Every company that decides to take customer marketing more seriously, thereby harnessing its full potential, will have the reference shadow market to contend with as part of the change management process. Allowing this to continue will absolutely zap your customer reference program of its necessary momentum. It seems counterintuitive that people wouldn’t be happy to give up a process that’s never been great, producing uneven results at best. And yet, sadly, it’s all too common. Let’s dive into the particulars.
Even if you’ve built a stellar customer reference program and implemented awesome reference management software, shadow marketers are going to keep shadow marketing. It’s that simple, and here’s why.
This is an 80/20 proposition. Eighty percent of the effort must be top down. The executives heading stakeholder departments, including sales, marketing, and revenue operations in particular, must communicate a) why the change is necessary for the organization, b) the upside to getting onboard, and c) the downside of non-compliance.
Why
– Prevent advocate fatigue, avoid embarrassment (simultaneous requests to the same advocate from PR, sales, events, etc.)
Upside
Salespeople respond to cash, competition, and recognition. If your program doesn’t have at least one of these factors as incentives for salespeople, then you’re pushing a rock uphill. Accumulating user reward points for “playing” is one approach (i.e., ReferenceEdge User Rewards), but so are leader boards and shout-outs at sales or all-hands meetings. Don’t assume you know what will motivate your salespeople, ask. It’s one of the many benefits of having a program advisory board. An alternative is to survey your stakeholders. Bottomline, don’t waste first impressions of the program; dial in your rewards approach as early as possible. It’s never too late, but it will take more effort if you’re further into the program’s life.
Downside
There are consequences for not hitting a sales quota. This is not a new concept. The reference program should be no different, but the quotas themselves will be: X quality nominations per month/quarter, X% of deals leveraging customer advocates, response rate related to program maintenance requests (e.g., updating reference account information when requested), etc. If these quotas aren’t met, perhaps certain incentives are held back, or performance ratings take a hit. At the very least, they appear at the bottom of the leaderboard and get zero recognition from management. Be creative, don’t underestimate social pressure.
What’s the 20%? That’s you promoting the program by sharing best practices, program success stories, keeping leaderboard standings and incentives front and center, offering reference training, leading sessions at onboarding, attending team meetings, and otherwise staying on stakeholders’ radars, thus personifying partnership.
Trust comes from setting expectations and living up to those expectations. Realizing that the thing you’re being entrusted with translates to a person’s livelihood and job security, it’s not to be taken lightly. Any salesperson will be skeptical of a new program proposing to do such magic. Solid communications are essential. Again, rely on your program advisory board to validate your messaging, clear up any ambiguities, and hit the key points. Establish your processes, then live up to the promise—consistently. It doesn’t matter if you travel as part of your role. It doesn’t matter if you take vacations. Salespeople don’t care. The service promised, the processes, must go on. Plan for it. It is very difficult to regain trust once a seller has been burned.
We’ve written a lot about these aspects of a program. At the end of all of your efforts, if a stakeholder can’t find what they need your program is of no use to them. Back to Slack or Teams. This problem may be one of two things: 1) you don’t have the right references in the database, and/or 2) users can’t search/filter the way they need to. You need both of these “pistons” to be firing. Imagine a shopping experience. The store, digital or analog, might look terrific and have a lot of merchandise, but if the merchandise is of no interest or the store is so badly laid out that you can’t find anything that may be of interest, you leave.
If any or all of these recommendations seem impossible, know that they are fully attainable. Many companies have dynamic programs with engaged stakeholders and phenomenal results to show for it. There are many factors such as culture, relationships with leadership and stakeholders, supportive training and sales operations teams, and competent execution capabilities overall. If that last sentence doesn’t make the point clear enough: customer reference management is a team sport. A customer marketer cannot do this alone, and shouldn’t try or set expectations that they can. Just the opposite. Follow our prescription and watch your program thr.
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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