“We have too many perfectly matched advocates.”
– Said No One

Building a steady pipeline of customer advocates is like searching for four-leaf clovers in a field of green. It takes intention, patience, and a sharp eye—not luck. Yet too many customer advocacy managers treat it like a side project, sidelined by urgent one-off requests. Without a system for continuously identifying and onboarding the right advocates, you’re stuck in reactive mode—constantly hunting and fulfilling at the same time, often under pressure from stakeholders who needed that advocate yesterday. And you don’t want to be under the microscope of executives who get wind of an urgent advocate need that’s taking too long.

So…how do you break the reactive cycle?

Let’s dig into the core issues most programs face, and explore practical options (with pros and cons) to tackle them.

What do you actually need?

Let’s start with the most crucial question: What types of advocates are needed? We think of type as:

• Segment
  Industry, product, region, use case—any combination that helps match a buyer’s context.
• Activity
  Speaking at events? Taking reference calls? Appearing in videos? The “how” matters.
• Persona
  Are you looking for execs? Practitioners? Technical or business users? Your stakeholders likely need a combination. Know your personas before you start filling quotas.

Think about current and future needs. Current needs often come from analyzing your sales pipeline. Future needs? Those should align with your company’s growth priorities. You might be surprised how easily your company’s strategic goals can (and should) shape your advocacy goals.

How many advocates do you actually need?

Spoiler alert: it’s not a random percentage of your customer base. Goals like “let’s get 10% of our customers in the program” are pure vanity. The volume may just be unwarranted. And what if an inordinate amount of time and energy is spent recruiting advocates and most are irrelevant to current needs? What a waste of precious time; yours, your stakeholders and your customers! When a customer joins your program, they’re making an emotional commitment to your brand. They expect to be called on not just added to a database.

Having 1,000 advocates when only 400 are needed? That’s not scale—it’s inefficiency. Worse, it’s a disservice to the advocates who want to be involved but aren’t activated.

Let’s look at how to estimate need by stakeholder group:

Marketing

Meet with PR, events, content, and demand gen leaders. Review calendars and map advocate needs to upcoming campaigns. Come to this meeting with company goals in-hand to ensure your respective teams are in alignment. Educate them on what you can offer—and build trust through regular (quarterly or as-needed) planning sessions. This is not a one and done. Repeat this collaborative planning quarterly or as needed, rather than waiting for ‘when there’s time’—because there never is, unless it’s prioritized.

Customer Success

Again, with your company’s top growth goals in-hand, meet with the CS managers to discuss both the advocate needs they have, and their role in contributing to your advocate pipeline. Effective CSMs know how to use advocates to expand your company’s footprint, and convert at-risk customers to renewals. Discuss with them the segments, activities, and personas they need most and factor that into your plan over the next quarter. As above, repeat this collaborative planning quarterly, or as needed. CSMs as a source of advocate candidates is discussed further below.

Sales

• Run opportunity reports to identify the types of deals accounting for the bulk of the pipeline. Look for clusters of opportunity attributes such as products A and C in Financial Services, in EMEA, with 1,000 or more employees. Focus on the biggest clusters with anticipated close dates in 30, 60 and 90 days, and prioritize recruiting accordingly. The process could be repeated monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly depending on fluidity of your company’s pipeline. If this is too big of a job for reports and spreadsheets, talk to us about our Advocate Gap Predictor feature using the predictive analytics of Salesforce CRM Analytics.
• With your company’s top growth goals in-hand, meet with the sales department managers (not VPs or CxOs). These are the people deeply involved and responsible for quotas. Their insights will provide additional context for the data you’ve got from the opportunity pipeline analysis discussed above. Just the act of sitting down with these people will convey your role in supporting their goals—and that’s meaningful when enlisting their support for your program objectives.

What method(s) should you use?

Now that you have your priority advocate criteria and estimated quantities, it’s time to consider your available recruiting channels. Which ones you use will depend on organizational, political, and even intangible considerations. Let’s explore your recruitment options—from classic to creative.

Working with the Sales organization is the avenue that comes to mind first, particularly if account execs have ongoing communications with clients as opposed to only reconnecting at contract renewal time. Account executives should have a current pulse on the account and know who’s ripe to be an advocate and has compelling (i.e., in-demand) stories to tell. If account execs show a lack of motivation to have a formal advocacy conversation with their customers, ask if they would provide a warm introduction. You can take it from there.

PROS
Salespeople can have skills of persuasion, and those skills can be applied to recruiting customers to be advocates. They are relationship oriented, and that’s always at the heart of acting as an advocate. An advocate’s willingness to “help” a vendor stems from a sense of being well-served and realizing business benefits. Salespeople are receptive to rewards/incentives, if well-designed.
CONS
Salespeople are all different. Some will see how helping you will ultimately benefit them (and the company), while others see a request to identify their happy customers as a bother and in competition with their quota pressures. They may not be sufficiently responsive or motivated, ruling them out as a useful source. If spiffs are used they must be compelling (tip: ask them what would motivate them).

PROS
Knowledgeable about their clients’ health and relationship-focused. More likely than sales to appreciate (and rarely receive) incentives.
CONS
Customer success managers are busy people. Managing relationships is time-consuming and problem-solving, planning and collaboration is primarily in an effort to achieve renewals. Oddly, we find that most CSMs are not incentivized or otherwise evaluated on the advocacy of their customers. The unfortunate fact is that unless advocacy is a performance metric, they view your goals as distractions and interruptions to their goals (“We don’t have time for that!”). We’re biased, but that just seems counterintuitive.

Direct to Customers
There may be a lot of legitimate reasons to not work through Sales or Customer Success. Sometimes these are political (i.e., management has not bought into your goals), but there could be many other circumstances that would hinder getting your job done. In that case, it’s important to do your best to leverage these resources with as little impact as possible, keep them informed of your efforts, but ultimately, go with plan B.

Satisfaction Surveys
Most companies have a way to gauge customer satisfaction whether via Net Promoter or a more traditional CSAT survey. The results include customers who self-identify as happy customers (“Promoters” in Net Promoter terminology). The segment of most satisfied customers is your recruiting lead list. Reach out to them on an individual basis for that personal touch, or use your campaign automation tool (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua) to recruit en masse.

User Conferences
If you have an annual user conference be sure that your program has a presence there. That could be a table/booth or a few minutes of presentation time on the main stage. Not only are these options a great recruiting opportunities; they are also relationship-building opportunities. Established programs build customer video capture into their plan and reserve a hospitality/conference room and schedule current advocates for short-form video recording. It’s a super efficient use of a video crew.

PROS
Reaching out directly is more expedient—plain and simple. Be sure to keep your peers—who own the customer relationships—informed of your activities so there are no surprises. Equally important, don’t delegate this outreach to an inexperienced (e.g., intern) or ill-suited team member. These are your most valuable customer relationships and they should be treated accordingly.
CONS
You don’t have direct working relationships at first, so customers may not feel as obligated to respond to your outreach. Make it clear in your first contact exactly what your purpose is and what the time commitment will be for whatever you’re asking. A call and an email used together will yield the best results.

Your executives generally have peer contacts at marquee accounts, and accounts that are part of CABs. They can unlock hard-to-reach personas quickly. Their relationship with their CxO peers can clear the way for high-level, strategic advocate activities such as speaking opportunities, video testimonials and ROI studies. Having access to a CxO to match up with a buyer’s CxO is so valuable even though you may not make use of them frequently. So leverage these relationships. Your CxOs will ask the same questions as customers, but from the perspective of impact on brand: What will you be asking them to do? How much of a time commitment is anticipated? Be crystal-clear on your ask and the time commitment to gain their confidence.

PROS
Executive contacts are high-level and typically strategic. These are the people you tap for the most important advocate activities. Don’t squander them on low-level needs. Things can happen quickly due to the direct, high-level connection, and their authority to approve activities is the highest.
CONS
Your executives may be hesitant to make requests on your behalf. They generally save these advocates for their top priorities (co-speaking opportunities at conferences, earnings reports, investor meetings, etc.). Be sure to have clear objectives/plans for these MVPs to gain your executives’ confidence.

Work through Marketing
These are your peers in PR, content, events, and RFP team, to name a few examples. They are departments that depend on advocates, and before you came along, they scrounged for advocates any way they could. Importantly, they have existing relationships. And now they each have a list of customers who have already acted as advocates in one form or another.

PROS
These are pre-qualified advocates. They have a track record and have already gone through internal approval processes. They know what’s necessary. That means it should be quicker to gain their participation for additional, different advocate activities.
CONS
The number of advocate customers from this source may not be high, but the quality will be there.

AI is a novel way to surface advocates based on customer behavior and statements with positive sentiment. As is the case with AI in general, a single prompt asked 10 different times may not yield the same results, and sometimes there are hallucinations. However, with effective governors, it’s possible you may find some surprises when AI sifts through account management call recordings, NPS survey comments, notes left by CSMs and AEs on contact records, and more.

PROS
Advocates may be found that would otherwise have gone undetected. Helpful for scaling discovery efforts.
CONS
The number of advocate customers found using this method may not be high. Additional quality control steps are needed to verify that AI’s findings are accurate, before initiating any outreach to the customer. These extra steps may not be the most efficient using emerging AI technology.

Final Thoughts

There’s no single “right” way to find customer advocates. The best programs use a mix of methods—tailored to their culture, resources, and goals.

But whatever you do, do it now. Don’t wait until the next urgent request exposes another gap. A well-stocked, well-aligned advocate pool is one of the most powerful assets your company has.

Every day without it is a day your company is at a competitive disadvantage.

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