Webinar:
How to make an innovative impact: scaling advocacy in B2B

Welcome and panel introductions

Koen Stevens, CEO at Ambassify, opens by skipping the slides entirely. "Three of us in conversation, no decks," because the standard webinar with 56 slides in 45 minutes has worn everyone out.

He's joined by two long-time colleagues in the field. John Lindsay, Canadian, based in Belgium for around 25 years, founder and CEO of WON. John helped Koen back when Ambassify was raising funds, with a long career advising B2B SaaS scale-ups on go-to-market. Kari Syrja, Finnish, based in Stockholm, currently leading commercial operations at DeskNow, with prior experience scaling customer advocacy programmes at Oracle (across thousands of CSMs in EMEA), Proof Analytics, and Comintelli.

The audience is invited to interrupt at any point in the chat. The session is intentionally informal.

Quality over quantity, the case against mass-scale advocacy

Kari opens with what he calls a slightly contrarian view. The mass-scale advocacy playbook of the last decade, big audiences, mass distribution, generic testimonials that read the same on every website, is being killed by two forces at once: new spam regulations (GDPR and stricter regional rules across the Benelux), and a buyer who has stopped trusting the format.

His recommendation: stop chasing vanity audiences and start building small, sharp ones. There's a well-documented sociological limit, often cited as Dunbar's number of 150, on the meaningful connections any one person can hold. Apply that to advocacy. A hundred and fifty strong-opinion contacts in APAC, another 150 in North America, another 150 in EMEA. Three groups, each genuinely engaged, each relevant to a real conversation.

"More we can be relevant, the higher our match. Don't chase vanity likes. They just suit your ego."

Koen agrees from the operator side. Companies running advocacy programmes often arrive expecting "everyone will join and the results will roll in". Reality is the opposite: only a subset of customers ever want to be advocates, and within that subset only a smaller pool stays active. Customer-advocacy-only platforms have struggled for exactly this reason. The connection between customer and brand is rarely as strong as the connection between employee and brand, which is why advocacy has shifted toward employees.

John connects this back to go-to-market strategy. The mistake he sees most often in scale-ups is targeting everyone. The art of scaling is to pick an Ideal Customer Profile and a finite market, often only a couple of hundred companies in a niche, and learn that segment deeply enough to advocate inside their context.

"Advocacy is talking with passion about a topic and understanding the people in your audience well enough that they think, 'this person gets my pains.' Eventually you might get down to feeds and speeds. That's not where you start."

The push and pull of real advocacy

Most B2B advocacy programmes are still all push. Send the post, share it everywhere, repeat. Both Kari and John make the case that real advocacy is two-way.

John shares a practical example from Megadeals. Once a month they run a community session of around an hour for their customer base. A short guest segment on a go-to-market challenge, then open discussion with exercises around a single theme: ideal customer profile selection, LinkedIn signals, the techniques to nudge prospects without burning bridges. The customers learn from each other, not just from the host. The session creates real conversation, not just impressions.

Kari adds the framing of push versus pull as a tango. You need both. The fastest way to ruin an advocacy programme is to make everything an ask. "Share this. Now share that." The fastest way to enrich it is to ask the audience to contribute back: photos from their company kick-off, customer success stories, opinions on what to do next.

"The worst version of this is the emperor's new clothes. ABM programmes, business development programmes, demand generation programmes, same things in new clothes. People take the easy way because the difficult way is difficult. The difficult way is actually caring about your customers and having a dialogue with them."

John links this to traditional account-based marketing. ABM that automates one message to everyone, that doesn't take the audience into account, fails because it isn't authentic engagement. Liking a post is fine. Actually reading the article and giving meaningful feedback in the prospect's own terms takes effort, and it's the kind of effort that compounds.

Avoiding social sharing fatigue

Koen highlights a phenomenon Ambassify has coined as "social sharing fatigue". Even if the topic interests an employee, if the only ask they ever get is "share this", they get fed up. Ambassify started out as a community platform, not a sharing tool, which is part of why pull mechanisms (polls, surveys, ideation campaigns, NPS, employee NPS) sit at the core of the product, alongside sharing.

A concrete example: the office Koen is sitting in was chosen through an ideation campaign with the team. A few seeded options, plus an open invitation for employees to suggest others, plus a budget guardrail (no, the Hilton top floor is not in scope), plus a public vote. The end result isn't just an office, it's a team that genuinely feels listened to. When that team is later asked to share something, they actually want to.

"Acting on feedback is the part most large organisations struggle with. Smaller companies can do it more easily, and the payback shows up every time you ask the team to push something."

The purpose of advocacy and the role of personality profiling

John brings the conversation back to the why. The purpose of advocacy, in his view, is "augmenting impact at scale": taking voices that count and enabling them in a frictionless way, then measuring whether you're actually moving the needle. If those voices are connected to a real purpose, they'll translate prepared messages into their own words and communicate authentically. If they're doing it routinely or transactionally, they shouldn't be in the programme at all. They'll be ignored, blocked, or unfollowed.

Kari adds a layer most advocacy programmes skip: personality profiling. It doesn't matter if you have 10,000 or 10 million people on a list if those people are inactive. Using profiling tools (Crystal Knows, DISC, the colour-based personality frameworks) helps identify the active ones, the curious ones, the first movers. You need the first movers to open the gates. Then you need the intellectuals and the critics to keep the discussion alive once others start arriving.

"Study how nightclubs work. How does fashion work? How does a queue at an event form? Even before social media, there was a logic to it. The same logic applies to advocacy."

The point both make: not everyone on your advocacy list should get the same message at the same time. Different people activate at different moments.

Advocacy, reference, and referral are three different things

Kari draws a careful distinction the industry often blurs:

• Reference is passive. You ask an existing client to take a call with a prospect.
• Referral is also activated by you. You ask a client to introduce you to their network.
• Advocacy is the only one that's proactive. Customers or stakeholders promote you without you asking. Your role is to enable, orchestrate, and facilitate. You don't give them the script.

His example: the GameStop meme craze. One well-placed voice, the right audience, real movement. That's advocacy.

Koen agrees and adds his own practice on references. He only puts customers on reference calls at the very end of the sales process. If the deal doesn't close after, he doesn't want one of his best customers wondering why a similar company chose not to buy. References work, but they belong at the finish line, not the start.

John reinforces the same separation. Advocacy is not about asking for the sale.

"If I go to the gym and see you the first time and say 'hi, you want to work out together?', you don't know who I am. After multiple visits we nod, then comment on each other's technique, then talk. It's an evolution of a discussion over time."

He cites Penny Power (co-founder of Ecademy, an early networking platform): she's said she has never posted with the intention of getting a sale. People still come to her and do business with her, because she's discoverable and credible around a topic she owns.

Customer advocacy and employee advocacy, related but distinct

Kari brings the conversation back to the European context. There's a structural talent shortage across multiple fields (IT, AI, nursing, policing, plumbing) and culture is now a competitive advantage in hiring. When a company can genuinely say it has a good atmosphere, and even better when employees and customers say it, the people in those circles notice.

The wrong way to do this is to have the marketing team write a post and ask everyone to share it. The right way is for employees to take their own photo of the kick-off party and post it themselves. It doesn't have to cost money, it's about feeling.

"If you have a boring company, you have a boring company. No software fixes that. Work on the culture first, then take the consultants and the software to scale."

Koen adds Ambassify's experience. The customers who really run with the platform usually need 12 to 18 months to move beyond pure social sharing and into pull-style campaigns. The earliest customers, now seven or eight years in, are running full push-and-pull programmes. The shift is gradual and needs guidance. Software vendors have a duty to steer customers toward it rather than just enabling social sharing forever.

Kari notes that even from a cold start, fast movement is possible when there's a moment to seize: a major industry event, a crisis, a change in regulation. If you've already profiled the right voices, you can amplify those moments instead of broadcasting at them. Boost the customer instead of boosting yourself.

KPIs: hard metrics and soft metrics

John asks Koen for examples of how Ambassify customers actually measure impact. Koen splits it into two layers.

Hard metrics. The dashboard surfaces direct cost equivalents. A typical paid cost per click in B2B sits between five and ten euros. When a company runs a campaign through employees rather than through paid advertising, the savings are concrete and the performance team can't fake them. Ambassify has seen single campaigns at large banks and insurers save €40,000 to €50,000. Add things like skipped recruitment-agency fees for key hires, another €50,000 a year saved.

Soft metrics. Harder to put a number on, but often where the bigger value sits. What's the value of an employee voting in an ideation campaign? Of completing an NPS? Of engaging with a poll? The number is set during onboarding with the customer based on what those behaviours mean to their business. Even when you discount the soft-metric number by 50% to be conservative, the business case usually stays comfortably positive. Ambassify customers typically see a hard-metrics ROI of 3x to 20x, before soft metrics.

A side observation from Koen on rewards: when Ambassify added sustainable reward options alongside the usual swag, 93% of rewards claimed by employees in the first year were sustainable (the company paying into chosen causes instead of shipping a hoodie). Adoption went up at the same time, especially among younger employees who care about how their company spends.

John then shares the parallel from the business development side. Megadeals takes around twenty companies, runs cross-channel advocacy media campaigns, ranks them by engagement, and then drills down to see which individuals inside each company are engaging. From there a business developer can build a social-selling strategy around the warm contacts, nudges and comments before any direct outreach. Same advocacy principle, different KPIs, different rhythm. And like Koen, John notes the behavioural change required: business developers have to shift from the Rolodex-and-call habit to slower, longer-arc engagement.

Closing takeaways

Each panellist closes with one thing they're taking from the conversation.

Koen: Profile the audience by personality, not just by behavioural data. Ambassify already has rich segmentation, but most of it is data-driven. Adding the psychological layer that Kari and John use is the next thing to explore.

John: The behavioural shift Ambassify drove by replacing swag rewards with eco-causes. A different and useful proof that the right incentive structure can move advocacy participation.

Kari: Keep going. The platform improves through this kind of feedback loop with customers and partners, and profiling-style features would make it stronger still.

Koen closes by thanking the audience and confirming the recording will be shared.

 

Related Pages & Posts

• Boost Your Employer Branding with Employee Engagement and Advocacy
• Employee Advocacy Platform
• Dealer Advocacy
• Social Sharing Fatigue