Featured Guest: Kristin Sanderson
On this episode of The CustomerX Files, Alison is joined by Point of Reference customer and Global Customer Advocacy Manager, Kristin Sanderson, for an in-depth exploration of what it takes to scale customer advocacy across global teams and markets. Together, they unpack how today’s most successful customer advocacy programs go far beyond simple reference fulfillment to become strategic engines of long-term growth and revenue impact.
As organizations expand their reach, the challenges of managing relationships, aligning stakeholders, and measuring impact become increasingly complex. In this conversation, Kristin shares her experience navigating these challenges and offers practical frameworks for building advocacy programs that not only grow in size but scale in strategic value. Listeners will learn how strong customer relationships — deliberately cultivated and thoughtfully integrated with revenue goals — can become a sustainable source of competitive advantage.
A key focus of the episode is the idea that advocacy is not a one-off activity but a repeatable, scalable discipline. Kristin and Alison dive into how successful teams collaborate with cross-functional partners including sales, marketing, customer success, and product to embed the customer voice into business processes and go-to-market strategies. They explore why shared accountability matters, how to balance global consistency with local relevance, and how to ensure that advocacy efforts translate into measurable outcomes tied to revenue, retention, and loyalty.
Listeners will walk away with clear insights into:
Throughout the discussion, Kristin emphasizes that a scalable advocacy program requires intentional design, ongoing measurement, and an unwavering focus on relationships, not just activity metrics. Whether you’re a customer marketing leader, advocacy practitioner, or revenue operations partner, this episode provides actionable guidance to help you evolve your advocacy strategy from reactive to strategic.
Listen now to discover how thoughtful planning, effective collaboration, and a focus on measurable outcomes can help you scale customer advocacy globally and unlock new avenues for growth.
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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