Empathy is a term tossed around a lot in Marketing, largely in relationship to understanding the wants and needs of buyers and developing useful personas. Customer Marketers are in a unique role because they have both internal and external customers. There should be alignment when it comes to all things customer advocacy, but often there isn’t. This post is going to focus on internal stakeholders, the reason you exist.
At the center of any advocacy program are prequalified accounts and contacts. Knowing these advocates at a granular level is the only way to be sure a) you have the right ones in your database for your stakeholders, and b) those stakeholders can search for and find these advocates for their purposes (whether the need is for an event speaker, a video, a live sales reference, a beta site, press release, whatever).
There’s only one way to really understand your internal customers. Walk a mile in their shoes. Maybe literally, maybe not, it depends on what’s necessary to get the insight you require to do your job well. Here are a few essential questions that need to be answered:
What goals are they being measured on?
Regardless of the use case, it’s important to spend your limited time on identifying and recruiting the advocates that will make these colleagues successful.
Understanding Marketing’s needs
If you meet with your colleagues in Social Media or PR, review their initiatives and consider your current advocate database. Will you have what they need in 2-3 months? Are there projects they’ve mentioned that could really sizzle with the inclusion of an advocate’s success story in some form, one not initially part of the project plan? How impressive would it be to realize they were being listened to and have a team member to partner with on reaching the same end goals?
Understanding Sales’ needs
To achieve the same level of understanding when it comes to Sales, you must understand the Sales process through and through. What’s a typical sales cycle, and why? What are the buying signals? How far along in the sales cycle before references become important? What is the role and level of the typical buyer? If there’s a buying team, who’s on it? Where can the process get hung-up? What would ease the buyer’s mind and give them confidence in their decision? Answers to these questions translate to the profiles of the advocates in your database, but also the deliverables from customer marketing that are useful at different stages of the journey (videos, quotes, reviews, case studies). There’s so much to be gained from joining sales calls or sales trips (for the in-person selling that still occurs). These experiences will provide the guidance and confidence you need to get laser-focused on where you spend your time.
The magical thing about empathy is that it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Co-workers who may not have given the customer marketing program a thought before now understand what you do, and they also have a better understanding of why you need their help when you come asking. And they’ll get that you’re in it together.
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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