Webinar.
Everyone is a potential advocate: how to scale word-of-mouth

Welcome and introductions

Elise Breban, Head of Customer Success at Ambassify, hosts this session with Johan Nilsson, founder and CEO of Startdeliver and co-founder of Impact Academy. Startdeliver builds a customer success platform for working through a customer base efficiently and with data, while Impact Academy runs training programmes for customer success managers and CS leaders.

Elise has been at Ambassify for five years. Her starting position: employees are a company's most important asset when it comes to advocacy, and advocacy is not a one-way street where you simply ask people to share content. It is a culture question.

The session runs in two halves. Elise covers what advocacy means at Ambassify and walks through customer examples. Johan covers customer advocacy from the customer success side. The through-line is that employee advocacy and customer advocacy have far more in common than most companies realise.

What we mean by advocacy

Elise's working definition: advocacy is your people sharing their experiences and their knowledge on social media in a positive way. Ambassify focuses mainly on employees, but the same logic applies to customers and partners.

The essential part is what sits underneath it. Advocacy is about collaborating and building a relationship. It is not about sharing content. Content is the output, not the point.

Where to start when you have no programme yet

Johan raises the question most companies get stuck on. Everyone knows advocacy is valuable, and most people have seen it work firsthand. Some of Johan's best hires came in on recommendations from existing employees. But very few companies have any structure or process around it, so where do you begin?

Elise's answer starts before the programme. You have to create a culture that is open to it, which means change management, because you are introducing something new. Two questions need answering for your people:

• Why does this matter to the company?
• What is in it for me as an ambassador?

The second one is the one companies skip, and it is the one that determines whether anyone participates.

Then identify who your ambassadors actually are. These are the people already willing to talk about your brand. You do not need every employee or every customer involved from day one. Start with the group that is genuinely willing, make sure that group is active enough, and scale from there.

What is actually in it for the ambassador

Elise names three things that come up consistently with Ambassify customers.

Content they can actually find. Ambassadors get easy access to content worth sharing on their own profiles, which lowers the barrier to becoming more active on social media in the first place.

Their own positioning. Once they are posting regularly about their work and their field, they start being seen as experts and thought leaders in their own right. Ambassify customers see interaction rates climb as ambassadors begin commenting more and engaging more broadly, not just resharing.

Recognition. Being recognised internally as an ambassador matters, as does the visible pride of being associated with where you work.

Johan reframes this from the employee's side: they are building their own profile and their own professional persona by promoting the company. That alignment of interests is what makes employee advocacy sustainable. Being proud of your employer and wanting good people to join is part of someone's identity, not a task they have been assigned.

The most common roadblock is that nobody owns it

Johan's view on customer advocacy is that awareness is not the problem. Anyone who has worked in sales knows the impact of a customer arriving on a recommendation, or of having strong testimonials and references available.

The problem is that it happens ad hoc and spontaneously rather than as a process. And the roadblock underneath that is ownership. Is advocacy marketing's job? Sales? Customer success? Often nobody can say.

Johan argues customer success should own it. CS is responsible for all existing customers, works closest with them, and helps them achieve their business goals, so CS is best placed to know who is in a position to advocate. But he is direct about the caveat: customer success teams are usually over capacity. Owning it does not mean doing it alone. You need marketing, probably sales, and management support to structure it and build processes around it. Tools help, but the first step is simply mapping out what kinds of references and advocates you want, and how you will keep generating them.

The low-hanging fruit is asking at the moment of positive sentiment

Johan's most practical starting point. You are already collecting sentiment through NPS or customer satisfaction surveys. When a response comes back positive, that is the moment to make an ask, and it can be automated.

The ask can take several forms depending on what you need: a referral, a review on a third-party site, a testimonial, or simply permission to use the quote they just gave you on your website.

He also names a cultural blocker. In general, companies are too afraid to ask people to advocate, and they do not ask nearly often enough. That is something you can start changing today, before any process exists.

Advocacy rule one, never ask an unsuccessful customer

This is where Johan is most emphatic, and it is his core argument for customer success owning advocacy.

If you ask a customer who is unhappy with your product, not making progress, or not achieving their business outcomes to act as a reference, you do not get a neutral no. You reinforce their dissatisfaction. Asking a struggling customer with low usage to advocate for you signals that you have no idea how things actually are, and you can end up worse off than before you asked.

Doing customer success properly means you already know where each customer stands, whether they are on track, and whether they are hitting their goals. That knowledge is what makes the ask safe.

There is a way to work with a customer who is not there yet. Intervene, get them back on track, and orchestrate the ask forward: when we hit these milestones, would it be okay for me to ask you to talk about us? You can set up a future advocate today, even when the present answer is no.

Why asking the right people strengthens the relationship

Elise draws the parallel back to employees. Strong internal ambassadors advocate because working at the company is part of their identity, they are proud of it, and they want more good people to join.

Johan confirms the same mechanism on the customer side. Customers who are genuinely getting value from your product and are then asked to advocate tend to become more satisfied, not less, because promoting your product becomes part of their identity too. It reinforces the relationship.

So the choice of who you ask cuts both ways. The wrong ask damages the relationship. The right ask deepens it, and the customer typically commits more to you afterwards.

The numbers behind word of mouth

Elise brings in the data on why any of this matters commercially:

• 84% of consumers prioritise recommendations from people they know.
• 82% of consumers actively seek referrals from people they know before making a purchase decision.

Conversion rates are meaningfully higher among people who hear about a product from someone they know. The same dynamic drives employer brand: when you are considering applying somewhere, what the people who actually work there say carries more weight than anything the company says about itself. That is why testimonials and reviews do so much work.

Renewi, scaling to 500 ambassadors and beyond

Renewi is an international waste-to-product company focused on recycling and the circular economy. Their ambassador community is called Proud Renewi, a name that already tells you what the programme is about: employees being proud to work there.

They currently have over 500 ambassadors and are targeting 800. The goal is not only social sharing. It also covers teaching employees to become better social sellers and stronger on LinkedIn, sharing vacancies and news, and building thought leadership.

Four things they did to scale:

User training. Two layers. Platform training that shows how easy it is to share, and social media or social selling workshops that build confidence in people who were not previously active. Tips and tricks get shared both offline and in the platform itself.

Referrals from existing ambassadors. Existing advocates are the best advocates for the programme itself, because word of mouth works internally too, at the coffee machine as much as anywhere. Renewi ran a campaign asking current ambassadors to bring colleagues on board and added 60 new ambassadors in under an hour.

Meeting ambassadors where they are. They actively promoted the mobile app so people can share from anywhere at any time, which fits how everyone already uses their phone.

Rewards and gamification. Ambassify customers running rewards or gamification see interaction rates up to 50% higher. Renewi chose online vouchers, which also keeps reward administration manageable.

On that last point, Johan pushes back usefully. In his experience the real reason someone advocates is that they see value in the product and like the company. The reward is appreciated but it is not the driver. Elise agrees: you do not need a rewards programme to have active advocates, and intrinsic motivation is the important part. Gamification is a nice add-on and a way of thanking people, not a payment. If it starts to feel transactional it can backfire and make people less willing to advocate.

Securex, building a community rather than chasing reach

Securex is an international HR company providing administration and HR services to employers and entrepreneurs. Their aim was explicitly to focus on relationships rather than simply asking employees to post content. Reach on social media still matters, but the objective was a real community.

Results after roughly a year:

• Close to 20% of employees became ambassadors.
• Around €60,000 saved in advertising spend, purely by enabling employees to share to their own networks.

They got there by using a wide variety of campaign types, which means a variety of different asks rather than one repeated demand. Sharing, liking and commenting, but also feedback campaigns where employees say what they would find interesting to share, and user-generated content where they create their own. Employees were also asked to leave reviews, which mirrors closely what you would do in a customer advocacy programme.

Johan asks who manages the content. Elise's answer: usually a combination. Marketing often owns the platform, with support from HR or employer branding supplying content. Employees then choose what they find interesting from what is available and can rewrite it into their own message. As Johan puts it, it is co-creation rather than here is the content, go share it.

That matters because the thing that stops most people from being active on social media is having to come up with the post themselves. They stop there. Removing that blocker, and reassuring people about what is safe to talk about, is one of the keys to getting a whole company posting.

The Glassdoor campaign. Securex asked ambassadors directly whether they wanted to help improve the company's Glassdoor score, and asked them to write reviews. They gained 97 extra reviews in less than a day and lifted their score to 4.6 out of 5.

Johan notes the direct parallel with customer review sites like G2, Capterra and Trustpilot. Reviews need maintaining. You do not want a page of five-year-old reviews, which is exactly why this needs process rather than an annual push. Elise agrees, and points out that both sides renew themselves continuously: new ambassadors join and can be asked again, just as new customers establish a relationship, become successful, and can then be asked for a review.

Leadership involvement. Securex has management fully behind the programme. Leaders understand why it matters and talk about it with their teams, which feeds the culture-building and lifts adoption.

What customer advocacy does to your key metrics

Johan makes the business case in terms of the metrics SaaS companies actually report on.

Addressable market. People recommending and talking well about your product extends your reach to more potential customers.

Customer acquisition cost. When a customer arrives on a recommendation, the sales process is faster and consumes fewer resources, so acquisition cost falls and efficiency improves.

Customer lifetime value. Customers who actively advocate for you stay longer. And the more advocates you have, the more advocates you generate, because it compounds.

Advocacy therefore touches revenue and net revenue retention directly. His honest caveat: the leading indicators for advocacy are harder to measure than the lagging ones, which is part of why it gets neglected.

Advocates exist at every level of the customer organisation

An important structural point. In customer advocacy you are dealing with two things at once: the customer as a company, and the individual people inside it. Different personas, different stakeholders, and different advocacy roles.

Johan's example: a CFO at a major customer might be the right person to present at your annual conference. A power user in the same company, perhaps a controller, might be the right person to write a G2 review. Both are advocates. Neither could easily do the other's job. Mapping who can do what is part of building the programme.

Advocacy rule two, do not overuse your best advocate

Everyone has done this. You find one excellent advocate who gives testimonials, acts as a reference and joins sales calls, and you keep going back to them.

Johan's warning is that this backfires too. Ask too many times and even a committed advocate can stop being one. Which is another argument for process: you need to keep adding new advocates continuously so you are never dependent on a handful of people.

Orchestrated advocacy, mapping the ask to the life cycle

The question Johan gets most often is how to actually structure this. His answer is to map the customer life cycle against your stakeholder types and ask, at each stage, where a request would be appropriate and what it would be for.

Progress is the trigger, not tenure. A customer can advocate for you immediately after onboarding, provided you set it up correctly and are clear about the purpose. If you want them to speak to how easy your platform is to onboard, say so upfront: here is the plan, here is how we will get you live. If we do this and you are happy with it, would you be willing to tell other people about it?

Most people say yes, because you are asking before the work happens rather than calling in a favour afterwards. Then you follow through by actually onboarding them quickly and well.

Johan calls this orchestrated advocacy: identifying the points in the life cycle where you want to ask, and assigning people to make those asks. Ad hoc requests will never disappear entirely, because sometimes you need a specific reference in a specific industry at short notice. But ad hoc should not be the whole programme.

Impact Academy runs a training programme specifically on customer advocacy, where participants build their own advocacy programme with frameworks and tools they can implement directly.

Q&A, how do you keep customer advocates engaged?

Johan's answer starts with a warning about complacency. Taking an advocate for granted is one of the most common mistakes. Advocacy has a best-before date, like milk.

The good news is that it renews itself as long as you keep delivering. If your customer keeps getting more value from your product, they stay an advocate. What breaks it is standing still. Progress is the whole game in customer success: what was good in year one is not good enough in year five. Keep developing the customer and helping them achieve more, and you have an advocate indefinitely. Forget about that and the relationship can turn.

Q&A, should you combine employee and customer advocacy?

Elise sees no reason not to. In Ambassify you can build specific target groups, so you can run campaigns aimed only at employees alongside a separate group for customers, in one platform.

The more interesting version is connecting it to your customer data. If customer success knows where each customer sits in the life cycle, that information can feed the advocacy platform so you are contacting the right customers at the right moment, with marketing supporting it.

Johan's closing thought on this: remember that all of it is people. People use your platform, people work at your company, and people are who you want to attract, whether as employees or customers. People trust other people they know and respect. He has seen developers at his own company who were active on social media attract both talent and software customers through the same channel. The processes overlap heavily, and the underlying driver is identical: people who are proud of your company or product will attract both employees and customers.

Closing thoughts

Elise's three takeaways:

1. Get a structure in place, whether you are working on customer advocacy or employee advocacy.
2. Focus on relationship building, not content volume.
3. Quality over quantity.