The question that customer advocacy professionals often must answer is: “Why should we continue to invest in a customer advocacy program?” Leadership wants results now. Meanwhile, customers need time to warm up to the program, clear potential reference activities with legal, and fit reference calls into their schedules. To get over the hump between starting your program and seeing results, you need to communicate Why the program is important, What results you expect to see, and How to ensure the program’s success.

The “Why” has a catchy tagline: the B2B world is changing, and the customer-first mindset is transitioning from a differentiator to an expectation. Buyers put more weight than ever on peer reviews, reference calls and other evidence to prove that similar businesses have found success with your product. Having the fanciest AI-driven feature set in your category doesn’t matter if your customers won’t go to bat for you. Buyers also want to purchase from an organization that they can consider a partner, not just a vendor. Engaging a buyer isn’t just about solving a business need with your product, it’s about elevating the stature of that buyer and their company because of the success they achieve using your product.

As nice as that sounds, no business leader is going to fund your program just because that’s what the customers want. You need to demonstrate that the program results in financial uplift for your business’ bottom line. Measuring the success of an advocacy program can be challenging, but these are some key metrics that we look at with our clients:

• Increasing new logo win rates

• Attribution of dollars won to advocacy assets leveraged in sales cycles

• Decreasing new logo sales cycle duration

• Increasing Lifetime Total Value of existing advocates

• Eyeballs on assets (e.g., page views on case studies, # of attendees at one-to-many reference calls, organic traffic to customer testimonials)

• Leads that have come in from advocates’ ad hoc conversations

Research shows customer advocates increase their spend 2X on products and services in the first 12-24 months in an advocacy program. They also bring in 5-10X their own spend in new business by having casual conversations about the benefits they see from your products. Tracking the sales opportunities you influence and the growth of your program members over time will be key for retaining the support of your leadership.

A challenge that many customer advocacy practitioners encounter is that they’re expected to make all of this happen alone. To be successful, advocacy managers need to run a cross-functional ship and foster relationships with sales, marketing, comms/PR/AR, and product marketing. Joining your sales team’s weekly standup to showcase a recent customer story (and highlight the salespeople that helped make that happen) can help show sales that you aren’t just there to facilitate reference requests; you’re there to make their wins more glorious.

Advocacy managers also must balance reference fatigue between sales and marketing requests. Tracking how often your advocates take part in different activities is key to making sure you can fulfill those G2 review requests for marketing without over-using the customers who helped your sales team win several deals last month. Updating your sales and marketing leaders with your advocacy program metrics every week will help both departments stay aware that they aren’t the only ones making requests. In addition, leveraging one-to-many calls for multiple prospects to chat with one advocate can make a few references stretch a long way.

Running an advocacy program can be daunting, and you need those successes to keep your spirits up during the never-ending busy season. One of our clients recently enjoyed their first leading placement in a Forrester report thanks to strong customer input, while another client is producing a video showcasing an enterprise customer’s CISO. Yet another client is feeding its sales org a high volume of private case studies by creating NDA-only documents, avoiding the need to get public clearance from their customers’ marcom departments, while still helping sales close deals with contemporary customer evidence.

With that said, if you hit roadblocks in creating certain types of customer content, take the road less traveled! As the market evolves, we have seen micro-videos, one-to-many reference calls, and peer reviews emerging as powerful advocacy activities.

How are you innovating the way you embed the customer voice in your company’s content?