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!
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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