There are so many ways to tell your company’s story through your customers. And the stories are out there along with customers willing to tell them in one form or another. But companies continue to struggle when it comes to getting those captured stories—customer content—into buyers’ hands.
According to a recent trend report from the Content Marketing Institute, 85% of B2B organizations attribute their success to content marketing. Customer-based content, such as a case study or video testimonial, serves to validate that a product or service works as advertised and addresses the prospect’s business need. In fact, the Second Annual State of Sales report from Salesforce.com notes that 57% of survey respondents listed high-quality content as an important sales driver.
In a recent study by research firm Televerde, more customer content was the fourth highest response from B2B salespeople to the question, What can Marketing do to help you win more deals?
- 1 Better Messaging
- 2 More Qualified Leads
- 3 Better Marketing materials
- 4 More Case Studies and Testimonials
A solid benefit of written or recorded content is that it multiplies the customer’s investment in telling their story. A customer can provide an interview for a video or case study illustrating their success with the potential for it to be used over and over again without additional time commitment. Preventing overuse of your VIP customers helps ensure you can still tap them for one-on-one calls or site visits when they’re needed to seal deals.
So where do you tell your Sales and Marketing to find content? Most likely the answer is not simple. The content is likely scattered between the company website, Dropbox folders, intranet drives, etc. Further they probably aren’t tagged in a way that supports the kinds of searches commonly used to support specific opportunities and marketing campaigns. Your internal content consumers don’t have the time or inclination to rummage around for the perfect story or piece of content. They need a sophisticated yet simple-to-use way to search and share customer content capability built right into the CRM solution they already use. The right application puts the right content at the right time just a few clicks away.
A purpose-built application for storing, categorizing, sharing, and measuring content impact on opportunities is a huge advantage for people who leverage it (and those who develop content). By efficiently locating the most salient customer content to address a prospect’s concerns at any given point in the sales cycle, salespeople can optimize their time and move prospects forward. Content helps build a context for buyers of how your customers use your solution and the types of business problems that were solved. Setting the stage with customer content means that live calls that occur later in the sales process are more informed and useful.
When selecting the right application to enable your content curation and sharing capability, keep these two things in mind:
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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