If you’re lobbying for a customer reference program, or already have a preliminary green light to start building one, now is the time to ensure you have the funds and support infrastructure you need to launch and sustain a high-impact program.
It’s important that your organization views this program as a team sport from day one, and not something that will just happen by buying technology and hanging the responsibility for success on a program manager. This is a company resource with beneficiaries throughout the organization; it’s completely reasonable to anticipate—expect really—cross-functional contributions and participation. Only then will outstanding results materialize, and they will if the right conditions exist!
Without further adieu, we offer these 7 tips to ensure you’re successful at securing the right budget, not just a budget.
Frame the proposal with the correct perspective. Customer Reference Programs grow sales—when executed effectively. Similar to a well-run lead generation program, the resulting sales far exceed the necessary investment. You would be hard-pressed to find an executive that doesn’t, by now, acknowledge the fact that customer advocates help sell your products. The key is that those advocates can be easily found and leveraged. Read more on program measurement.
One of the most important things you can do to persuade the budget guardians to fund your program is correlate the program’s capabilities to company's growth goals. Is your company launching a new offering, expanding geographically, adding new partnerships, acquiring companies, or initiating a new partner program? Your proposal should explain how your customer reference program, through ready-to-use customer advocates and customer content, will support specific growth initiatives. Read this eBook: Capturing & Keeping CxO Engagement.
Include enough salary in the budget for experienced program leadership. Programs do not run themselves. Experience proves that customer reference programs are less likely to be successful with a junior resource at the helm (please don’t even utter the word intern!). There is a broad spectrum of customer advocate programs out there. Some just churn out case studies. Others only provide help desk support for sales references (calls, RFPs). Those are functions, not programs. If you fund a full-time leader with exceptional relationship skills, comfortable working with salespeople, and 10-years in a variety of marketing, sales enablement or customer success roles, expect great things to follow. Read more on our vision for this leader.
Gather support from the stakeholder groups that stand to benefit the most from a program. This list would include not only Sales but PR, IR, AR, social media, events, lead gen, product marketing, and customer success—all the consumers and relationship managers of customer advocates. Meet with department heads and discuss how an organized customer reference program would further their team goals, and incorporate those findings in your business case. Read more on how to build a business case for a customer advocate program.
Don’t forget to budget money for program sustainability. After the initial launch of the program, it must be promoted. Internal promotion activity has to include getting in front of users–even remotely–at company events such as recurring sales meetings, and one-on-one touch-base calls. It is a great way to cultivate relationships, solicit feedback, and gain insight into how your internal customers use the program.
Include budget dollars for fun! Related to sustainability is engagement. Most programs use incentives to a) build the customer advocate database, and b) reinforce program use (including customer reference software). Rewards and games create momentum and yield a more enthusiastic response than mandates and policies alone. So budget money for spiffs, whether that’s cash, prizes, PTO, stock options, or something else people value. Need ideas? Form an advisory board for your program.
We are a smidge biased on this one. You can only keep so many balls in the air, managing a program by spreadsheet. Put a line item in your budget request for an application designed to enable EXACTLY what a customer advocate program needs to do: centralize information, automate processes, and measure performance. Your budget should include both one-time start-up costs and ongoing license costs. If you use Salesforce CRM we have a recommendation.
More and more marketing departments have a dedicated content marketing function and budget, so that wasn’t addressed here. But if your company doesn’t have that function, nor a budget that’s another line item for your customer reference program budget request. There are many variables here. If you’d like our help with ballpark customer content costs or any other customer reference program best practices discussed above just call or email us.
Good luck with budgeting season!
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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