Marketing automation is an essential tool to accelerate advocate recruiting. We’re 100% in favor of leveraging every possible channel to uncover customer references for your program. And not just any customer, the ones that help Sales and Marketing reach their goals,and not coincidentally, your company’s growth goals—the ones by which your CEO and the rest of the leadership team are measured.
The classic approach would be to ask Sales and Customer Success to nominate those customers who have the desired stories, use cases, geography, and product mix. This method can be very successful in many companies. In others, though, something doesn’t click. Maybe leadership didn’t communicate the importance of growing the reference database. Perhaps there are no benefits for the nominators or consequences for not being a team player. Regardless, the program must go on!!
In these circumstances, think about recruiting customers directly. Where to begin? With a customer list from your most recent customer satisfaction survey (NPS or other). Build a report to filter out the neutrals or detractors (in NPS terminology). The customers left in the list are the highest probability, most positive sentiment “leads” for your customer reference program. If you’ve got the time and staff, the ideal next step would be a phone call, followed by an email introducing the customer to your program. Include descriptions of the different advocacy activities and related levels of effort for each. For example, video interviews are a bigger ask than a written quote. Be sure to clearly communicate what’s in it for them. There aren’t many programs out there with bandwidth to take on this high-touch recruiting approach, although outsourcing to one of a few providers in our domain is an option.
Your alternative to personal calls is leveraging your existing marketing automation app. Nearly every company uses a marketing automation tool such as Marketo or Eloqua. Not only can these products support the initial email campaign introducing the program to those customers you’ve identified as “low hanging fruit,” they can capture responses that ultimately comprise the customers’ advocate profiles. Profiles include:
What’s really interesting about the “direct-to-customer” approach is how well and why it works. Even your peers who own the relationship are often surprised by the results. Sales and Customer Success folks aren’t always comfortable asking for favors from customers. They may read a minor kerfuffle as a clear sign that the customer isn’t happy enough to be a reference. But all of us take into account more than the latest nit when assessing our overall satisfaction. Taking that relationship owner out of the equation can cut to genuine sentiment.
Before you set goals like adding 100, 200, or 500 reference customers from this type of campaign, think about your stakeholders’ needs. Use their criteria to build your campaign list. It will do you no good to recruit an impressive number of new advocates that actually provide no value to the organization.
Our product, ReferenceEdge, is 100% installed in Salesforce CRM. If your marketing automation platform, like Marketo and Eloqua, is also integrated with Salesforce CRM, it will record form data from landing pages in the Salesforce Campaign object. That makes it very straightforward to leverage the data in ReferenceEdge records such as nominations or reference profiles. But even if you don’t have ReferenceEdge but do have Salesforce, the data will be in Salesforce, which makes exporting to your favorite spreadsheet tool, or reporting using Salesforce reports and dashboards that much easier.
Leveraging your marketing automation tool is worth adding to your toolbox, whether your Sales or CS colleagues simply aren’t motivated (and management isn’t helping) to contribute advocates, or you have a “you can never have too many” mentality about.
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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