In this short video, Asha May — a seasoned customer advocacy expert — explains why leading B2B companies turn to Point of Reference and our ReferenceEdge platform for their customer advocacy programs. From streamlining reference requests to driving real business outcomes, she walks through what sets us apart.
ReferenceEdge is built directly on Salesforce, not just integrated. This means your advocacy data lives where your teams already work, enabling seamless reference searches, automated workflows, and real-time visibility.
With AI built-in (including tools like the Advocacy Gap Predictor), our platform helps you predict where you’ll need advocates months in advance and automates menial tasks like updating advocate profiles.
You don’t just get software — every client gets a dedicated team member to guide them. That level of hands-on partnership ensures your advocacy program doesn’t just get off the ground — it thrives.
From recruiting and onboarding new advocates to nurturing their engagement, ReferenceEdge supports the full lifecycle. You can track advocate preferences (like whether they prefer public speaking vs. private calls) and manage their availability.
Our platform doesn’t just manage advocates — it ties their engagement to business outcomes. You can track metrics like revenue influenced by advocate activity, giving your advocacy program real, quantifiable value.
With visibility into how often advocates are being asked to participate, teams can avoid overusing their most loyal customers — protecting relationships while keeping the advocacy engine running.
Rolling out new tools can be challenging — but Point of Reference helps you do it right. We provide a change management playbook and training to ensure your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams adopt ReferenceEdge smoothly.
Advocate activity is gamified: participants can earn points for advocacy actions (like reference calls, case studies, or public speaking), which can be redeemed for incentives. This makes engagement fun and sustainable.
As one client shared, after implementing ReferenceEdge, their reference pool grew from 120 to 700 accounts, and they now track and report on revenue-influenced reference activity.
Another benefit: better internal alignment. With dashboards and insight on advocate behavior, program managers can report to executives (like the CMO or CRO) and demonstrate how advocacy is contributing to strategic goals.
We don’t just hand you a tool — we partner with you. Since 2003, Point of Reference has helped companies build scalable, sustainable advocacy programs through a combination of deep product expertise, strategic guidance, and unparalleled customer service.
We understand customer advocacy is more than just “getting a reference call.” It’s about building a living, breathing community of your most passionate customers — and turning that energy into growth for your business.
Watch the video above to hear Asha May’s full insights and then request a live demo to see how ReferenceEdge works in action.
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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