As the leader of your reference program, how’s your relationship with your CRO? More and more companies we work with have invested in a relatively new CxO role: the Chief Revenue Officer. While this title has been around for at least five years, it’s becoming more mainstream, and customer reference program managers need to take notice. These execs may be the answer to many of your most nagging challenges to reaching full program potential.
The CRO role began as a catch-all for “all things relating to revenue,” but with a lot of variation from one company to another in terms of specific responsibility, scope, and authority. One thing is consistent, and that’s who the CRO typically reports to: that’s the CEO. Because CROs are, in effect, second in command, the individual has a lot of influence. In addition, they are the bridge between Marketing and Sales. A dream goal of any company is perfect alignment between Sales and Marketing. In reality, there’s still friction and misunderstanding when it comes to how these teams interact, their priorities, and their obligations to each other. Years ago, when I was a restaurant manager, and the relationship between the front-of-the-house (dining room) and back-of-the-house (kitchen) had the same issues. In that world, I believe the restaurant manager was essentially the CRO, minus the cool title.
How then does the CRO play a potential role in customer reference management? She plays a sort of overlay role working with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to achieve harmony and maximize revenue. It is no longer a matter of the department heads operating on their own islands, sometimes getting along, sometimes not.
As a customer reference program manager within the marketing team, you know the challenges of getting Sales and perhaps Customer Success to adopt better practices relating to customer references. The CRO can play a role in optimizing processes, implementing productivity tools, and establishing metrics that move all the players in the right direction.
The goals you have are:
The headwinds you encounter are:
The CRO’s top 10 list must include revenue growth, and we know that customer references fuel wins. That’s why it’s so essential for you to link your program’s efforts to company growth goals. If you are a savvy program manager, you’ll be able to enlist the CRO in addressing those headwinds that are holding you back. It’s implicit that a customer reference program is mainly in place to help Sales, but a CRO will want specifics. If you can demonstrate that, for example, the program’s four main growth goals all support the company’s four main revenue goals, as well as finetuning the reference database, documenting success stories, and collaborating with stakeholders working on the same goals, you’ll be golden.
An effective CRO will knock down obstacles and articulate why the reference program is part of her mission. The CRO will take the lead as a shrewd arbiter, diplomat, and problem solver. They can paint a big picture and make the cross-functional connections that others can’t. It’s worth your effort to allocate some time to cultivate a solid relationship with your CRO and see your program thrive.
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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