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.
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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