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.
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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