The good news is that this will one day be a reality. The bad news? This program won’t be available until 2050 at best.
The reality about customer marketing & advocacy programs is that natural intelligence is still a really big part of what we do. There is a lot of art, in addition to the growing amount of science, involved. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have a long way to go. Consider the amount of data needed to produce useful machine learning. Does your program generate tens of thousands of transaction activities? If not, a handful of transactions can skew future decisions.
Just consider these everyday variables—happening concurrently—and the re-calculations needed to adapt to them:
Running a program is a bit like being a flight traffic controller. You can’t take your eye off the ball for long, because the ball is always moving and changing course. On the plus side, lives aren’t at stake, just your company’s net new business and renewals—both reliant on customer advocates in one form or another.
F/T dedicated customer marketing & advocacy program managers are becoming the norm, and for good reason. Any time not spent on fielding complex reference requests, getting new users trained, onboarding advocates, uploading and setting up new customer content, etc., should be spent meeting with stakeholders and stakeholder department heads to better anticipate needs, analyzing program performance, and cultivating additional exec champions: in effect, being strategic.
To do this job effectively, it’s not possible to be traveling extensively, spending hours of uninterrupted time writing case studies or also being the sole online community manager. That leads to burn-out, and each program component underperforming.
Let’s take these core program motions and consider what happens when they are neglected.
Employees take their cue from leadership. If your program isn’t seen as important to leadership, your co-workers will simply continue doing what they’re used to doing.
Salespeople have a short memory. What have you done for me lately applies to you, just as it does to them (how their managers assess them). They need to trust you to “have their back.” If they don’t, they’ll get what they need another way, your program doesn’t exist.
If users of your advocate data find the data to be inaccurate or outdated, they’ll stop using it. They’ll assume the only way to get the most up-to-date data is by, for example, Slacking their co-workers for each and every need.
Over time you will lose advocates due to employer or role changes. If you’re not always recruiting to backfill gaps, then you’ll risk not being able to satisfy reference needs, or overusing advocates. Neither is a good result.
Once your stakeholders raise their hands and bring referenceable contact to you, that nomination cannot sit, uncontacted for long. The nominator won’t suggest new advocates in response to your inaction. If the contact knows of the nomination, your inaction won’t sit well with them either.
We like the term “everboarding” versus onboarding. In the context of training, it means new users need training, but users will never stop needed training and coaching. No matter how simple it is to follow a new process you’ve defined, users won’t adopt it if they don’t feel educated. They’ll return to old ways rather than poke around figuring out something new on their own, which will probably just be frustrating.
Out of site, out of mind. This truism applies to your program as it does to so many things in life. Stop keeping your program in front of Sales, and it may as well have never existed.
The reference environment changes all the time. There are new competitors with new messaging. There are new Sales priorities. Changing conditions translate to a need for new stories, new types of reference customers. How will you know if you’re keeping up with demand today, and tomorrow, if you don’t regularly hear from your stakeholders?
Not being on top of reference requests that require your assistance is the ultimate sin in reference management. You’ll lose trust, and the seller may lose the deal.
If you aren’t watching trends in your program, then you won’t be able to intervene when a trend is going in the wrong direction.
Rather than wait for the self-driving customer marketing & advocacy program, focus on automating all that can be practically automated today. More and more will be possible over time. The program manager, however, will be the leader of strategic program alignment forever. Don’t allow your manager(s) to presume that you have a self-driving program today, and don’t make the mistake of thinking this yourself. Customer marketing & advocacy programs can be messy, but also gloriously fulfilling.
After all, you provide a service that Sales and Marketing functions depend on; like air. Be a doting program manager, not a neglectful one, and enjoy the many ways you make your organization better and contribute to its success
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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