#discussions

Our customer success teams typically know their customers best so we lean on them to identify potential advocates and referenceable customers!

We created a Salesforce/Planhat field where our CSMs can update the customer's referenceability - this is then pulled into a report that serves as our "Reference Roster" when we are looking for a customer to participate in a reference call or other opportunity (webinar, public speaking, case study, etc.). Then Customer Marketing (me) tracks when these activities happen so we can make sure we aren't overusing the same customers and are rewarding our most loyal advocates.

The next phase of the advocacy program will be allowing customers to opt in to join a formal branded advocacy program/group. The invitation to join will likely still come from the CSM, but the customer would be able to opt in and note activities that they are particularly interested in.

I am based out of our Customer Success team so I work very closely with them! They have their own internal advocacy program where they can earn points, rewards, etc for helping us with advocacy efforts (nominations for customer advocates, helping us place reference calls, event speakers, etc!) We do tend to struggle to get buy-in from our Sales team for what it’s worth.

The ideal state for me would be collaborating with CSMs and other field/customer-facing teams to make sure they're asking the right questions and collecting good data during their interactions with customers. Then, the customer advocacy team can build off that relationship to identify advocate accounts and personalize the approach. For pretty much all accounts, except identified strategic accounts, I prefer to do the outreach myself rather than add another to-do to those teams. Strategic accounts are different, because you really want to be in sync with everyone involved with those accounts, and in many cases, it's best to have one POC for all asks.