The only word missing from the title is “Can”—a small omission, but a crucial one. By now, customer advocacy program managers understand that to stay relevant with their executive team, they must tie their efforts to key corporate objectives. This benefits the company, of course, but don’t overlook the personal side. CMOs are looking to shine in their roles. Your program can help elevate their professional success while they, in turn, can boost the visibility and impact of your initiatives.
For some, that may be hard to do. In some companies, those top goals aren’t explicitly shared. If the program manager is new to the space, it may not be obvious how they contribute to leadership’s goals. Staying busy, that’s easy, especially given most programs run on a shoestring. Ensuring program efforts are clearly in support of company goals, and getting those results in front of executives, not so easy. Keeping your head above water is the primary objective.
That said, what happens when leadership knows that the CMA program is part of achieving their goals is the kind of support that results in more resources, not less. In effect, “The program was able to do X with what we have today. If we had [fill in the blank] we could have [2X, 3X, etc.] the impact.”
What are the key priorities by which CMOs are assessed? How can a customer advocacy program directly support those objectives? Let’s explore the top CMO priorities and how aligning your advocacy efforts can help meet both executive expectations and corporate goals.
Your company has a growth goal that is driven by multiple initiatives. They could be new industries for existing products, or new products for existing industries, or a new sales channel, or new geographies, or any number of activities where leadership sees opportunities.
The CMA leader’s mission is to make sure the advocates needed are in the database and ready to go. Not just the right accounts, but the right contacts in the accounts to match up with buyer personas (e.g., technical exec, business exec, technical architect, business line manager, etc.). And the contacts must be able to provide advocate support where needed (e.g., event speakers, reference calls, site visits, etc.).
Building an advocate database is no small effort. Don’t build one that is misaligned with the needs of the business in terms of growth goals. Maintaining an aligned database is equally important. Stay abreast of changes to those growth goals that may occur in the course of the year. You don’t want to be left in the dust and become irrelevant.
Not all happy customers are brand ambassadors. Be sure you know exactly what your brand should look like, as personified by your customer advocates. Usually those are your unicorns, using a broad swath of your solution, producing above average results, in the targeted growth segments, and able to articulate the value your solution has delivered to them.
Customer advocacy programs have the potential to have the best customer data in the company. Why? In a well-managed program this data is cleaner, more accurate and more current than any CRM data, in general. There are many parts of marketing where impact assessment (i.e., attribution) is difficult, if not impossible. Not so with customer advocacy, if you have the right technology. Just having reliable data for analysis sets your program apart from many, and CMOs prize data-based decision making.
Aligning your customer advocacy program with the CMO’s top priorities is essential for demonstrating value and securing executive support. By focusing on revenue growth and pipeline influence, you ensure that your efforts directly contribute to the company’s strategic goals. Building and maintaining a well-aligned advocate database allows you to leverage customers who not only embody your brand’s value proposition but also act as powerful brand ambassadors. Emphasizing customer-centric growth amplifies the voice of the customer, creating a feedback loop that enhances trust and customer experience. Remember, when leadership recognizes that your program is integral to achieving their objectives, it often leads to increased resources and a greater impact on the company’s success. Contact us today to see how ReferenceEdge can help you align your customer advocacy program with your CMO’s top priorities.
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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