This is your biggest challenge, right, customer marketing program adoption among sales? Salespeople are tough to corral since they are such independent creatures with a single-minded drive.
It’s clear, from an enterprise viewpoint, how an organized and efficient customer marketing program can make their lives better. But that is not obvious to them. For salespeople, operationalizing a function translates to change, demands on their time and less perceived efficiency, at least to begin with. None of that sounds good—from their perspective. The good news is that many program managers have successfully navigated these waters and avoided all the classic pitfalls.
By volume, Sales is the biggest beneficiary of a customer advocate program, but only if it’s built to meet their needs. One of the smartest things you can do is to form an advisory board for your program early on. Use their feedback on advocate data needs, processes, rewards and training. Maintaining relevant data (and customer content) and the means to search it are the foundation of your program. Knowing exactly what types of customer advocates are now or soon-to-be in demand is essential. If stakeholders don’t find what they need, all is for naught. So, know your company’s growth goals and how they translate to your data, and lean on your program advisory board to help steer your advocate recruiting plan.
This is nothing new, but bears repeating as it gets lost among all the activities that have to happen to launch and run a program. Your stakeholders have to understand what’s in it for them. What is all the disruption you’re asking for going to yield? It’s easier to make your point if you’ve gathered information about current pain points such as never having enough customer advocates of a certain type, having forms of content that aren’t useful, not having a way to easily search and find compelling advocates and the worst: losing deals because advocates could not be provided in the specified timeframe. This insight may come from data analysis, or a survey of the Sales team.
We believe in providing clear and concise training about how the program in general, and technology specifically, work. But too often there is a lapse in time between training and use, or people simply miss training altogether. That means that information missed in training needs to be easy and quick to find, consume and understand. In the case of a customer reference management app, help should be available in line with the task being performed. Many of our clients offer task-specific videos, monthly office hours or recurring live training sessions open to anyone with questions. Offering options for any learning scenario or style demonstrates a commitment to your stakeholders.
This is perhaps the biggest obstacle to change. You can do everything else in this post really well, but if the old options remain available (e.g., Slack or Teams channels just for finding references), then you won’t reach a critical mass of adoption. You’ll need additional sets of eyes from managers to help you, which is a good segue to the next topic.
There are going to be salespeople who aren’t going to change their ways willingly―expect it. It’s normal to encounter lone wolves who instinctively do things differently. As long as they’re selling, they tend to be left alone. Then there is a group of sellers who could do much better at reference selling, but who need more than incentives to work smarter. They may need consequences in the form of withheld commissions, bonuses, etc. That’s where Sales leadership comes in, wielding the “stick.” Just like with salespeople, leadership needs to be reminded of why the program exists. An effective program helps elevate below average producers to average, and average producers to above average. That means more of their team members meet their quotas, which in turn help the VP of Sales or CRO hit her goals. If they aren’t willing to help you with change management, they are only hurting themselves.
Conventional thinking is that salespeople should do things, like nominating new customers as references, because it’s part of their job. But pragmatic leaders acknowledge that if you want to get sellers’ attention, then there needs to be a fun, competitive and rewarding element. That doesn’t always mean cash, although salespeople do like cash. Creative approaches involving like recognition by leadership, and winning competitions, work, and need not be expensive. If you run a contest, the contest standings need to be visible to all players to stay top-of-mind. Contest leaderboards inject fuel into those competitive engines.
Customer advocate stories influence both prospects and your program stakeholders. Peers are a top influencer, that’s a fact. So, use your early adopters’ success to show those still in the transformation stage, between current and future states, how they too can be successful by using the program as designed. Share these stories with regularity in Sales team meetings and company-wide communications. Long after program launch, there will always be new salespeople, and even existing salespeople forget how critical references are when there isn’t a pending deal. A customer advocate program is a year-round operation, and its mission of decreasing advocate round-up time and increasing the odds of closing deals must be communicated like a steady drum beat.
Any technology purposefully designed to categorize and centralize advocate information, support complex advocate searches, manage reference requests and capture reference nominations, should make life easier for salespeople, not harder. Provide access to these capabilities where salespeople already live (CRM, sales portal, mobile apps). That alone reduces the behavior “re-programming” that’s part of change management.
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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