You know the competition is stiff if you’re trying to hire a customer reference management or customer marketing manager right now. There are the highest number of job postings we’ve seen over the past 18 years! As so many companies have—seemingly all at once—discovered the customer marketing imperative, we felt we needed to address the elephant in the room in the hope of preventing potential program failures. Here’s the question we’re often asked that gets to that elephant:
Does a customer reference program need a manager, and is that resource full-time, or can they have other responsibilities?
The short answers are yes, yes, and no. Here’s why.
There was a time when a customer reference program was, in reality, a case study factory. Find the happy customers, interview them, manage the approval process, upload the approved case studies to the website. Done. These success stories were captured opportunistically (i.e., beggars can’t be choosers) by different parts of the organization including PR, product marketing, and field marketing. Beneath these case studies were gushers of other advocate activity waiting to be tapped. But, extracting a drop was all anyone hoped for from those customer advocate wells.
Customer marketing has evolved way past that point. Here are some of the most significant differences:
Managing these relationships and related data, it’s not a static situation. Your advocate contacts change jobs and companies. Their sentiment about your solution or service changes periodically. When stakeholders look for a specific kind of advocate, the data they search for has to be reliable, or they will look elsewhere. What’s the issue with “elsewhere?”
It’s time-consuming, it’s frustrating, and the end result is more often “they’ll do” rather than “they’re perfect!”The right advocate is far more effective than “an” advocate, all other factors being equal.
Given where customer reference programs started (“Give this ‘project’ to the intern,” “Nick, who does other things involving customers, can take this on,” “We don’t need a senior person for this niche function”), it’s no wonder many managers/executives don’t put these programs on a par with demand gen, campaign management or events. They haven’t been around as long, and there are fewer examples of professional programs with real goals and results. Plus, there are relatively few program leader veterans with strong track records, and those veterans don’t come cheap.
So, here we are. A whole new generation of program managers is about to enter the domain. There is so much demand and so few candidates with depth in customer marketing that there will be steep learning curves and reinventing the wheel ahead. Hiring managers, please give these folks a fighting chance. Don’t expect them to run a reference program, write press releases, interview customers for videos and case studies, and run the booth at events (virtual or otherwise). Your reference program demands more: invest! This is a clear case of you get out what you put in. We have many good and bad case studies to back up this claim.
We’ve developed this graphic to illustrate all the components of a strategic customer reference management role, segmented by the frequency/cadence of the various tasks. Some of the tasks assume some system is in place (license assignments, system tuning), but most apply regardless.
After reading through the enumerated tasks, try to imagine your new customer marketing manager, especially one with no or minimal experience, running a similar program, and doing all this effectively while juggling a few more jobs.
Something will have to give (i.e., be neglected). If a customer reference manager is also involved in events, the show must go on; no second chances! The events will get priority. When the customer marketing manager is also involved in PR, those releases must go off on a tight schedule nothing can interrupt. So, PR will win. Almost no other job meshes well with the time-sensitive, continuous relationship cultivation and maintenance nature of the customer reference manager role.
We believe that the most crucial aspect of being a reference program manager is ensuring stakeholders find what they need when they search for a reference. That involves synthesizing current demand and future demand into the optimally balanced database, knowing that “optimal” this quarter may be different than next, or a year from now.
This involves analyzing the current opportunity pipeline, having a firm grasp of company growth goals (and exactly how they will be achieved), and staying in sync with the needs of stakeholder groups (sales, digital, lead gen, AR, PR, etc.). This is the strategic part of the job and not even conceivable if the program manager is too mired in the tactical weeds or too unfocused.
Approach the customer reference management and the reference program like any other discipline. Hire the right leader, and the program will yield many, many dividends. Just consider a few of them:
In summary: You get out what you put in. So, give your program the best odds of realizing its potential—a full-time, focused program manager.
If you’d like to learn more on this topic, check out this blog, What a Strategic Customer Reference Program Manager Does.
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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