In this insightful video, advocacy experts Delaney Tucker and Becky de Tenley, from Conga, share powerful strategies for using your internal Quarterly Business Review (QBR) as a catalyst to strengthen your customer advocacy program, drive stronger alignment across teams, and ultimately grow your business.
While QBRs are traditionally seen as internal performance checkpoints, this discussion reframes them as a strategic engine for customer advocacy activation. Rather than simply reporting on metrics and outcomes, internal QBRs can become purposeful forums where customer success, sales, marketing, and executive leadership align around customer stories, challenges, and forward-looking plans. This alignment ensures that customer advocacy isn’t siloed—it’s embedded in the strategic rhythm of your organization.
An internal QBR typically serves as a recurring cross-functional meeting where teams review performance from the prior quarter, discuss learnings, and set priorities for the quarter ahead. It’s a crucial practice for accountability, strategic planning, and proactive management of customer success and outcomes. When intentionally positioned, these sessions become an opportunity to elevate advocacy by integrating customer feedback, success metrics, and reference-worthy stories into internal strategy conversations.
One of the key takeaways from the video is how internal QBRs help forge shared understanding and ownership of customer advocacy goals. Instead of treating advocacy as a standalone function owned by just one team, Tucker and de Tenley emphasize embedding advocacy into broader business discussions—so sales, marketing, customer success, product, and leadership all see advocacy as a driver of retention, expansion, and brand differentiation. When teams regularly discuss advocate feedback and success highlights during internal QBRs, advocacy becomes a business priority rather than an afterthought.
Internal QBRs also provide a structured space to identify and celebrate your best advocates. By reviewing customer wins, successful reference activities, and impactful stories, organizations gain clarity on which customers have compelling narratives and influence. This insight allows advocacy program managers to recruit and nurture advocates more effectively, ensuring the right voices are amplified externally and used strategically across sales and marketing initiatives.
Another advantage discussed in the video is the ability to spot gaps and elevate opportunities for advocacy growth. When teams share insights on customer trends, product successes, or unmet needs during QBRs, these conversations can highlight untapped advocacy potential—such as customers who are poised to provide testimonials, participate in case studies, or speak at events. By connecting these opportunities to strategic goals, internal QBRs drive purposeful advocacy engagement that ties directly to business outcomes.
Finally, Tucker and de Tenley highlight how integrating advocacy into internal QBRs fosters a culture where feedback loops are not only encouraged but expected. This ensures customer voices influence product decisions, marketing narratives, and strategic priorities—strengthening the credibility and relevance of advocacy efforts.
Whether you’re a customer advocacy leader, customer success manager, or executive sponsor, this video offers actionable insights on transforming routine business reviews into engines of customer success and advocacy excellence.
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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