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If users of your advocate data find the data to be inaccurate or outdated, they’ll stop using it.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
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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