Featured Guest: Kristin Sanderson
In this compelling episode of The CustomerX Files, host Alison Bukowski sits down with Kristin Sanderson, Global Customer Advocacy Manager and trusted Point of Reference partner, to explore one of the most powerful — yet often overlooked — drivers of business growth: customer relationships.
While many organizations invest heavily in tools, processes, and performance metrics, Kristin and Alison make a compelling case that true revenue acceleration starts with something far more human. This episode explores how strong, authentic customer relationships go beyond “feel-good” engagement and become a measurable, strategic asset that directly influences pipeline, retention, expansion, and long-term brand trust.
Throughout the discussion, Kristin shares her real-world experience building and scaling advocacy programs that align closely with revenue-generating teams like sales, marketing, and customer success. Together, she and Alison unpack why customer advocacy and relationship management are often misunderstood — and how reframing them as business drivers can elevate their impact across the organization.
One of the central themes of the episode is alignment. Kristin explains how advocacy teams can work more effectively with sales by understanding sales priorities, timing, and pressure points — and how this collaboration helps ensure customers are engaged in ways that feel authentic, respectful, and mutually beneficial. Rather than treating customer advocates as transactional assets, Kristin emphasizes the importance of long-term relationship stewardship that builds trust over time.
The conversation also tackles a challenge many customer marketers face: measurement. How do you quantify the value of relationships in a way that resonates with executive leadership? Kristin and Alison discuss moving beyond vanity metrics to connect customer engagement, advocacy participation, and relationship health to tangible business outcomes such as deal velocity, win rates, renewals, and expansion opportunities. Listeners will gain insight into how to tell a stronger story with data — one that reflects both the emotional and economic value of customer relationships.
Another key takeaway is the role of accountability. Kristin outlines practical frameworks for setting expectations internally, tracking impact, and ensuring advocacy and relationship-building efforts are tied to clear business goals. This includes defining success metrics, establishing feedback loops with internal teams, and continuously refining strategies based on what’s working — and what isn’t.
Whether you’re a customer marketing leader, advocacy practitioner, or part of a cross-functional revenue team, this episode offers practical insights you can apply immediately. It challenges conventional thinking, reinforces the strategic value of human connection, and provides a roadmap for turning relationships into a repeatable revenue engine.
Listen now to discover how prioritizing authentic customer relationships can transform not only how your teams work together — but how your business grows.
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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