Holistic customer marketing is essential to optimizing the value of your customer advocate program. Here are some things to help you achieve better results.
Customer Marketing has two definitions in the market.
I’m going to focus on the evolution—the 2.0 version—of definition #1. Many companies have determined that customer advocates have the power to persuade, unlike any marketing messaging, conventional sales practices, analysts, and other well-worn strategies, channels and tactics. The sheer number of open positions for program managers in the past six months speaks volumes about the newly recognized influence of customer marketing.
A program manager, new to our space, begins with these primary objectives:
These are the basics, and they’re an excellent place to start. But what then?
Today there are a variety of integration possibilities, both functional and technical, that a holistic customer advocate ecosystem.
There’s a reason we haven’t created a monolithic software solution that includes all the technologies I’ll be covering. There is a lot to know about each, and like the medical profession, the depth of specialization required is simply too much for any one solution provider to do well. That means each solution’s integration capabilities become paramount. Additionally, each likely requires an internal owner, partially or fully dedicated, to make that function successful. We delve into this topic specific to customer reference management in this post.
Why consider these integrations? The reality is that your customer advocate landscape changes all the time in terms of sentiment, the specifics of their customer relationship (products in use, # of users, use cases, etc.), and employment status (they change roles and companies). Automation can do a lot of the tactical work, but the strategic work and relationship cultivation continue to require humans.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of functions that should be part of your comprehensive customer marketing program.
Our bread and butter, customer reference management, is the centerpiece to so much of the customer marketing program. The emphasis is on knowing who is a reference, for what, how often, and for what advocacy activities with just a few seconds of searching. An accurate, up-to-date reference database results from gathering, qualifying, and maintaining customer information about your company’s MVP customers. It is a truly cross-functional effort. Check out our post, Customer Reference Management Requires Cross-Functional Work. You’ll find that this database is most valuable when all of the following programs and associated technologies talk to it, which we strongly encourage.
There are purpose-built advocate communities such as Influitive’s AdvocateHub and those customized for this purpose such as Salesforce Customer Cloud. All of them provide opportunities for engagement early in the journey (e.g., identifying advocates) and over the long-haul when customer reviews need a boost or the company wants feedback (e.g., help to prioritize user conference topics or roadmap priorities). They provide a means of issuing rewards and keeping members apprised of their contributions and reward balances. Of course, they also offer a way to connect customers with one another for various reasons, something that may not be possible outside of their customer relationship with you.
We believe the customer success function is an essential part of the customer marketing function. Done well, customer success nurtures customers to satisfaction, renewal, and ultimately advocacy. Customer Success typically owns the customer relationship and has the greatest insight into an account’s current state. Whether using Salesforce, Gainsight, Totango, or another purpose-built customer success application, CSMs maintain a customer status that’s used, at a high level, to represent an account’s (and perhaps key contacts as well) “health” as a score, such as a red/yellow/green indicator or some equivalent. When searching for an ideal customer reference, it’s crucial that only “healthy” accounts are returned in results. Therefore, it makes great sense to leverage the CS account status to determine a customer’s status as a reference.
CSMs are well-positioned to identify prospects for the reference program as well. Providing CSMs with a mechanism for nominating customers is one way to maintain a robust pipeline of advocates, which ensures sufficient “new blood” to counterbalance natural customer advocate attrition.
While newer to the B2B arena, more companies are building formal referral programs that incentivize existing clients to help bring in new customers. Referrals are another form of customer advocacy. Referring customers should be recognized for their efforts along with their other acts of advocacy. It’s part of the full picture of your customers’ relationship. If you’re using Influitive’s AdvocateHub, Amplifinity, Ambassador, or Saasquatch, you’ll want those activities/transactions included in at least one centralized source.
It seems every company has software for marketing campaigns, and customer marketing is a beneficiary. Applications such as Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot are useful when it comes to customer-direct activities. Many of our clients use these tools to canvas their customer base for potential advocates. It’s complementary to, for instance, CSMs nominating clients. For more on this recruiting method, see this post on why customers become advocates and how to recruit them.
Reviews are a necessary component of any customer marketer’s toolkit. Reviews are a form of customer-generated content, useful to digital marketers, salespeople, and analysts, to name a few. TrustRadius, G2, and Capterra all provide integrations to websites, and in at least some cases, to CRM systems like Salesforce. Reviews complement longer form customer perspectives such as case studies/ROI studies, and are particularly good at “warming up” a lead early in the buyer’s journey.
UserEvidence, Vocal Video, ShoutOut, and SlapFive represent scalable options for gathering customer experiences via surveys or video capture, respectively. Like customer reviews, these resources have a lot of legs. Demand generation may be the biggest beneficiary, but salespeope are as well, particularly in the early to middle opportunity stages.
The key to this content, like any content, is making it easy for potential users (salespeople, marketers, analyst relations, and PR managers) to find and share it. Having a single place to find any content for Sales and marketing is the key, and correlating use to impact (e.g., revenue influenced) is the holy grail for CxOs, especially CROs.
Applications such as Seismic, Highspot, and Showpad include content management functionality. In fact, most started there then added “guidance” or “playbook” functionality to increase consistency and Sales effectiveness. Customer content, in whatever form, must be easily discoverable or systematically matched to opportunities to be useful. You’ve probably seen this stat: 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects. That’s criminal! In the case of customer content, just think of all the interview time, writing, editing and approvals that aren’t delivering the intended impact. The integration opportunity here is making content easy to find, where salespeople live, and tracking content’s influence on opportunities. This data must be included in customer marketing’s reporting because without its cultivated customer relationships, there would be no customer content.
As mentioned, this technology category often includes sales playbooks/guidance functionality. That means someone has plotted out the sales process and documented best practices for a salesperson to follow. Surprisingly, customer marketing doesn’t often recognize the opportunity (or get invited) to teach customer reference best practices. As part of earlier sales stages, the salesperson should be leveraging content, especially customer content. As the opportunity moves to the middle and later stages, she should be reminded to start thinking about lining up references for calls or site visits, and not wait until the last minute. And not just any reference will do. In our experience, there is too little coordination between the sales enablement tools and processes, and customer marketing.
What an exciting time to be in customer marketing! You can be an expert in any of the areas described above and establish a valuable role in your organization. There is a more holistic, senior leadership role that oversees and coordinates all of these related functions and can have an enterprise-level impact. If your company has a chief revenue officer, who is all about revenue optimization, then you should join forces. They’ll have an easy time seeing how customer marketing contributes to their mission, which we expand upon in this post about elevating customer advocacy by partnering with your CRO.
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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