction—we’re curating lived experience. We’re not just content creators; we’re stewards of trust between companies and the people who choose them. That trust is earned through honesty, not spin.
As society begins to recognize what’s been lost in the erosion of truth, the work we do will only grow in value. In a time of growing skepticism, people are hungry for something genuine—and advocacy will become even more essential.
So where does that leave today’s B2B buyers? They’re more skeptical than ever. They tune out vendor claims that carry even a hint of exaggeration. What they crave is truth—and the only place they're sure to find it is from people who’ve been in their shoes. Our role is to amplify the voices of real customers who’ve navigated real challenges.
Customer advocacy, then, is not just a marketing function, but the most honest, grounded, and human way to build trust in a world that often feels anything but.
Yes, advocacy supports many GTM functions. But its first job is to help buyers make confident, informed decisions—not to “convince” them. Advocates aren’t there to sell for you. They’re there to speak plainly and provide social proof that someone just like your prospect made a good call—and would do it again.
Shift the mindset: "We're not just closing deals—we're reducing buyer doubt."
The best advocacy programs are fueled by discovery, not just demand. Spend time listening to success calls, renewal conversations, support interactions—anywhere authentic customer praise naturally shows up. Then, elevate those real moments. Use tools (agents) and systems (like ReferenceEdge) to track advocate activity and find new stories, not just the same three logos.
Be a story scout, not a story shaper.
Not every advocate experience needs to be perfect, and that's okay. In fact, stories that show problem-solving, partnership and even redemption can build more trust than spotless testimonials. Buyers don't believe in perfect solutions. They believe in vendors who show up when it matters.
Courageous transparency builds more brand equity than polished perfection.
Too many advocacy assets focus only on the beginning: "Customer had problem, chose our product, succeeded." That’s a helpful narrative, but buyers want to know what happens after year one. Do you keep showing up? Does the value compound? Advocacy should show continuity and evolution, not just conversion.
Trust grows over time—your stories should show that.
How to apply it:
Too often, we try to "shape" customer stories to match our messaging framework. But savvy buyers can spot overly curated narratives a mile away. The most credible content comes when customers speak in their own language—warts and all.
Let them tell the story. Instead of asking, "How did we help you achieve x?" Ask, "What was going on before you started looking for a solution?" Start with their reality, not your pitch.
One of the fastest ways to lose trust with advocates is to overuse your most willing champions. It signals that you value output over relationship—and that your program is more transactional than respectful. Sustainable advocacy means respecting your customers' time (minimize/coordinate touch points), giving them choice and control over how they participate, and tracking engagement to avoid fatigue. Building trust between your company and your advocates is as important.
How to apply it:
Be the voice that buyers can believe In a time when people don’t know what's real, the voice of an actual customer is gold. They've done the thing your prospect is afraid to do. They've already made the leap, solved the problem, and seen the outcome. When we lift their stories, we do more than support pipeline—we help buyers move forward with confidence, not coercion. And that’s what true customer advocacy is all about.
It's only natural that many advocacy leaders have landed on the same objective: make the program easier to use by meeting users where they're already working.
Today, that increasingly means Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever generative AI assistant employees happen to have open.
Imagine a salesperson simply asking AI, "Find me three German healthcare customers using product Y, willing to speak with a prospect," instead of navigating to another interface, or waiting for someone from advocacy, or elsewhere, to respond. It's easy to see the appeal. Removing friction has always been one of the fastest ways to increase adoption.
It is exactly the right instinct.
The difficult parts, arguably the reason program managers exist, occur before and after AI says, "Here are your three best matches."
The value advocacy professionals bring is the ability to operationalize and scale customer advocacy for maximum impact. Quality advocate information doesn't just appear, it's the result of a system.
Now that the user has three advocates, what should happen?
Notice what happened. The search was completed.
The next steps are just as manual as ever if AI search is the be all, end all.
Reality Check
AI can tell you who could participate. It can't tell you who should participate unless someone (or something) has been keeping score.
This is where the story starts to feel strangely familiar.
Many companies still operate their program using spreadsheets, scattered CRM fields, shared drives, email folders, and the remarkable memories of a handful of program managers.
Eventually, organizations realize they aren't managing an advocacy program at all. They're managing lists that happen to contain advocates.
But the shortcomings are real:
Purpose-built advocacy platforms emerged because advocacy is much more than a search problem.
Ironically, AI has convinced some organizations to revisit the same shortcut they worked so hard to escape.
Let's imagine two different worlds.
In the first, AI recommends an advocate for a sales call.
Months later, AI knows this customer recently participated and may deserve a break before being asked again.
Now imagine the second world.
Three months later someone asks how many customer reference contributed to the revenue this quarter.
Silence. Nobody really knows.
The advocacy happened...hopefully. The program didn't. Collectively, the organization slowly stopped feeding the very system it depended on to understand its advocacy program.
Reality Check
If AI helps facilitate twenty closed-won opportunities this quarter, but none are recorded, your executive dashboard still says zero.
One of the easiest mistakes to make in an AI-first world is assuming that successful interactions somehow become organizational knowledge on their own.
They don't.
If a customer agrees to speak with a prospect and nobody records it, the organization loses far more than a single activity.
The most valuable advocacy data isn't simply who your customers are.
It's everything they've done.
That's the story AI actually wants to read.
It's often said that AI needs good data.
That's true.
But operational history is far more valuable than static customer information.
Those aren't search results.Those are patterns.
Remove any one of those pieces and AI becomes little more than an exceptionally fast search engine.
Reality Check
Every workflow skipped today is a pattern AI won't discover tomorrow.
The AI revolution has created tremendous excitement, and rightly so. Finding the right advocate is becoming dramatically easier than it was only a few years ago.
That's worth celebrating.
Just don't confuse a better search experience with a better advocacy program. Search is only one chapter in the story.
The organizations that see the greatest return from AI won't necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated models.
They'll be the ones with the richest operational history.
Those organizations won't use AI merely to answer the question, "Who should we ask?"
They'll use AI to answer far more valuable questions.
That's when AI stops behaving like a better Google search.
That's when it starts behaving like a strategic partner.
Finding the right advocate has always been the opening scene.
If your AI can find advocates but your program can't learn from using them, you've built a remarkable search engine instead of a remarkable advocacy program.
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