Executive support: it’s essential, critical. We’ve all heard it and said it. But here’s the central question: Do you know what support looks like? Do the executives know what you need and what support looks like? We often hear from program managers that executives are “totally onboard,” or in “full support” of the customer advocacy program, but what we see in terms of program results tells a different story. The most glaring examples of executive support in name only is a lack of change. A customer advocacy program requires quite a bit of change. People that needed advocates went about keeping track of, requesting and using these customers with a lot less process. A customer advocacy program, properly designed and implemented, adds structure, accountability and tracking.
People in an organization facing change want to hear why they should change and what that will look like from 1) the top company executive and 2) their direct manager. Those are the leaders who must convey the right message and demonstrate their support.
It’s essential that the CEO and executives overseeing sales, marketing, and customer success communicate the need for the program, why it’s important to company success, and how each part of the organization contributes to customer marketing success. Here’s a breakdown of specific executive activities that enable the establishment of a robust customer reference program:
Fostering a robust customer advocacy program is not merely about declaring support—it’s about demonstrating it through clear vision, consistent communication, and tangible actions. Executives play a pivotal role in articulating the program’s significance, aligning it with overarching business objectives, and ensuring it receives the necessary resources and visibility. Effective leadership support goes beyond mere budget approval; it involves active engagement, resource allocation, and a commitment to managing change adeptly. By empowering teams, recognizing efforts, and maintaining open lines of communication, leaders can truly galvanize their organizations towards the successful implementation and growth of the customer advocacy program. Ultimately, the measure of true executive backing is reflected in the program’s results—transforming passive endorsement into active, impactful leadership. Learn how our supplemental staffing services can help your advocacy team garner the support you need from your executives.
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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