Featured Guest: Asha May
In this episode of The CustomerX Files, host Alison Bukowski welcomes customer marketing and advocacy thought leader Asha May for a deep and practical conversation about one of the most important — yet sometimes undervalued — levers for customer program success: the partnership between Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) and Customer Success (CS).
With more than two decades of experience working across both customer success and customer marketing domains, Asha brings a unique and highly strategic perspective to how these two functions can collaborate to not just support customers but also drive measurable business value. Throughout the episode, she shares real-world examples, lessons learned, and actionable guidance that CMA and CS professionals can implement to strengthen relationships, streamline collaboration, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for customers and the business.
While organizations often operate CMA and CS as separate functions, Asha and Alison challenge that status quo by highlighting why alignment between these teams is critical in today’s customer-centric business environment. Far from operating in silos, the most effective customer programs exist where success teams and marketing and advocacy professionals co-design strategies, share insights, and partner closely on execution. In this conversation, listeners gain a clear understanding of what true partnership looks like and how to get there.
One of the episode’s key themes is the shared mission between CMA and CS: ensuring customers are not only satisfied, but empowered to participate, advocate, and grow. Asha explains how customer success teams are often the first to understand customer challenges, goals, and journey dynamics, while CMA and advocacy teams are experts in amplifying customer voices, storytelling, and program engagement. When these strengths are combined, the organization can build more purposeful advocacy programs that resonate with customers and internal stakeholders alike.
Asha outlines several practical collaboration strategies that CMA and CS teams can adopt. This includes establishing regular communication cadences, co-creating customer engagement plans, and developing shared performance indicators. By aligning on goals and expectations, teams can ensure they’re working toward common outcomes — such as improved retention, stronger reference pipelines, and higher advocacy participation rates.
The discussion also dives into how to break down relationship barriers that often exist between CMA and CS teams. Asha shares thoughtful advice on building empathy across functions, understanding differing priorities, and creating shared language around customer value. These insights are valuable for leaders who want to foster a culture of partnership, not competition, across customer-facing groups.
Measurement is another topic Asha addresses thoughtfully. She emphasizes the importance of defining success metrics that reflect both operational excellence and strategic business impact. For example, this includes metrics that recognize improvements in customer health, satisfaction, reference readiness, and advocacy engagement — all of which are strengthened when CMA and CS work in harmony.
Throughout the episode, listeners will gain valuable insights into:
Whether you’re leading a customer marketing function, driving customer success initiatives, or working at the intersection of both, this episode offers perspectives and practical advice you can put into action immediately. You’ll come away with a stronger appreciation for how purposeful collaboration fuels better customer experiences, builds stronger advocacy pipelines, and elevates the impact of your entire organization.
Listen now and discover how cultivating an intentional partnership between CMA and CS can unlock new opportunities for customer connection and business growth.
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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