Featuring special guest:
Dave Hansen, Global Customer Advocacy Program Manager, Siemens
In this episode of The CustomerX Files, we tackle a challenge that’s becoming more common — yet remains surprisingly under-addressed — in customer marketing: the divide between customer advocacy and customer community. These two functions often operate in separate silos, but they’re more powerful together. When aligned, they can amplify engagement, deepen relationships, and prove measurable business value. In our no-fluff conversation, host Alison is joined by Dave Hansen, Global Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Siemens, to unpack how to end this turf war — and why doing so could dramatically accelerate your program’s influence.
Dave and Alison begin by exploring how organizations often treat advocacy and community as distinct, disconnected engines. On the one hand, advocacy programs are built to identify and activate your most enthusiastic customers — champions who can act as references, provide testimonials, or participate in case studies. On the other hand, community teams focus on online engagement, discussion forums, peer learning, and product feedback. While both are critical, they frequently lack communication, shared goals, or intentional overlap.
This separation creates friction and inefficiency. Programs miss out on advocates who can strengthen the community, just as communities lack structured paths to escalate their most engaged participants into advocacy roles. The result? Missed opportunities, wasted resources, and a fractured experience for your customer base.
Dave offers a clear, practical framework for bridging the gap — one rooted in collaboration, shared ownership, and intentional strategy. Here are some of the key tactics discussed:
Rather than forcing advocacy and community to “get along,” approach them as complementary parts of a unified customer engagement engine. Develop shared goals around customer influence, retention, and satisfaction.
Use community signals as a way to surface potential advocates. Look for highly engaged community members, subject-matter contributors, or peer helpers. These individuals already show up and contribute — which often makes them ideal advocate candidates.
Design workflows and measurement frameworks that span both functions. Use advocacy metrics (like reference usage or content contribution) alongside community KPIs (such as active users, posts, and peer interactions). Then tie both sets of data back to business outcomes — whether sales, renewal, or customer satisfaction.
Advocacy and community teams should not just talk — they should plan together. Create cross-functional working groups, joint roadmaps, and recurring alignment rituals. Building shared ownership helps ensure both sides are working toward mutual value, not competing priorities.
This episode doesn’t just cover theory — it’s a call to action. Dave and Alison emphasize that if your customer marketing strategy is in “maintenance mode,” you’re missing a chance to shift into momentum. By terminating the turf war, you can transform stagnant or siloed programs into coordinated, high-impact movements that generate ROI, deepen customer loyalty, and amplify your most powerful voices.
The payoff is real: smarter connections, a pipeline of advocates emerging from your most engaged community members, and a unified measurement model that proves the value of both functions.
Who Should Listen
This conversation is tailored for anyone working at the intersection of community and customer advocacy — especially:
If you believe your advocacy and community efforts could be more than parallel tracks — if you want them to drive shared impact — this is a must-listen episode.
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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