Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) is a demanding profession. With a vast array of stakeholders with their own diverse needs, it often falls to a small team, sometimes just one person, to manage the program. Despite these challenges, many program managers achieve remarkable success measured by a variety of metrics unique to their organizations. So, how do these high performers manage to excel? After years of careful observation, we’ve concluded that their success stems from a combination of professional skills and personal attributes.
These essential skills are not typically taught in college classrooms, but rather developed through mentoring, on-the-job training, and practical experience.
When we asked our customer success team to describe the most accomplished program leaders, these words emerged as the most frequent descriptors:
This is the number one required characteristic of high performers. Makes sense doesn’t it? If someone isn’t that “into it,” how can they do great things? It’s really important to believe in the power of customer advocacy because this is not an easy role. Conviction about and dedication to what you’re doing gets you through the ups and downs while never losing sight of that north star.
Fake it till you make it can have a negative connotation. But, there is something to be said for approaching naysayers and blockers with a healthy dose of confidence. High performers recognize, intuitively or learned, the importance of self-assurance and belief while maintaining integrity and authenticity. On the flip side, if a program manager avoids asserting themself when it comes to making asks of leadership, Sales management or IT, the program will suffer from a different and missing type of advocacy—self-advocacy.
With so many balls to juggle, it’s understandable that sometimes the best laid plans don’t come to fruition. High performers are not only organized but also skilled negotiators and communicators. They remain aligned with top company objectives and find ways to complete the tasks that drive the most significant results, understanding that the details can make all the difference.
Effective program managers are collaborative by nature, working across nearly every function in the organization. They understand the importance of being consultative with stakeholders, listening to their needs, and maintaining strong relationships. By involving key departments like IT, Sales Enablement, and Customer Success early on, they ensure that when support is needed, it’s already in place.
In the ever-evolving world of Customer Marketing & Advocacy, the standout program managers are those who artfully weave professional savvy with personal fervor. They don’t just manage change—they orchestrate it, harnessing technology as their secret weapon and keeping leadership in their corner. What truly propels them, though, is an unshakable commitment, a knack for persuasion, and a collaborative edge that turns every interaction into an opportunity. By honing these rare skills and embracing the intricacies of their role, they transform hurdles into stepping stones and ideas into influential realities. The journey is challenging, but the rewards? Absolutely transformative.
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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