“We have too many perfectly matched advocates.”
– Said No One
Building a steady pipeline of customer advocates is like searching for four-leaf clovers in a field of green. It takes intention, patience, and a sharp eye—not luck. Yet too many customer advocacy managers treat it like a side project, sidelined by urgent one-off requests. Without a system for continuously identifying and onboarding the right advocates, you’re stuck in reactive mode—constantly hunting and fulfilling at the same time, often under pressure from stakeholders who needed that advocate yesterday. And you don’t want to be under the microscope of executives who get wind of an urgent advocate need that’s taking too long.
So…how do you break the reactive cycle?
Let’s dig into the core issues most programs face, and explore practical options (with pros and cons) to tackle them.
Let’s start with the most crucial question: What types of advocates are needed? We think of type as:
Think about current and future needs. Current needs often come from analyzing your sales pipeline. Future needs? Those should align with your company’s growth priorities. You might be surprised how easily your company’s strategic goals can (and should) shape your advocacy goals.
Spoiler alert: it’s not a random percentage of your customer base. Goals like “let’s get 10% of our customers in the program” are pure vanity. The volume may just be unwarranted. And what if an inordinate amount of time and energy is spent recruiting advocates and most are irrelevant to current needs? What a waste of precious time; yours, your stakeholders and your customers! When a customer joins your program, they’re making an emotional commitment to your brand. They expect to be called on not just added to a database.
Having 1,000 advocates when only 400 are needed? That’s not scale—it’s inefficiency. Worse, it’s a disservice to the advocates who want to be involved but aren’t activated.
Let’s look at how to estimate need by stakeholder group:
Again, with your company’s top growth goals in-hand, meet with the CS managers to discuss both the advocate needs they have, and their role in contributing to your advocate pipeline. Effective CSMs know how to use advocates to expand your company’s footprint, and convert at-risk customers to renewals. Discuss with them the segments, activities, and personas they need most and factor that into your plan over the next quarter. As above, repeat this collaborative planning quarterly, or as needed. CSMs as a source of advocate candidates is discussed further below.
Customer Success
Again, with your company’s top growth goals in-hand, meet with the CS managers to discuss both the advocate needs they have, and their role in contributing to your advocate pipeline. Effective CSMs know how to use advocates to expand your company’s footprint, and convert at-risk customers to renewals. Discuss with them the segments, activities, and personas they need most and factor that into your plan over the next quarter. As above, repeat this collaborative planning quarterly, or as needed. CSMs as a source of advocate candidates is discussed further below.
Run opportunity reports to identify the types of deals accounting for the bulk of the pipeline. Look for clusters of opportunity attributes such as products A and C in Financial Services, in EMEA, with 1,000 or more employees. Focus on the biggest clusters with anticipated close dates in 30, 60 and 90 days, and prioritize recruiting accordingly. The process could be repeated monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly depending on fluidity of your company’s pipeline. If this is too big of a job for reports and spreadsheets, talk to us about our Advocate Gap Predictor feature using the predictive analytics of Salesforce CRM Analytics.
With your company’s top growth goals in-hand, meet with the sales department managers (not VPs or CxOs). These are the people deeply involved and responsible for quotas. Their insights will provide additional context for the data you’ve got from the opportunity pipeline analysis discussed above. Just the act of sitting down with these people will convey your role in supporting their goals—and that’s meaningful when enlisting their support for your program objectives.
Now that you have your priority advocate criteria and estimated quantities, it’s time to consider your available recruiting channels. Which ones you use will depend on organizational, political, and even intangible considerations. Let’s explore your recruitment options—from classic to creative.
Work trough Sales
Working with the Sales organization is the avenue that comes to mind first, particularly if account execs have ongoing communications with clients as opposed to only reconnecting at contract renewal time. Account executives should have a current pulse on the account and know who’s ripe to be an advocate and has compelling (i.e., in-demand) stories to tell. If account execs show a lack of motivation to have a formal advocacy conversation with their customers, ask if they would provide a warm introduction. You can take it from there.
PROS
Salespeople can have skills of persuasion, and those skills can be applied to recruiting customers to be advocates. They are relationship oriented, and that’s always at the heart of acting as an advocate. An advocate’s willingness to “help” a vendor stems from a sense of being well-served and realizing business benefits. Salespeople are receptive to rewards/incentives, if well-designed.
CONS
Salespeople are all different. Some will see how helping you will ultimately benefit them (and the company), while others see a request to identify their happy customers as a bother and in competition with their quota pressures. They may not be sufficiently responsive or motivated, ruling them out as a useful source. If spiffs are used they must be compelling (tip: ask them what would motivate them).
Work through Customer Success
If you have a post-sales team, typically with the title of customer success manager, and their responsibility is to own the long-term client relationship, then these should be your best source of advocates.
PROS
Knowledgeable about their clients’ health and relationship-focused. More likely than sales to appreciate (and rarely receive) incentives.
CONS
Customer success managers are busy people. Managing relationships is time-consuming and problem-solving, planning and collaboration is primarily in an effort to achieve renewals. Oddly, we find that most CSMs are not incentivized or otherwise evaluated on the advocacy of their customers. The unfortunate fact is that unless advocacy is a performance metric, they view your goals as distractions and interruptions to their goals (“We don’t have time for that!”). We’re biased, but that just seems counterintuitive.
Direct to Customers
There may be a lot of legitimate reasons to not work through Sales or Customer Success. Sometimes these are political (i.e., management has not bought into your goals), but there could be many other circumstances that would hinder getting your job done. In that case, it’s important to do your best to leverage these resources with as little impact as possible, keep them informed of your efforts, but ultimately, go with plan B.
Satisfaction Surveys
Most companies have a way to gauge customer satisfaction whether via Net Promoter or a more traditional CSAT survey. The results include customers who self-identify as happy customers (“Promoters” in Net Promoter terminology). The segment of most satisfied customers is your recruiting lead list. Reach out to them on an individual basis for that personal touch, or use your campaign automation tool (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) to recruit en masse.
User Conferences
If you have an annual user conference be sure that your program has a presence there. That could be a table/booth or a few minutes of presentation time on the main stage. Not only are these options a great recruiting opportunities; they are also relationship-building opportunities. Established programs build customer video capture into their plan and reserve a hospitality/conference room and schedule current advocates for short-form video recording. It’s a super efficient use of a video crew.
PROS
Reaching out directly is more expedient—plain and simple. Be sure to keep your peers—who own the customer relationships—informed of your activities so there are no surprises. Equally important, don’t delegate this outreach to an inexperienced (e.g., intern) or ill-suited team member. These are your most valuable customer relationships and they should be treated accordingly.
CONS
You don’t have direct working relationships at first, so customers may not feel as obligated to respond to your outreach. Make it clear in your first contact exactly what your purpose is and what the time commitment will be for whatever you’re asking. A call and an email used together will yield the best results.
Work through Executives
Your executives generally have peer contacts at marquee accounts, and accounts that are part of CABs. They can unlock hard-to-reach personas quickly. Their relationship with their CxO peers can clear the way for high-level, strategic advocate activities such as speaking opportunities, video testimonials and ROI studies. Having access to a CxO to match up with a buyer’s CxO is so valuable even though you may not make use of them frequently. So leverage these relationships. Your CxOs will ask the same questions as customers, but from the perspective of impact on brand: What will you be asking them to do? How much of a time commitment is anticipated? Be crystal-clear on your ask and the time commitment to gain their confidence.
PROS
Executive contacts are high-level and typically strategic. These are the people you tap for the most important advocate activities. Don’t squander them on low-level needs. Things can happen quickly due to the direct, high-level connection, and their authority to approve activities is the highest.
CONS
Your executives may be hesitant to make requests on your behalf. They generally save these advocates for their top priorities (co-speaking opportunities at conferences, earnings reports, investor meetings, etc.). Be sure to have clear objectives/plans for these MVPs to gain your executives’ confidence.
Work through Marketing
These are your peers in PR, content, events, and RFP team, to name a few examples. They are departments that depend on advocates, and before you came along, they scrounged for advocates any way they could. Importantly, they have existing relationships. And now they each have a list of customers who have already acted as advocates in one form or another.
PROS
These are pre-qualified advocates. They have a track record and have already gone through internal approval processes. They know what’s necessary. That means it should be quicker to gain their participation for additional, different advocate activities.
CONS
The number of advocate customers from this source may not be high, but the quality will be there.
Use AI
AI is a novel way to surface advocates based on customer behavior and statements with positive sentiment. As is the case with AI in general, a single prompt asked 10 different times may not yield the same results, and sometimes there are hallucinations. However, with effective governors, it’s possible you may find some surprises when AI sifts through account management call recordings, NPS survey comments, notes left by CSMs and AEs on contact records, and more
PROS
Advocates may be found that would otherwise have gone undetected. Helpful for scaling discovery efforts.
CONS
The number of advocate customers found using this method may not be high. Additional quality control steps are needed to verify that AI’s findings are accurate, before initiating any outreach to the customer. These extra steps may not be the most efficient using emerging AI technology.
There’s no single “right” way to find customer advocates. The best programs use a mix of methods—tailored to their culture, resources, and goals. But whatever you do, do it now. Don’t wait until the next urgent request exposes another gap. A well-stocked, well-aligned advocate pool is one of the most powerful assets your company has. Every day without it is a day your company is at a competitive disadvantage.
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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