“Where should a customer reference program live?” We get asked this question frequently during our sales process. A prospective client recognizes the “customer reference problem,” and the need to put some focus on fixing it, but isn’t sure what department the customer reference program should call home.
Ten years ago, the vast majority of customer reference programs fell into the marketing department. Today, a little less so. One of the big changes over the last decade is the rise of the customer success function, which can dovetail nicely with customer advocacy. We also have clients who determined their program fits better into Sales Operations or Product Marketing.
The “right” home for the customer reference program depends on how the function is classified. Is it actually customer marketing, field enablement, PR, or customer experience? The answer to that question is founded in the program’s end goals and metrics used to determine if those goals are being achieved.
When we’re asked for a definitive answer, a best practice, we answer with a few questions:
Passion
If the leader overseeing the customer reference function isn’t a believer, then the only way the program will succeed is if the program manager is passionate, influential, and a real go-getter. Still, it’s going to be an uphill battle without someone with a seat at the leadership table who is all-in.
Synergy
We see programs that reside in a department where it is the outlier struggling to get traction. The program managers may attend department meetings and find they have little in common with their teammates, and feel isolated. It feels like they’re in a silo, there’s no synergy. Of the possible home base departments listed earlier, we tend to find product management to be the least successful option. Yes, product management does establish relationships with customers through beta testing, and possibly through customer advisory boards. But those intersections are too sporadic for most customer reference programs to thrive when located in product management.
Bandwidth
A leader may have great intentions, but if they have a full plate of other initiatives/responsibilities, they won’t be able to provide the necessary executive support. Leadership’s vocal and visible support can make all the difference when a program needs help with backing changes in process, policy, and behaviors. For example, the customer reference program may need IT support, which can be hard to come by, or inter-departmental coordination glitches may require leadership to articulate the end goal of collaboration and customer experience. If leadership doesn’t have the time to advocate for these needs, the customer reference program will flounder.
Budget
It’s ideal for a customer reference program to have a discrete budget for staff, technology, and potentially, contractors. Getting budget allocations ahead of producing results requires a leap of faith and vision. That tends to be leadership’s domain, a reason they are in strategic positions. A customer reference program without the necessary resources to recruit customers, manage access, and engage internal stakeholders is likely to fail.
In conclusion, be sure your company gives these considerations sufficient deliberation before moving forward with a customer reference program initiative. Our experience is that these variables make all the difference between a program that thrives or merely exists. These same considerations come into play if the original executive sponsor departs. The replacement may have very different views and priorities. An executive change should prompt a re-evaluation of the program’s home, always with an eye toward providing the best chances of success for the program, and therefore its stakeholders, including sales, marketing, PR, demand gen, events, and more.
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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