The tech industry is in chaos right now. In the context of customer marketing (CM), what do executives have on their minds? As a CEO, I know what’s important in challenging times. Simplification. Re-focusing on the fundamentals. In particular, we need to focus on fundamentals that are tangible, measurable, and contribute to our primary missions: customer retention and acquisition. The reality is that for better or worse, experimentation and related extraneous activities, people and tools tend to take a backseat. It’s fight, flight or freeze time. The question of the day? ‘What can we do today to bring in revenue this quarter?’
We have built our entire business on the idea that customer marketing supports the entire organization’s needs when it comes to amassing, maintaining and “deploying” our customer advocates to maximum benefit. The value to PR, events, social, community, IR, AR, digital and yes, executives (think earnings calls, joint speaking opportunities) is real and substantial. And yet, when economic anxiety grows, it’s back to basics, and near-term basics at that.
CM’s role in this use case is to support the Customer Success or Account Management team. These people are measured on retention, it’s important. We all have customers who aren’t maximizing the value of our solutions for any number of reasons. In some cases it’s because they don’t have role models to emulate. Or, they may know what the end result should be, but aren’t able to execute. Know who can help? Successful customers. Connecting the struggling clients with those who are kicking butt may be the change agent needed. Suddenly the conversation isn’t about what your solution isn’t doing, but about how to get the most from your solution (i.e., as it was designed).
If a customer is on the fence about adding a new capability or an add-on feature/module, the problem is doubt. Will this addition be worth the effort and cost? Customer advocates to the rescue, once again.
Do your relationship managers think about the use of customer advocates for these situations? They may not. So all the program promoting you did with Sales and Marketing should be extended to this team. As always, the peer networking is truly appreciated by customers regardless of the catalyst. Customers might even be more eager to talk to a fellow customer than a prospect. Spread the word and help your customer success brethren meet their goals (and by default, the company’s goals).
It’s hard to come up with anything quite as vital to a company’s health than sales. Retention ensures a base revenue stream, but that alone won’t catapult your company to new heights. It’s part of the formula. So, although the term “customer marketing” has not a hint of “sales” in it’s name, it is (or should be) high on a CM manager’s list of priorities.
Why are salespeople so well-compensated and treated with reverence by leadership? They are the engine that grows the company. Yes, they can be hard to corral, their attention spans fleeting and too often overly protected by leadership when it comes to communicating with them directly. But, they need CM—if it’s clear to them that you have something they need, and getting that something is not overly complicated and reliable.
Of all the things that fall into the CM bucket (community, digital, events, etc.), the most quantifiable element is advocates influencing sales. This includes demand gen where suspects become leads, become opportunities; and sales references where opportunities become revenue.
Working with Sales can be intimidating if you’ve never sold. So get to know their processes, their challenges, and translate into how CM can/should support them. This requires attending their team meetings, consulting with them on specific situations (e.g., big opportunities nearing the need for references), staying in tune with the “marching orders” issued by the Sales VP. Familiarity alleviates the sense of intimidation.
By understanding the headspace your executives are in during periods of economic anxiety you can endear yourself to the people making cost-cutting decisions. That said, they have to know that your priorities are theirs—don’t keep it a secret. One of our client program managers recently received a request from the CEO to make cuts and her response was to create a brief video explaining how the cut he was proposing would impact sales, marketing, and her ability to do her job effectively. She persuaded him to drop his request. This was a very clever way to get the CEO’s time, and present her case in a tangible way. Consider this approach as one of many “arrows in your quiver” for articulating how your program aligns to the CEO’s top imperatives. This blog highlights some other ways customer advocacy programs make CMOs look good.
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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