Here's the uncomfortable truth about most advocacy programs: they stall out because everyone's waiting for advocates to raise their hands.
They won't. Your happiest customers are busy running their own companies. Creating and finding advocates is your job, not theirs.
I teach the full playbook in my Testimonial Hero course on activating and engaging customer advocates. This post is the condensed version: the groundwork, the 10 identification methods, and what to do once you've found them.
Do the groundwork first
Most people skip straight to outreach and wonder why it flops. Before you identify a single advocate, do these six things:
1. Interview your customers. Get on actual phone calls. Learn their personas, their challenges, how they prefer to learn. Everything downstream gets better when you do this first.
2. Interview your sales team. They know what resonates with prospects and where deals get stuck. That's free intel for your content and your advocate targeting.
3. Map content to the funnel. Early-stage prospects want logos and quick success stories. Late-stage deals want personalized video and peer-to-peer conversations. And advocacy doesn't stop at closed-won: post-sale content is what turns satisfied customers into loyal ones.
4. Look at your data. ACV, usage, engagement. Let the numbers show you where the stories live. Tableau, Amplitude, whatever's in your stack.
5. Build a wishlist. Write down the companies you want as advocates and the specific story you want each one to tell. "A case study" is not a story. Get precise.
6. Arm your go-to-market teams. Give sales a slide that introduces the advocacy program early in the relationship, and give CSMs a script so they mention it often. If only marketing knows the program exists, it doesn't exist.
10 ways to identify customer advocates
1. NPS, with a trigger. The score is just step one. The real move is the automated follow-up that fires right after someone gives you a 9 or 10. Speed matters here. Strike while the love is fresh.
2. Stand up a CSQA program. Customer Success-Qualified Advocates: train your CS team to spot advocate potential in everyday conversations, and incentivize them for surfacing names. Your CSMs talk to happy customers all day. Make it easy for them to flag it.
3. Build smart lists in your marketing automation. Who opens every email, clicks everything, shows up to every webinar? Engagement data is a cheat sheet for advocate potential. Use it to build your invite list.
4. Catch the renewal and upsell moment. A customer who just renewed or expanded is voting with their budget. That's your window. Don't let it close.
5. Mine your usage reports. Build dashboards around what customers actually do in the product. Heavy users of your stickiest features are people with real stories to tell. Let the data target your outreach.
6. Watch your communities and forums. Find the customers answering other customers' questions and hyping your product without being asked. They're already advocating. You're just giving them a bigger stage.
7. Ask right after renewal. High lifetime value customers are deeply invested in your success, and they're motivated to see you keep winning. The ask feels natural here because the relationship is at a high.
8. Read the support tickets. This one's counterintuitive: a pile of support tickets usually means a power user. Someone deep in the product, trying new things, pushing limits. They often know your product better than your own team does. Invite them in.
9. Borrow ABM tactics. Personalized emails, retargeting, direct outreach. Treat your best-fit customers like the VIP accounts they are instead of blasting them with generic invites.
10. Set up Gong trackers. Create keyword trackers that catch positive sentiment in sales and CS calls. When a customer says "this changed how our team works" on a recorded call, that's a testimonial waiting to happen. Go get the quote.
Finding them is only half the battle
Here's where most programs die: they build a list of potential advocates and then... nothing. Identification without activation is just a spreadsheet.
The programs that work treat advocacy like a community people aspire to join, not a favor you ask. Keep the outreach personal. Keep the energy high. Keep showing up. And that wishlist you built? Start working it, one personalized ask at a time.
Want the full playbook?
I go much deeper on all of this in my course, Activating and Engaging Customer Advocates, with Testimonial Hero: the scripts, the CSQA framework, the templates. Watch it here: https://www.testimonialhero.com/learning/activating-and-engaging-customer-advocates-with-leslie-barrett
And once your advocates are activated, here's how to prove the revenue they're driving: in my course Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing.
