When you’re starting a brand new customer advocacy program, or re-starting a program, it’s important to have realistic expectations. Nominations and Advocate Requests: these are two fundamental “motions” of an advocacy program. One correlates to building your advocate database, the other with effectively using that database: two sides of the same coin.
Remember in elementary school math how you learned to estimate? Estimating ensures you’re on the right track. If you estimate 30, but your calculation yields 62, you know something is off. So how does this apply to nominations and advocate requests?
When you seek advocate nominations from co-workers in sales, customer success, product management, professional services, etc., you can make some assumptions to arrive at an estimate. Let’s think about CSM nominations.
We’ll start with the common sense approach first.
Another way to estimate is by percentage. Some percentage of the CSM’s assigned customers are going to be advocates, or strong advocate candidates. How do you get to that percentage? The most objective way is to consider recent customer feedback.
With this information, you should expect a nomination campaign to yield somewhere between 150 and 250 nominations, assuming just one contact per unique account. Of course, it’s very possible that each account has more than one happy contact. Stick with one contact per account if you want to be conservative, or be more ambitious with an assumption that 10, 20 or 25% of accounts will have two contacts with advocate potential.
To estimate advocate request activity, you need to understand how sales opportunities work in your organization (this post provides a deeper dive). In short, you must have answers to these questions:
For example:
What you should expect in terms of request volume is of 85 closed opportunities per month, 64-67 require references. With an average of 1.7 reference accounts per opportunity, there should be 109-114 unique account requests each month. Before settling on that number, consider that some salespeople won’t look for references outside their own “back pocket” of references. The more tenured salespeople will do this more frequently, while the newer salespeople will need your help or that of their other colleagues (e.g., CSMs or AEs). This is more art than science. You’ll want to discount the 109-114 estimate by some percent to account for the “back pocket” references. Maybe the number is 10 or 15%; it’s an intuition call.
Then there are marketing activities that require advocates including demand gen campaigns, events, PR, social media, and more. Each of these functions should maintain a calendar 2-3 quarters in advance, or more. As a program manager you can be a proactive consultant and not only be ready for their needs, but identify opportunities to use advocates in ways they hadn’t considered. That’s value add! In any case, these respective calendars provide the advocate forecast you need to meet demand.
It’s important to set expectations for yourself and your leadership when it comes to nominations and requests. You don’t want to be too conservative and “smash” your numbers, with no meaningful traction to show for the program. On the other hand, you don’t want to set sky high expectations and burst everyone’s bubbles, thus losing attention/momentum. By using the estimation approaches outlined above, you’ll be able to establish goals that are attainable and impressive. If you miss your estimates, you’ll find our posts on executive support and the reference shadow market useful in planning your next steps.
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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