Super frustrating, right!? They clamored for it, and you delivered the equivalent of the best thing since sliced bread. What’s going on?
So, what’s going on. The short answer is, there are gaps in your change management planning. Not intentional, by any means. It’s really common to underestimate how much humans resist change. As much of an improvement as the change promises, it’s change. Change management specialists, Prosci, developed the ADKAR® model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement).
When you don’t get the adoption you expect, you need to determine where the problem is, and at this early stage the places to look are Awareness, Desire, Knowledge and Ability.
There are two primary ways to get feedback:
Advisory boards provide a forum for discussion and an opportunity to dive a bit deeper into various subjects. But it is a sample data set of the entire population. As a result, the feedback may be a bit skewed. Keep this in mind when making consequential decisions based on the input. Advisory boards provide an ongoing forum for end-user feedback far beyond adoption. They can uncover insights that help you plan your program strategy. Surveys provide a way to gain a broader perspective, but it may be more of a challenge to gain granular information without building an unreasonably long survey. That makes the formulation of the survey’s goals and related questions critical, striking a balance between a tolerable length, and not spawning more questions than conclusive answers.
Surveys are the ideal way to understand stakeholder behavior, or lack thereof, at scale. We know that sometimes it’s a nontrivial exercise to get the necessary approvals to run a survey that includes salespeople in particular (Don’t distract them from selling!). You have to practice the ADKAR change management practices even at this stage. Make the appropriate parties aware of the need for the survey, share the questions and justify the length, collaborate on timing and gain support from front line managers to cajole (or reward) participation. How can an argument be made for squandering an investment in people (you and others involved) and technology? Well, stranger things have happened, so approach the ask in full ADKAR mode.
Let’s talk about the survey itself.
If you aren’t getting customer advocate candidates from Sales, Customer Success, or other customer relationship owners, you should ask:
Have you nominated any of your customers as advocates?
If not, why not?
If there’s an indication that stakeholders aren’t finding the advocates they need (i.e., going somewhere other than your database), you should ask:
When you search for an advocate, you find what you need:
When you don’t find what you need, is there a combination of criteria that’s consistent?
Here you’d offer an open text box because you want to allow maximum flexibility and specificity. It could, for instance, be product A+B, financial services, and Central America.
In summary, when in doubt don’t just guess, or worse, give up. Ask! And to ensure you get a sufficient response from your very busy and distracted stakeholders, enlist the managers of the stakeholders to communicate the importance of their timely participation. You can’t help your stakeholders if you don’t give them a chance to help you. And they won’t help you help them if they don’t understand the benefits of making the leap from the old way of doing things, to the new, future state. When you find you have an adoption problem, immediately think about change management and the ADKAR components. Adoption is the outcome of effective change management, plain and simple. For more resources on how to increase user adoption through effective change management, check out this podcast.
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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