Unlock actionable career guidance and professional insights from seasoned Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) expert Carlos Gonzalez in this exclusive video from Point of Reference. Whether you’re just starting in customer advocacy or looking to elevate your impact in a leadership role, Carlos shares practical advice drawn from real-world experience in building and scaling high-impact customer programs.
In today’s customer-centric market, advocacy programs are more than a nice-to-have — they’re a strategic growth driver. Buyers increasingly rely on peer insights, authentic stories, and real customer voices to make decisions, making the role of a CMA professional both powerful and essential to business success.
Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) is the discipline of empowering customer advocates to support your brand’s sales, marketing, and retention goals. By bridging cross-functional teams and centering customers in your go-to-market approach, CMAs help transform customer satisfaction into measurable business outcomes.
In this insightful session, Carlos Gonzalez provides practical career advice and strategic tips for CMA professionals, including:
Learn the essential capabilities that set top customer advocacy professionals apart — from program strategy to cross-team collaboration and stakeholder influence.
Carlos explains how CMA leaders can align sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams around shared customer advocacy goals — and why that alignment matters for program adoption and long-term success.
It’s not just about managing reference requests — true CMA expertise involves understanding how customer voices fuel business outcomes and tailoring efforts that scale.
Whether you’re new to the field or aiming for leadership, Carlos shares career tips and professional growth insights that help you stand out and drive greater impact.
This video is ideal for:
✔ Customer advocacy and customer marketing professionals
✔ Sales, marketing, and customer success leaders
✔ Anyone interested in elevating their customer advocacy career
✔ Teams looking to integrate advocacy into company-wide strategy
Watch the video, then explore additional resources from Point of Reference to grow your skills, scale your advocacy programs, and become a customer marketing leader.
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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