It’s a question that comes up once or twice a year in our domain. Does it make more sense to buy “off-the-shelf” customer advocate management software to run your program, or to build it? It’s pretty attractive to think about the license fees that can be avoided if the internal IT group can develop a tool. So why not go down that path? 3 simple reasons:
There aren’t too many developers in a typical IT group who know much about customer advocate management systems. What company, besides a specialist, has this core competency? We’re still expanding and evolving our knowledge base as client needs morph even after nearly 15 years in the space. The process of specing out an application and translating that to a user-friendly, robust tool is not trivial. Thus the reason we hear about companies still working on a solution IT promised 12, 18, 24 months after embarking on the journey. Meanwhile, the program limps along running on spreadsheets.
The feature set and processes designed into an off-the-shelf solution is the result of hundreds if not thousands of data inputs from a variety of clients. Designing an application for one company’s needs often leads to quirky results. The design might accommodate particular people and their idiosyncrasies or company dysfunctions, which lead no where good when environments and people change. We’ve heard, “I don’t know why we built it this way. It was way before my time” more than a few times. If you don’t have any basis for comparison to what has worked best for other programs it’s hard to recognize that there’s a better way.
With the right executive support it’s possible to get the resources and budget for an initial customer reference management software build. The plan is often to build in phases with the first phase being the “bare bones” tool to be enhanced over time. Sounds good. Get something into the hands of program managers and users as soon as possible. Here’s what usually happens. IT gets pulled into a high priority project after phase I. Afterward, they’re pulled into another high priority project, and so on. Then a key developer of phase I leaves the company and knowledge of the application follows. The program still needs enhancements to get the application truly usable for the long-term. But now IT resources are too busy and hard to come by. The project is in a holding pattern…forever.
Can you blame IT? They did make a commitment to build and continue enhancing the application. But is that the best use of their time? Was customer advocate management software ever a company competency or priority? It isn’t 99% of the time. So the natural pull of competing priorities does its thing and the program is stranded.
When we replace a home-grown solution, regardless of what platform it’s on, we find the following:
At the end of the day there is a price for this cost-saving fantasy. It’s the time spent by IT resources on an application with no real future. Its lost benefits from a truly effective application that helps sales and marketing find advocates in a few clicks and complete processes efficiently so that deals can close and marketing events include compelling advocates. Opportunities to influence buyers, analysts and the press are lost forever. Was it all worth the cost savings in terms of licenses?
Learn more about our purpose-built application ReferenceEdge, and save your company from the highly foreseeable outcome. If you’re in the unenviable position of having to tell leadership that the home-grown decision made a year or so ago was a mistake, just know we’ve helped migrate companies from home-grown to ReferenceEdge many times. It won’t be our first rodeo.
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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