Customer reference management is a team sport, yet how many customer reference programs out there are remote islands in their respective corporate sea? Too many! Customer reference programs are one of the most cross-functional programs in an enterprise. Yet, they’re often set up for failure when leadership isn’t involved in establishing the right conditions for success. In defense of corporate leadership, most executives have many competing, high-priority demands. Traditionally, a customer advocate program and the customer reference portion of it are delegated downstream. Leadership doesn’t see how reference programs directly contribute to their personal goal achievement, so the don’t give it much mind share. However, you can change the perception of your program from nice-to-have to essential.
In the absence of an “enlightened” executive team that fully appreciates a customer reference program’s strategic value, a program manager must consider organizational education necessary groundwork to everything else they want to accomplish. Gaining C-suite backing and understanding establishes the foundation of the cross-functional team needed for a vibrant, impactful reference program.
Once you have that executive endorsement you have the “juice” needed for two specific purposes:
Effective customer reference management requires synergy with stakeholders in PR, digital, demand gen, and events, to name a few. They have reference contacts you don’t have and vice versa. These teams own specific objectives that contribute to your company’s key growth goals. The database of customer reference contacts you build must support their needs. You’re success is tied directly to getting these stakeholder groups to play by your customer reference protocols and practices to maximize reference value while being committed to preventing overuse. If their leadership team tacitly or explicitly approves of a “wild west” reference management approach, you will fail. When each stakeholder group manager clearly understands they are part of a reference management team with common goals, then the whole thing works.
What does this collaboration look like? It isn’t the same for every company. We’ve seen both formal and informal approaches to customer reference management work. Organization size and degree of a teamwork culture are deciding factors in each case. More formal processes involve recurring reference planning meetings where stakeholder representatives present a list of upcoming reference needs and activities under consideration. Attendees strategize together to optimally coordinate activities for their respective benefit and that of the customer. For example, PR may attend a phone interview for a case study to obtain quotes for a future release. Digital marketing may leverage portions of a virtual event for website content. And so on. The possibilities are endless.
There are even a few ways to build cooperation into the system with rewards and performance measurement. Rewards and performance metrics will apply primarily to Sales and Customer Success. Think of salespeople being rewarded for not using the customer reference shadow market and for helping to identify reference candidates. Renewals are common Customer Success goals, but what if client referenceability or how many reference candidates they cultivate becomes a metric? Talk about alignment! Using these “levers” removes contradictory motives that create unproductive friction in the customer reference management ecosystem.
For a customer reference program to work, there must be a strong supporting cast. Depending on how you’re maintaining reference contact and content information, you likely need IT involvement, including the CRM system and content management system administrators. You’ll need sales enablement or sales operations to help with training at the point of onboarding, as well as continuing education about the program and its technology/tools. A customer reference program needs to be woven into current Sales practices as well.
Don’t forget your colleagues in other marketing teams. Your program may leverage tools like Marketo, Eloqua, or Pardot for customer reference-related campaigns, which means periodic coordination with the campaign management team. If you’re in charge of customer content production, there is the creative team (in-house or outsourced). Want a page for the program on your website? You’ll need digital marketing’s help. Since promoting and sharing the customer reference program’s capabilities and successes via Slack, company newsletters, or executive videos is essential, you can add corporate communications to your supporting cast list.
I hope you can now begin to see how many parts of the organization contribute to a program’s success and why you need leadership support. Your biggest champion may come in the form of a Chief Revenue Officer. By describing your program in these holistic, team-oriented terms and explaining why it’s worth their backing, you position yourself and your vision in a very different light. That will set you apart from many other program leaders and garner respect and engagement.
It’s easy to quickly become mired in the day-to-day of running a program, which is the opposite of evangelizing the team sport nature of a customer reference program. And it will work counter to establishing and cultivating something that drives company revenue and growth. That’s ultimately what our job as customer reference professionals is all about.
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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