“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.
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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