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.
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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