When budgets tighten and growth slows, customer advocacy program managers—especially those who’ve focused mainly on pre-sales influence—may be entering their first bear market. If that’s you, it’s time to pivot. A recent Gartner Survey finds 73% of CSOs are prioritizing growth from existing customers for 2025 (i.e., retention & expansion vs. net new revenue).
Now is the time to get closer to Customer Success. Help CSMs use advocates to save potential non-renewals and expand existing accounts. Retention and cost savings are top-of-mind for execs, and your program needs to evolve with that reality—or risk being seen as overhead.
Luckily, the case for advocacy-led retention is plenty compelling.
According to Forrester, 95% of marketing decision-makers say formal advocacy programs are more critical now than ever before. These programs are recognized as growth enablers—not just because they drive awareness, but because they deepen engagement and loyalty across the customer lifecycle.
IDC backs this up with evidence that advocacy programs support both acquisition and retention. They help formalize and scale customer engagement, turning happy users into vocal supporters, and brand awareness into brand allegiance.
Nutshell puts it simply: customers who participate in advocacy programs are more likely to remain loyal. These customers already believe in your value, and their involvement in your program deepens that belief. It’s psychological consistency in action—people stick with what they’ve endorsed.
This matters now more than ever. With shorter renewals and lower switching friction in B2B tech, customers are constantly evaluating whether to stay or go. And in markets where net-new demand isn’t growing, the pressure shifts to expansion and retention—what Forrester calls “customer obsession.”
So how do you make your advocacy program indispensable?
And here’s the kicker: this is a pretty easy story to tell. Pull a report that compares renewal rates of advocates vs. non-advocates. Show your leadership that advocacy isn’t just a warm and fuzzy program—it’s a retention engine.
Customer advocates are objectively more loyal. That’s not a soft benefit—it’s your hedge against churn.
In a downturn, loyalty becomes your most undervalued asset. Time to make it your strategy. Contact us today to learn how!
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.
.svg){kind=icon}
