CMA pros are always looking for deeper insights that lead to the best matches, and optimize advocate impact on sales and marketing activities. With AI advancing rapidly, there’s growing enthusiasm about leveraging unstructured data—like Gong conversation transcripts, free-form text notes, and emails—to get the most relevant advocates, and uncover customer advocate candidates.
At first glance, this seems like a potential goldmine. More data should mean more insights, right? Not necessarily. While unstructured data can contain valuable nuggets of information, it’s unreliable as a primary source for identifying who is actually willing to engage in customer advocacy activities—like taking sales reference calls, speaking at events, or participating in media interviews.
It’s usefulness in surfacing positive sentiment customer quotes possibly leading to richer, more compelling content (slides, website quotes, case studies), that’s a more realistic, near-term use case. This is a true gamechanger for time-challenged program managers!
I’ll refer to the collection of related advocate information as an advocate profile. In ReferenceEdge, it is designed to provide a structured, up-to-date, well-populated repository of advocate insights. And we’ve built a variety of features in ReferenceEdge addressing recruiting and data updating to ensure it stays that way. Done right, this profile data may very well be the most accurate data source in your company outside of financials. Advocate profiles are (or should be) the gold standard of customer advocate intelligence, and include, at a minimum:
Because this data is structured and quality controlled, it enables precise, fast searches—ensuring that sales and marketing teams can quickly find pre-qualified, highly matched advocates with full confidence. Trustworthy information is the name of the game. Without it users return to their highly inefficient, unreliable advocate “hunting” behavior using Slack, Teams or email, and user adoption of the program and enabling systems is undermined. Their customer advocate need becomes everyone’s problem. because entire sales and CS teams have to evaluate scatter shot messages asking for help
Unstructured data, by contrast, is anything that doesn’t fit neatly into an organized database—sales call transcripts, rep notes, customer emails, and Slack conversations. AI-powered tools can analyze these data sources for sentiment, intent, and context, but they lack the certainty and structure required for confident advocacy identification—although results are confidently returned.
The result of each of these promising insights is a separate, just-in-time recruiting effort. If the goal is efficiency, then adding the recruiting step to every request fulfillment motion is counterproductive. It is the opposite of building and maintaining a verified database of ready-to-go advocates.
Does this mean unstructured data is useless? Not at all. It might highlight advocate candidates (i.e., advocates-in-the-making), identify trending sentiment shifts, and surface opportunities for further validation.
But it’s purely a secondary layer of insight—not a replacement for structured advocate profile data. Think of it like this:
The excitement and novelty of AI has naturally led to atmospheric expectations about leveraging unstructured data within customer advocacy programs. While AI can surface insights from call transcripts, notes, and emails, advocate decisions require certainty—especially when engaging your best customers. Over-relying on unstructured data puts sales and marketing at risk by leading to mismatched advocacy requests, busy work, eroding trust in AI tools, and driving disengagement among customers who feel misaligned with outreach. The result? Sales teams lose confidence, AI adoption stalls, and customers start tuning out. AI will improve over time, but nothing—whether used by AI or humans—beats the power of reliable, structured data. Never stop tending to your advocate profile data and your AI dreams just may come true.
Contact us today to learn how we can help.
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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