Oct 10 • Mary Green

Starting A Customer Advocacy Program

A Phased Approach to Building a SaaS Customer Advocacy Program

My (Mary Green) approach to building an advocacy program is a phased approach. I want to get the program started as soon as possible while guaranteeing that my company and my customers see value.

As I gain wins this way, I slowly integrate other activities, team goals, and customer benefits. This ensures constant momentum at a rate I can manage as a small team. 
I’ll talk more about the structure and how you can scale the program across more customers, while keeping your sanity. 

Related Resources: 
Before you jump in, consider checking out Mariah Lenahan's episode on Advocacy program maturity. 
And, read Is It Time to Start A Full Customer Advocacy Program? by Mary Green

Before You Start: Advocacy Program Prep

Tech Assumptions about your Customer Advocacy Program

For this guide's purpose I'm going to assume the following: 
  • You are not purchasing an Advocacy or Reference platform
  • You have access to use a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot 
  • You have access to use a Marketing Automation platform
  • You won't be starting a community (or needing a platform)
  • You'll use a spreadsheet to manage your content assets

Topics to Discuss in Stakeholder Interviews

To prepare for your advocacy program, you need to consider what needs to be built and why. This will vary for each company and group of customers.

I do this by interviewing stakeholders, analyzing the responses and building a plan. 

Setting Goals & Aligning Expectations by Interviewing Executives/Leadership & Stakeholders


You'll start by engaging your leadership & executive team to understand: 

  • Strategic business objectives for the next 12-24 months; for advocacy programs we tend to find 3 main goals: Growth, Retention, and Expansion.

  • Current challenges in customer acquisition and retention - from 2023-2024 more Customer Advocacy Managers are dealing with retention and adoption. 

  • Expected ROI and success metrics; ask your leadership team what success looks like and what metrics they want to see change as a result of your program. Start measuring these metrics in a dashboard today to establish a foundation before your program launches. 

  • Resource allocation and budget expectations; you need this information to estimate the tools, rewards, and head counts you'll need for your program efforts. 

  • Timeline for program milestones; This is incredibly helpful as you seek to show the value of your program to executive, leaders and other teams. 
Reach out to other teams and leadership to schedule interview calls. Explain that you are starting a new program for customer advocacy and you hope to get their insights into how it will impact the company and customers. 

Login to get the Free Stakeholder Interview spreadsheet template. 
Sales Team
Collaborate with sales leadership to identify:
  • Current gaps in social proof and reference materials
  • Customer reference pain points and bottlenecks
  • Competitive intelligence needs
  • Deal-closing challenges that advocates could address
  • Ideal customer profiles for advocacy recruitment

Customer Success
Work with CS teams to understand:
  • Customer health metrics and satisfaction indicators
  • Existing customer engagement initiatives
  • Top performers and potential advocates
  • Common customer challenges and success stories
  • Current customer communication channels
Product Team
Align with product management on:
  • Product feedback collection needs
  • Beta testing requirements
  • Feature validation processes
  • Customer advisory board objectives
  • Product roadmap communication needs

Marketing Team
Coordinate with marketing leadership on:
  • Content creation needs and gaps
  • Event and speaking opportunity requirements
  • Social media strategy alignment
  • Brand voice and messaging consistency
  • Leads & Demand generation goals
While these teams are the most commonly impacted by an advocacy program, there are other teams you should consider. 

Both the Education and Events teams have deep understanding of your customers and can help you make an immediate impact with your advocacy program. I highly suggest setting up calls with them as well. 

If your program will include references, take time to speak with Sales Enablement as well, they'll have a helpful view on what the sales team needs and how you can best support them. 

Additional Resources: In a recent CMAweekly Friday Meetup Andrew Sevillia shared his approach for an executive listening tour. I've implemented his ideas into this stakeholder interview approach but you can look at his questions and approach on the blog post here. 

Creating Your Internal Cross-Collaboration Roadmap

Once you've finished your stakeholder interviews, you need to align their goals, priorities, and preferences with your metrics, timelines, and programs. 

I've created a roadmap template you can use to help you do this. (This is part of the Stakeholder Interview Tracker in your dashboard, please join to get this for free). 

Customer Advocacy and Cross-Collaboration

Warning: For new advocacy programs it can be difficult to get Customer Success and Sales teams to collaborate because they won't trust you to have theirs and their customers' best interests at heart. You have to show them how they are wrong. 

Members of the CMAweekly community often run into issues with Cross-Collaboration. Because most of us are open to working with other teams, we think they will have the same approach. Unfortunately, they do not. 

There are several reasons they may not want to collaborate, but the solution is usually that you must add value to their teams and show you are a team player. Then, you can ask for support in return. 

Top Down Support: the problem with top-down support is it means something different for everyone. In some companies you'll find a CEO that is extremely supportive of your initiatives, they might invite you to share on town halls or interfere with cross collaboration obstacles to help. 

For others, the CEO or leadership members might support the initiatives you have but they aren't going to interfere and push your agenda. Either way, you have to be successful and it is your job to make this work. 

The Solution: Use the templates above (for stakeholder interviews and cross collaboration internal roadmaps) to plan your approach for supporting other teams, gaining their trust, and getting their support. Read more about stakeholder interviews and questions in this post to understand why and how I position these interviews to help me succeed in collaboration. 

Additional Resources: Advocacy Program Checklist, Goals & Expectations List

Customer Advocacy Program Phase 1: Crawl

To start, I recommend you run a beta of your program with your current advocates.
Select the advocates who are most excited to participate, those who always respond, respond quickly, and are eager to learn more about your product. 

Advocate Persona Development 
As you start to identify your ideal advocate, keep the following aspects of their profile/personality in mind. You'll want to identify trends that will help you find other excited advocates among customer segments. 

  • Demographic profiles
  • Behavioral patterns
  • Professional goals
  • Industry influence
  • Platform usage

Now, in the Crawl phase we want to provide 3 things:

1) An advocacy program landing page with form. 
You want to collect their information, the activities they are interested in fulfilling, how they want to participate and be rewarded. 

This page should lightly describe some of the activities they’ll be asked to do, some of the benefits of participating, the time commitment, and the ability to join. 

** Putting this out to all customers will cause some customers to join who are not in a great position with their account.

Just because they join does not mean they have to be offered opportunities or that you have to give them access to the rest of the program. You can easily mark their account in Salesforce to indicate they aren’t ready for your main advocacy program. 


I would keep branding out of the process until absolutely necessary because it does take about 3 months to complete the process with them involved. 

2) A place to access opportunities (or requests) for advocates to complete. 
The goal of your program is to make it easier to scale. To do this, they need a place to find opportunities; you don’t want to be the one reaching out and letting each of them know what’s available. 

This can live in a community group (if your company has one) or in another type of portal, even a Google doc, if necessary. If it’s in your Slack workspace, you can add a channel where you’ll post the opportunities. 

** Quick Tip: I’ve used Notion to Super.so with our company name as the custom section of the URL. Then I created a keyboard shortcut on my computer so that every time I typed ‘rql’ the link would come up and I could send it to advocates to check for new opportunities. 

This is more of a startup approach, so if your corporation doesn’t want this, you have to find a workaround. 

3) A twice-monthly advocacy newsletter. 
Here, I list all of the open opportunities (you might want to shuffle these out to make it seem fresh), offer incentives like ‘Do this today and get a free Starbucks $10 card’, celebrate some of the advocates that have participated, and include any community/customer programs I’ve created to help them connect. 

Important part of the Crawl Phase: Data
As you build your program, there’s one area specifically that needs a lot of attention. That area is your Data; the information you gather on your advocates. You already have some data about them, such as where they work, their title, possibly LinkedIn URL, etc. 

But I am thinking about other data that will make it easier for you to decide which advocates to invite to a request. 

Keep track of: 

  • Their Expertise
  • Years of Experience
  • Activities they want to complete
  • Types of rewards they like
  • Geographic location 
  • Activities completed
  • Type of Advocate (here’s a link to Laura Ramos’ article on the 4 types of advocacy)
  • Hobbies or likes/dislikes they share
  • Career/Job goals
  • Now, you can invite all of your beta advocates (or references) and start collecting feedback. 

Customer Advocacy Program Part II:  Walk

In the next phase, you’ll work on implementing any changes your existing advocates suggested, put processes in place for other teams to make requests, and invite more cohorts of customers.

I’ll also share my tips for getting CS and Sales to send customers to your advocacy program. 

Cross Collaboration: Working with Other Teams
You’ve probably already had several teams sending you requests. You might be able to fill them, but the process can be messy. It’s time to take some proactive steps to add some order and allow for scaling your program internally. 

This approach does take spending more time with each of the teams to initiative processes. To start with, I suggest working with one team at a time. Who is the team that takes up most of your time? That’s the department to prioritize. You can learn more about choosing which teams to work with in this post about Stakeholder Interviews. 

Create an SOP Document
Ex: you do a lot of references, then you should work to make the reference suggestion and fulfillment function more efficient for the sales team. 

1) Start your SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure documents)

Here are questions you should answer about the reference process, in the SOP: 
  • Where can they submit requests? 
  • What should the team member expect? 
  • How can you deflect some of their requests? 
  • How quickly can you offer a reference? 
  • What stage of the deal will you fulfill a request?

2) Schedule a call with the team &/or their leadership to make time to discuss what works for them. You want to understand their processes and how you can best suggest changes that will make it easier for them.

3) Remember that initiating any change is a process, it takes a lot of communication, and often several reminders.  

Inviting Customers to Your Advocacy Program

Cohort approach
I treat Advocacy programs similarly to community programs in that you always need new blood. As your existing advocates get busy with new jobs, new projects, etc, they’ll have less time to help you, so you have to always be looking for new advocates.

In the cohort approach, I look for segments of customers to invite.

Here’s how I approach it: 
  • Invite customers who Customer Success or Sales says are satisfied (recently upgraded, renewed, high CSAT, bought professional services, etc). 
  • High volume usage customers; check your Pendo reports, especially for the features where you need customer marketing material
  • Customers who have completed a course or certification
  • Customers who have participated in live events, webinars, user groups, or other customer programs. 

After this, you likely have quite a few people in your program. Then I’d send invites based on product purchases, length of customer account, adoption rate, and more depending on the metrics you have available.  
Lifecycle Approach
In the lifecycle approach, I’m looking more closely at each stage of the lifecycle and when it is a good time to ask them to participate based on how they are likely to feel at the time and how you can best present your program.

Here are some of the moments that are often best:  

  • After onboarding is complete. (this is often a good time to ask for a review) You might consider suggesting your program as a place for established professionals to come share their experiences with others in your ecosystem.
  • 6 months into their contract, as long as they have used the product at least 30 minutes a month. This could be a good time to connect them with other advocates in your program who are interested in mentoring or networking with other customers. 
  • 9 months into the contract you can ask them to give feedback on their success so far with your product then ask them if they’d be interested in joining your advocacy program and getting access to product betas. 
  • After they’ve participated in 2 webinars. You can ask them if they would want to share their experience on a webinar or in a blog post. 

Here are more lifecycle moments you can consider: 

  • Post contract signing
  • Onboarding kick off
  • Onboarding checkins
  • Certification completions
  • Onboarding closed – a lot of saas companies ask for reviews here.
  • Additional certification completions
  • Lack of adoption red flag
  • Acceptable adoption landmark
  • New feature adoption
  • Customer joined a customer program (community, user groups, CABs, product beta group)
  • Customer submitted content to blog or webinar
  • Customer marked at a high CSAT or NPS (not to be used to trigger a review due to recent 2022 legislation)
  • Customer enters upsell opportunity (product, features, services)
  • Customer completes upsell successfully
  • Customer doesn’t finish upsell
  • Customer renews contract

Tools in the Walk phase:
A lot of CMAs in this phase are still using a CRM, Spreadsheet, or Project Manager platform. At this point, they are likely still collecting data and optimizing the best way to use this data to get advocates to join more programs (such as User Groups as hosts, CABs, beta programs, etc).

Some CMAs already have such a high number of advocates (over 100) that they are considering an advocate platform to help them manage it all. 

FREE TEMPLATE for Collecting Customer Advocate Data!

If you are a member of CMAweekly (this site or Slack) you can get the Advocacy Management & Scoring Template just by logging in. Join here or login here and go to your dashboard to get the link here. 

Part III: Advocacy Program Run Phase

In the Run phase, you are managing over 100 advocates, you must have some automations in place now, and use the 1:15 approach because it’s too difficult to do a 1:1 advocacy approach. 

At this point I expect two things: 

  • You are doing well working with your teams and you have each of the most important collaborations in process. 
  • You’ve considered and started to implement some kind of community program (even if only roundtables) to add a layer of engagement and interest to your program for all advocates that want to connect.

Teams:
  • You have processes in place to work with Customer Success, Sales, Product, and Education on a regular basis. 
  • You have systems in place that make new requests easy to manage. 
  • You are regularly collecting feedback from these teams, looking for ways for them to contribute to your programs, and you stay updated on their metrics that pertain to your programs. 

Community: 
  • You do not need to have a full community strategy or program in place, however you have considered it. 
  • Community programs contribute to the long term success of your advocacy plans. Customer communities make it easier to keep a pipeline of possible advocates in place so that you can easily nurture and recruit new advocates for various opportunities. 
  • Remember that community programs do not have to look like an online discussion board. They can be held for free in Slack, or Discord, on Reddit, or not have a discussion space. 
  • But, you do offer a way to bring customers together, help them connect, educate, share, and get help. In these spaces (wherever they exist) you will notice trends, ideas, and needs of your customers. 

Software: 
Get access to our Advocacy Software Survey Results to see what your colleagues say about every platform. But we can help you identify the right product to purchase in the #no-vendors channel on Slack, just message us. 
 
Thank you for reading our first Crawl, Walk, Run plan for Advocacy Programs. We will be making improvements as trends shift and we find new ways for you to win with your newest advocacy program. 
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