1) The wildly successful program
We’ve had the pleasure to support many of them, and the cascade of successes never gets old.
2) The modestly successful program
– Certainly better for the organization than having no program at all.
– But it’s like that person in your life with massive talent and potential who never quite realizes it.
3) The program that fails to launch
There are, as one might expect, many different reasons that explain each of these customer marketing program variants. From our experience, the wildly successful programs have most, if not all, of the following attributes:
The program leader checks these boxes
The executive champion checks these boxes
The important takeaway is that there are many examples of customer marketing programs that produce noteworthy and tangible results in customer acquisition and retention. They’re kicking butt and taking names! If that is the case—that it’s totally achievable—then why do other programs simply plod along, or worse, wither?
In our case, all customers use the same software, and receive the same level of customer success support. These are common denominators. An outside, impartial observer would have to conclude that neither the software, nor service, is the make-or-break factor.
What successful programs have that others don’t is change management competence. This competence isn’t usually a result of the executives or program manager having completed formal training. It’s that they possess substantial pieces of change management intelligence. How did they acquire that competence? Perhaps through past experience and learnings, or perhaps it comes naturally or intuitively. Either way, it alters the way change is managed, and therefore the trajectory of the program.
Whenever a company reorganizes, changes core processes, adds new positions, implements new technology or otherwise disrupts the status quo, there are a set of activities that have to happen: communications, education, promotion, goal setting, and so on. Why is all this necessary? Because people need help moving from current state to future state. Change is not natural, and often resisted either openly or passively. People are people, accept it.
Yet this simple fact is so frequently overlooked or minimized to the detriment of “the change,” whatever that is. Change is personal, and resistance to change must be addressed at an individual level.
We believe that a lack of emphasis on Change Management is at the heart of unsuccessful customer marketing programs. This is no small gap; it’s like a car without fuel! A small percentage of companies we’ve worked with have someone, or a team dedicated to change management. At some point someone in these companies realized that failed change initiatives nearly always trace back to a change management “blind spot.” They’ve decided it needs to become a core competency for organizational success. Change happens and sticks in these organizations.
So, what can a customer marketing manager do when it comes to change management? First, recognize that this skill will apply many times in your career, regardless of the direction it takes. It is absolutely worth your time to invest in developing change management competence. Any change you are a part of, or in charge of, will benefit from you knowing the principles of change management.
70% of change management initiatives fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support (MkKinsey)
42% of companies said lack of user buy-in contributed to change failure (Forbes)
There are many good change management resources. One of our favorites is Prosci. Their ADKAR model, short for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement, is a great place to start. From our experience, the most commonly overlooked parts are Desire and Reinforcement.
A customer marketing manager must address the Desire among sales, marketing and customer success early and often. Talk to those not adopting, or worse, sabotaging the program’s likelihood of success. Think about these ADKAR reasons to participate in change relative to your own program experience:
Reinforcement goes by another name in our company: everboarding. This term is a way to recognize that while projects have defined start and end dates, change management does not, though it may take different forms over time.
In addition to the myriad online change management resources, you may have one or more people in your organization tasked with change management. Sometimes these people are in sales enablement, HR or elsewhere. You should enlist them in your program’s success, learn from them. However you approach it, we encourage you to commit yourself to becoming proficient in the art and science of change management. The success it brings you will yield professional growth opportunities that will define your career, no matter what stage you’re in today.
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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