Featuring Asha May, CMA Industry Expert
Building a thriving customer advocacy program takes more than great tools—it takes buy-in across teams and smart use of data. In this short video, Asha shares practical strategies to fast-track program adoption and engagement.
Learn how to:
One of the biggest challenges in adopting an advocacy program is securing executive and stakeholder buy-in. This begins with measurable value. Collecting and presenting data that clearly shows how advocacy drives business impact—such as increased referrals, shortened sales cycles, or stronger customer loyalty—is critical. Leaders are more likely to support programs that tie directly into key performance indicators (KPIs) and revenue goals, especially when they can see evidence of tangible results.
Tracking metrics like referral traffic, conversion rates from advocacy-driven leads, and engagement levels also helps internal teams see advocacy’s value in real time. This data not only proves impact but fuels continuous improvement and helps justify further investment in the program.
A successful advocacy program isn’t the responsibility of a single team. It needs champions and contributors across your company. Marketing, sales, customer success, product development, and even executive leadership all play vital roles. By fostering ongoing collaboration, you ensure advocacy initiatives align with broader organizational goals and have support across departments.
For example, the sales team can help identify strong advocates from their customer interactions, while product teams can leverage advocacy feedback to improve offerings. Aligning advocacy goals with department objectives—like tying advocate-generated case studies into product launches or sales enablement content—encourages shared ownership and participation.
Early successes are powerful accelerants. By identifying quick wins—like showcasing customer testimonials that increase conversion rates or securing keynote speaker slots for top advocates at industry events—you create momentum that can influence internal perceptions and boost program credibility.
Highlighting these wins through company-wide communications (such as newsletters or Slack announcements) helps sustain internal excitement and keeps advocacy top of mind. Celebrating success publicly also reinforces to customers that their participation is valued and impactful.
For a program to be embraced long-term, it must connect with your business’s overarching strategy. This includes clearly defining how advocacy supports marketing, sales, customer retention, and brand health goals. A program that lives in a silo is less likely to gain traction.
Advocacy initiatives are most effective when they support measurable outcomes that leadership cares about, such as improving net promoter scores (NPS), increasing upsell rates, or generating higher-quality leads. When advocacy is tightly interwoven with strategic objectives, adoption becomes less of a “nice-to-have” and more of a central business priority.
For customers to become advocates, they need simple, meaningful ways to engage. Offering a variety of advocacy opportunities—such as participating in case studies, providing testimonials, speaking at events, or sharing content on social media—ensures that customers with different preferences and time constraints can participate in ways that feel comfortable and rewarding.
Personalization goes a long way: use customer data to tailor advocacy invitations based on interests, purchase history, or engagement levels. Moreover, recognition and rewards—like exclusive insights, swag, or public acknowledgment—can motivate advocates and make the experience more fulfilling.
Sustaining adoption means maintaining ongoing education and engagement. Regular training sessions, onboarding communications for new team members, and recurring updates help internal users understand how to use advocacy tools and why they matter. Likewise, continuous communication with advocates—through newsletters, program updates, or community events—keeps them engaged and informed.
Feedback loops—both internal and external—are essential. Regularly solicit input from internal teams about what’s working or where friction exists. Similarly, invite advocates to share their experiences and suggestions. Use these insights to iterate on your approach, refine processes, and enhance the advocate experience. This iterative mindset contributes to a more resilient and effective program over time.
Whether you’re just launching your program or looking to take it to the next level, Asha’s expert guidance will help you turn internal alignment and customer enthusiasm into sustainable advocacy growth.
Watch now to discover how to accelerate adoption and elevate the impact of your customer advocacy initiatives.
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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