You may have heard the term everboarding. It applies to so many situations in business, including stakeholders and customer marketing/advocacy. Onboarding is a one-off project; everboarding is a continuous, evolutionary process. In practice, almost everything involves some degree of everboarding. Think about when you joined your current employer. Yes, there were the usual HR tasks including paperwork, IRL or digital. But was that the last you heard from HR? No way. You continue to receive updates as policies, benefits, and processes evolve. Think about that regular security training—yes, you’ve been seamlessly everboarded without even realizing it!
Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) is a better defined discipline than it has ever been. Yet, it’s still relatively new to the people who need to know about it, leverage it, and feed it. The muscle memory isn’t there, unless you have a well established program. So, in most cases, it’s up to you to build it. How specifically does everboarding apply to customer marketing?
Onboarding
At the launch of a new CMA program, there should be, understandably, a lot of communication about the program, answering questions like: Why is it needed? What are the expected benefits? How does it work? How will this affect me? What’s in it for me? That should take care of the users present at the time of the launch.
Everboarding
But people come and go, they change roles. The program will adapt to changing conditions and corporate needs, and you can’t leave your stakeholders in the dark. That necessitates more communication. Establish a rhythm of regular, meaningful updates through the most resonant channels, be it team meetings, newsletters, direct message channels, etc. This forces you to ask, ‘Is there anything that I need to share this week/month?’
Take every opportunity to talk about things you’re doing to make the program better, and the results the program is producing. Share sales and retention successes that involved advocates from your program. People like to associate with winners. Your program wins need to be regularly broadcast. This is a form of education as well. By showing examples of advocate success you’re modeling effective practices. Don’t assume even the most experienced salespeople know how to use advocates to best effect. These examples provide tangible, best practices; and describe the differences between onboarding and everboarding.
Onboarding
Like Awareness, most companies do a good job training end-users of a program or tool at launch, then assume everyone’s “got it.” Bad assumption. CMA stakeholders may not need the program every week, or even every month. We’ve all been faced with returning to a process or application after not having used it for a while. Remember that feeling of trepidation when trying to remember how to use it? What do we do if we can’t? Revert to the old way of doing something. Ugh.
Everboarding
Everboarding means acknowledging the inevitability of memory fade and proactively offering knowledge refreshers. Provide training “hacks” to users in a variety of formats, including videos, “cheat sheets,” bite-sized tips and tricks, office hours, and live recurring training sessions. How long must this continue? For as long as human beings are the end-users. This is not “retraining,” it is everboarding. Many companies use playbooks, documented process steps, to ensure best practices are repeatable. Some of the playbooks should include CMA best practices, such as when to use customer advocate content, when and how to find advocates, how to nominate an advocate for program membership, how to update advocate data, and so on. Getting program information into officially sanctioned documented processes is huge!
Onboarding
The most fundamental component of a CMA program is a reliable, sufficiently detailed customer database. Who is willing to do what? For what use cases and products? How often? There is a big push to build this database, and it’s important for end-users’ first impressions. This effort requires support from leadership, managers and end-users.
Everboarding
And just when you think you have a solid database of advocates, the advocates change! They change jobs. They fall in and out of “happy” with you. You and your colleagues close to customer relationships need to continuously care for this database, and in a timely fashion. When a user has a bad experience based on outdated advocate information, it is hard to earn their trust back. So the trick here is to establish regular reviews of advocate data. It may take a while to build this muscle memory, so be ready to ride herd on it until it’s got momentum. Let’s not forget rewarding good behavior as an element of everboarding. Some companies will offer spiffs at the outset, just to jumpstart program activities such as nominations, then stop. The drop-off in activity is predictable. Make the rewards system a permanent part of your program. Know that it need not be expensive, but it does need to be creative and well-received by the users you want to motivate. Ask them what would “move them,” don’t guess. You’ll only waste time and money.
Onboarding
CMA leaders are consultants, or at least that is the potential. When the program launches you have the attention of the company, but your stakeholder teams in particular. PR, Events, Demand Gen, Sales and others know about the program. Maybe you had an opportunity to join team meetings and explain how CMA is able to support their initiatives. That’s great, because you want to get into their planning process, and stay in it.
Everboarding
Fast forward 3 months, 6 months. Did your message stick? Probably not yet, or not consistently across teams. Let’s say the events team is building out their calendar for the quarter or year. Have they factored advocates into their plans? Keynote speakers, panelists? Only through your continued presence will it become automatic: “Hey, having an advocate do X at this event would be awesome!” As a consultant you can brainstorm such ideas with them, and make them aware of the stories among your members that would make a big impact.
Onboarding
Of course, you will have received budget and tacit support from leadership in order to create a CMA program. And most think that is the end of their part in the success of your program. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Initial support may make for a good launch, but as you can see from all the preceding topics, leadership is needed to build that muscle memory across the organization.
Everboarding
Regular leadership messaging should echo through the organizational hierarchy, encouraging adaptation and celebrating transformation. What kind of messaging? Some of it is pure support, amplifying program successes. Some of it is reminding employees to change, as prescribed; out with the old, in with the new. This typically works best when managers are held to task. They are closest to the “troops,” and will have visibility into resistance to change, and processes that are failing due to that resistance. Since managers change, the same everboarding rules apply. Plan to meet regularly with key managers to keep them apprised of program results, the mandate you were given, and how their support is needed.
Business is not a field of dreams where “build it and they will come” holds true. Change is hard. Humans naturally resist change. As a CMA leader it is best to start your program with an everboarding mentality. That means you can’t launch the program and simply move on to other ventures. That’s a losing strategy. Persistence is often a trait that our most successful program leaders have in spades. They just don’t accept a lack of progress. They are rewarded time and again. You will never hear the words “retrain” or “relaunch” come out of their mouths. Why? They’ve never viewed their program as a project with a start and stop. They have an everboarding mindset.
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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