The term strategic is tossed around all the time. We all want to be strategic. Tactical sounds so pedestrian, right? Some in customer marketing might view the customer reference management component as tactical. Respectfully, I vehemently disagree.
How does one become strategic and behave strategically in the context of customer reference management? It begins with how you view your program, which lets co-workers and executives know how they should view your program.
On the surface, what are the primary objectives of customer reference management?
These objectives are not just about supporting Sales. Far from it. The advocate database is a corporate asset that—built, used and maintained properly—improves any activity with the infusion of customer advocate experiences and insights (customer videos and quotes in campaigns, live presentations at conferences, sales calls, earnings calls, investor calls, etc.).
The reality is that most customer marketing managers must be both strategic and tactical simply because there are many teams of one out there. If that’s your situation, then think of the following as “hats” you wear, and not different people.
To act strategically you have to both understand your company’s growth goals and translate your program’s goals and tactical execution to align with those strategic goals.
How do you translate all of this to customer reference programs? Following is a list of key program aspects, and two program versions: one without strategic alignment (and therefore perceived value), the other with strategic alignment.
At a recent customer marketing conference, attendees were surveyed and asked about their career ambitions. Well over half had C-Suite positions in mind. To get there it’s important to start thinking like an executive in your customer marketing role, and developing that executive muscle now. It’s a form of training: think of it like you’re marathon training only for your career rather than a race. Once your strategic potential is recognized, doors will open and you’ll be on your way. But stay purely in the tactical space and you’ll simply be a best-kept secret.
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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