If your customer advocacy program and customer community are still operating in separate lanes, you’re not just missing opportunities—you’re wasting them.
This session cuts through the noise with a practical, no-fluff guide to uniting these two powerful engines of engagement.
Learn how to:
If you’re a customer marketing or advocacy professional ready to move from maintenance mode to momentum, this is your blueprint. The time to act is now—because in today’s environment, siloed efforts don’t just slow you down—they hold you back.
Featuring special guest:
Dave Hansen, Global Customer Advocacy Program Manager, Siemens
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Despite shared objectives — stronger customer relationships, higher retention, and increased lifetime value — customer advocacy and customer community initiatives often function as separate entities:
This siloed approach limits visibility into who customers truly are, what drives their engagement, and how best to activate them strategically.
The webinar provides a no-fluff, tactical framework for uniting advocacy and community functions. While the original webinar itself is concise, its core insights are strategic and highly actionable:
Rather than running parallel programs that barely intersect, organizations should create shared objectives for advocacy and community teams. These might include:
Setting measurable goals that tie to broader business outcomes (e.g., revenue impact, customer retention) encourages collaboration rather than competition.
One practical way teams can work together is by using community engagement signals to identify potential advocates. Instead of searching high and low for customers who might be willing to participate in case studies or testimonials, teams can identify individuals already active and vocal in community forums. These individuals:
By treating the community as a pipeline for advocacy, both teams benefit — community gets recognition and growth, while advocacy gains vetted, enthusiastic participants.
Aligning teams means more than simply agreeing to collaborate; it means creating workflows that operationalize collaboration. Examples include:
When both teams understand when and how to collaborate — and how success will be measured — it becomes easier to break down internal barriers and accelerate impact.
This webinar is especially relevant for:
If your organization wants to move beyond operationally maintaining customer programs to strategically growing them, this kind of alignment is essential.
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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