Are you taking advantage of one-to-many reference activities? One-to-one reference calls are the standard approach for connecting a buyer and a customer reference. They are more labor-intensive to arrange but offer the most personalized sharing of information between two parties. The high-touch reference approach generally works pretty well until demand exceeds supply, such as at the end of a quarter or year. Some companies will connect only deals meeting a certain revenue threshold with reference customers. Buyers who don’t meet that threshold may not kindly take the “You’re too small to warrant a reference call” implication, which isn’t a great way to begin a relationship. Fortunately, a few options are available to meet high demand periods yet still retain a one-to-one call’s dynamic, interactive quality:
The idea behind a limited group event is to have 2-4 prospects join a call with a single customer reference where all attendees take turns asking questions. This is the simplest form of one-to-many customer reference activities, and can be set up easily. A side benefit of these calls is that one prospect may pose a different set of questions than the other prospects. One could make the argument that it’s a more thorough due diligence opportunity. Of course, some questions may not be pertinent to other prospects, so that’s a potential downside. Nevertheless, during spikes in reference demand, group calls may offer the only feasible way to accommodate all prospects in the reference-check stage of the sales cycle.
Limited Group Events may have representation by the vendor, but more often than not are un-chaperoned.
It’s always important to track revenue influenced to any sales-related reference activities. In the case ofone-to-many activities the customer’s influence applies to each attending prospect opportunity. The reward for the customer may be higher given this additional influence, but generally is rewarded for a single activity. The same applies to Reference Forum customers.
Reference Forums are reference calls at scale. In the early days of Point of Reference, we used to plan, facilitate, record, and host edited recordings of Reference Forums as our one-to-many reference activity. Some had as many as 70 prospects in attendance. That sounds unwieldy for Q&A, but typically only 10-20% of attendees asked questions. The rest were simply happy to listen. Reference Forums were more planning- and labor-intensive but worked quite well to satisfy the due diligence requirements of prospect companies.
Here are some key considerations in offering Forums:
Feedback from attendees of one-to-many reference events is typically quite positive. The brain trust of the attendees leads to questions from a host of different perspectives. Comments such as “I wouldn’t have thought to ask some of those questions” are not unusual.
While we view group events as another “tool” in a program’s “toolbox,” we have worked with at least one company that has made group events the primary option for reference conversations. They gained commitment from customers to do monthly or quarterly calls, the dates scheduled in advance throughout the year. The schedule is published for sales, so they always knew what type of customer was available and when. It took a very particular type of program manager/team to go all-in on this model. But it worked for them.
However you choose to leverage these one-to-many reference options, they ensure you never have to “turn off the tap” on reference activities when demand exceeds conventional one-to-one reference calls.
Check out some of our own customer success stories on the Our Advocates page!
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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