The Swan Problem in Customer Advocacy.

Where does your advocacy program sit?

Ask someone how their advocacy program is going, and you'll usually get something vaguely positive - "yeah, it's ticking along", or "we're doing okay."

Ask them to point to where it actually sits - somewhere between "a couple of people squeezing this in while they focus on their day jobs" and "something the board actually cares about because it's driving revenue" - and most people can't.

That's not a knock on anyone, and I've certainly been there. How do you juggle it all when the demands are this high and this varied? Honestly, that's a good sign in disguise - companies want customer advocacy, and success just breeds more demand. But it also makes the job fast paced and pressured, and you're only ever as good as the last big brand that stood on stage with your CEO...

I've sat in enough of these conversations to know that advocacy is one of those functions that can look fine from the outside - the typical swan gliding across water, while their legs are paddling at a million miles an hour. What does the glide look like; a couple of great case studies, some big brand videos, and a happy customer who'll always take a reference call.

What does the manic paddling look like? Unfortunately, it's high-fiving over vanity metrics - the number of customer stories generated - while real value quietly gets left on the table. It's also the constant struggle to prove you're driving real business impact, not just running a cost centre. (Been there, done that, and have the corporate branded T-shirts to prove it.)

The teams who get past that stage aren't working harder than everyone else - they just have the benefit of being able to see clearly where they currently stand, and plan for what comes next.

I have always been open about sharing my experiences with others in this field, and while the successes massage my ego quite nicely, I am also happy to share the cautionary tales - that's where the richness of learning is, and hopefully helps others. I've felt strongly for a long time that customer advocacy needs a guiding map and not just a report card. Thankfully my friends at Trusted felt the same way, and we put that shared frustration into something useful: the Enterprise Advocacy Maturity Model.

This is a free framework for mapping your program somewhere across four stages - Initiated, Managed, Optimised, and Differentiated - based on six things that, in my experience, actually determine whether advocacy sticks: strategy and vision, resourcing and governance, infrastructure and enablement, advocate engagement and growth, measurement and impact, and cross-functional alignment.

I want to be clear about what it isn't. It's not there to make anyone feel behind, or that they're not doing a good job. Almost every program I've come across is strong in one or more of those six areas and genuinely stuck in the rest - and once you know which is which, you stop guessing at what to fix next and can actually start planning it.

Why I think it's worth twenty minutes

Because whether or not your program is ready, your buyers have already made up their minds about advocacy:

• 80% of B2B buyers want to speak to a customer before they buy (Gartner)
• Brands that engage their advocates well see a 30% increase in sales (McKinsey)
• Deals with a customer advocate involved run 15% larger, on average (Forrester)
• Customers who were referred by another customer stick around at a 37% higher rate (Deloitte)

I've found that the gap between a program that's moving at a reactive pace, and one that's fully embedded is never a gap in effort, it's a gap in structure. It shows up directly in numbers like these.

The four stages, roughly speaking

• Initiated - advocacy is happening, but it's one person doing it on the side, nothing's written down, and the rest of the business barely knows it exists. The real risk here isn't a shortage of willing customers. It's that nobody officially owns it.
• Managed - there's a program now, but it only really switches on for campaigns. The same three or four advocates get asked for everything, and honestly, nobody's quite sure who else could be asked instead.
• Optimised - things are standardised, the tech actually talks to itself, and advocates have started shaping content instead of just showing up in it. The job now is proving the ROI convincingly enough to earn the next round of investment.
• Differentiated - advocacy is just how the company operates. It's aligned across sales, marketing, product and CS, backed by AI-driven personalisation at scale, and treated as a board-level growth lever rather than a marketing side project. Even here it doesn't stop - the next stage is making advocacy every GTM leader's job, not just marketing's.

Why where you sit matters

A team at Initiated and a team at Optimised are dealing with completely different problems, even though both would tell you they "run an advocacy program." One needs an executive sponsor and a place to start keeping track of who their advocates even are. The other needs a shared dashboard, proper tiering, and a way to stop running its best few advocates into the ground.

Knowing which of those problems is yours is the whole point here. It's why we've built a short, practical assessment around this model instead of just writing it up as a slide deck.

Find out where you actually sit

The assessment takes about as long as this article did to read. It's free, and it benchmarks your program against the six areas above. It tells you honestly which stage you're in and gives you practical next steps that fit where you are - whether that's finding your first executive sponsor or getting advocacy onto the board agenda.

Take the assessment here.

I've built my career in customer advocacy over <cough> a long time. I'm always happy to chat, brainstorm, share best practices and support others in this industry. Get in touch if that would be helpful!