Customer Marketing & Advocacy (CMA) has always delivered value for the business. You fulfill requests from Sales, Demand Gen, Product Marketing, Events, and PR. You provide the advocates, videos, case studies, and proof points they ask for. You make it happen. That alone puts you in the “solid operator” column.
But there’s a higher value tier available—one that sets you apart professionally and transforms how your organization views advocacy.
It’s the difference between:
“Let me know what advocates you need.”
and
“Tell me your goals for the next 3, 6, 9 months and I’ll show you how advocates can help you crush them.”
Teams, excluding sales, don’t naturally think about advocates. They think about pipeline, press, campaigns, events, renewal motions, and competitive battles. They’ll use advocates if they stumble into them, but they don’t wake up thinking, “I should bring advocates into this initiative.” They don't plan them into their initiatives.
That’s your opening.
You know your customers. You know who has credibility in niche micro-markets. You know whose voice resonates with analysts, CxOs, technical consultants or system integrators. You know what content already exists and which stories are still waiting to be told. That intelligence is strategic fuel.
Instead of waiting for reference requests, you show up to quarterly planning with:
Suddenly you’re not the “reference queue.” You’re a win-rate accelerator.
Instead of being asked for yet another panelist three days before the event, you help shape the agenda months in advance:
Events become advocate experience engines, not fire drills.
Instead of waiting for campaign requests, you sit with the team early to uncover:
Suddenly nurture streams don’t just drip—they punch.
Instead of scramble-mode media asks, you present:
Press becomes more authoritative. Analysts get more data. Messaging tightens.
Working this way does two important things:
1. It broadens your internal surface area.
You’re now plugged into strategy, not just execution. You hear plans before they harden and inject advocates while there’s still room to influence outcomes.
2. It changes leadership’s perception of advocacy.
You stop being an “expendable function” that fulfills requests and move into business value territory—pipeline, brand authority, competitive differentiation, and revenue influence.
Executives notice that shift. It’s not theoretical. It’s visible.
Teams you support suddenly:
The gratitude shows up in surprisingly useful forms:
Advocates themselves also feel the difference. They’re not just case study generators—they become trusted protagonists in your company’s success story. That hits differently.
Fair. Many CMA leaders are barely keeping their heads above water. Requests pile up. Sales cycles heat up. Events don’t pause because you need breathing room.
Here’s the blunt truth:
To elevate, you must automate or eliminate the parts of the job that don’t require human nuance, and fuzzy logic.
If a machine can do it—let it. If a workflow can handle it—use it. If a queue can triage it—deploy it. If you can outsource it—shed it.
Your job is to keep the parts that only you can do:
Remove that humanity and the magic evaporates. Advocates feel it, and they'll be far less eager to help. Hold one to what matters in this connection-based domain.
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