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.
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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