More Advocates, More Innovation

16 min readJan 15, 2023

Develop Breadth and Depth of Your Advocacy Base for More Innovation.

Purposefully developing your advocacy relationships and encouraging more depth in advocacy behaviors will keep your organization successful in the long game. The people investing in the future of the organization are the hallmark of any thriving organization. I call these people “advocates,” and distinguish them and the act of advocacy, in the following manner:

Advocate: One who invests in our collective future.

Advocacy: Behaviors that demonstrate investment in our collective future.

Both the breadth and depth of your organization’s advocates provide powerful, leading indicators to the strategic, long-term success of any organization. If the advocate count, in the customer and employee base, is increasing, the future is very bright. Likewise, if the number of observable “advocacy” behaviors is on the rise, the depth of advocacy is improving. If both the depth and breadth of advocacy are improving, you likely have a sense of confidence in the future of your organization. Motivated souls are working to build a better future through the products and services that your organization provides. This is what we deem strategic success.

Consider your own behaviors in this context. When you advocate for a product, service, or organization, it demonstrates that you care about the organization’s future. These behaviors, like referring and recommending a product or service to your friends, giving authentic feedback, investing in their future with your ideas, and defending them in the wild provide a powerful source of validation for your organization. Companies thrive as a result of these behaviors in their customer, employee, and vendor ecosystems. Organizations that build relationships at scale require less expenditure on advertising, sales, and recruiting investment than their peers. They have figured out how to develop their advocates in powerful ways. I call this an “advocacy-based strategy.” These organizations have mobilized a faction of customer and employee advocates to make the world a better place through their products, services, and ultimately through the relationships that they build.

Once a customer or employee reaches this high-level stage in their relationship with the organization, something quite magical occurs. Something is triggered, emotionally, in the relationship when these measurable advocacy events happen. Dan Ariely, in his book, Predictable Irrationality, talks about some of the biases that occur as a result of familiarity and sunk costs that often fly below the conscious radar of the people we are leading. In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein provide some stories and tactics of how these biases might be leveraged to change behavior systematically. Taking it to another level, Nir Eyal lays out a framework in his book, Hooked, for systematically using technology to create these loops of customer investment behaviors.

When customers and team members reach this level of a relationship, they have made a significant personal investment in the organization that represents a significant amount of relationship equity. When they demonstrate this relationship publicly, they should be revered, honored, and treated like gold for the organization. In many cases, these investments from advocates manifest as time commitments. You can see them demonstrated in the writing of constructive feedback or the provision of a deserved pat on the back to your team. In other cases, the investment represents the production of hyper-valuable information to the organization that manifests as insights, competitive intelligence, or ideas that could be game-changing in the future. In the most esoteric, obvious cases, they refer or promote you without you paying them a dime in return. I regularly argue that an advocacy base is a strategic and valuable asset for an organization. It is, arguably, the most valuable strategic asset that any firm has.

When the people you serve go out of their way to refer, connect, promote, or otherwise help you market and sell your organization’s value, it is particularly valuable. It represents them powerfully combining and intertwining the organization’s reputation with their own. This “advocacy threshold” marks the point in the relationship where customers and employees demonstrate their willingness and eagerness to go public about their connection with your organization. When they stamp their personal seal of approval on your organization, this is an acknowledgment of significant alignment and success. This form of social capital is difficult to quantify in monetary value. The reason an organization exists is to add value to people in the world through its products and services. Demonstrations of advocacy are powerful representations of strategic success and result in the stories and corporate lore that need to be told.

These “relationships” don’t happen on their own. As our customer and employee relationships unfold with our organization, we curate, cultivate, and nurture these relationships by crafting shared experiences that start with trust and move through loyalty. The next goal is to arrive at a place of recurring, shared advocacy. It is our job, as leaders, to leverage these shared experiences to earn, encourage, and trigger more advocacy events with more advocates over time.

In order to purposefully grow advocacy for our organization and measure it, there are a number of things that a team can think about and do to spur more of these behaviors. Improving the metrics will lead to a more robust ecosystem of advocates for your organization. It will also ensure that you are continuously thinking about your advocates and raising the bar for them for future service levels.

Investing in your inspired customers, who are willing to defend and promote your organization, is a powerful marketing tactic. Building these behaviors into the fabric of your culture will pay long-term dividends like few other investments you make. There are many ways for us to leverage our experiences with loyal customers to draw them into an advocacy relationship. This list is, by no means, exhaustive. However, I have found it to be a powerful starting point for teams looking to purposefully convert more of their loyal customers, employees, and vendors into advocates. It involves the purposeful development of high levels of caring for these customers and demonstrating your competence in the context of your products and services. The more of these you do together, with your potential advocates, the better.

CARING

The first three tactics for developing advocacy relationships involve thoroughly examining the ways in which we are systematically demonstrating that we care for our advocates. It is largely about creating an environment of “us” and “we” and shifting our organizational thinking toward a sense of meaning through a mutually beneficial relationship. As I said above, there are many ways to do this, but these three strategies provide a practical framework to get teams started.

1. Include Them

Once you have identified who these key candidates are, by observing their persistent loyalty over time, find creative ways to meaningfully address their need for belonging and relatedness. Find ways to spark feelings of deep and special inclusion in something bigger than themselves. Create a warm and welcoming community within which they can see the social benefits of belonging and leverage this community to elicit more feedback on their many experiences with your organization. If you invest in your advocates and invite them into your inner circle, it is likely that you will remain top of mind for them in the context of your organization and that they will ultimately share that experience with others more frequently and more powerfully.

We have found it quite valuable to connect customers to each other and to find ways to better connect employees, not only with each other but also with customers in various combinations. Find systematic ways to deepen and nourish the bonds that exist between the people that your organization serves, and you will build natural resilience and adaptability into the organization. Connecting and including your best customers in a community of like-minded leaders is a fantastic strategy for empowering more advocacy. Many industries have long known the importance of customer communities for the development of relationships and the harvesting of ideas for the future.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might we invest in a community for our most passionate customer advocates?
How might we invest in a community for our most passionate employee advocates?
How might we connect more customers to each other?
How might we deepen relationships by including our advocates in more things?
How might we connect our employees to each other?
How might we deepen the relationships between our customers and our employees, systematically?
How might we better connect our employees to our customers?
How might we deepen all of these categories of relationships?

2. Honor Feedback

Treat every piece of feedback that your customers give you as a gift. Create systems that purposefully thank them and let them know you value their insights by purposefully acknowledging their important contribution. Where feasible, apply as much of a human touch as you can. The more personal you make every feedback-oriented engagement, the more valuable the outcome will be. Note that this doesn’t mean that you need to take every piece of feedback that you get and do something with it. Remember that your customer or employee has one set of single-threaded experiences with you. You cannot build a healthy, scalable enterprise by trying to solve every problem for every person. You would go broke fast. However, it doesn’t take much to say “thank you”, and you should try to build systems that are grateful for authentic feedback whether positive or constructive.

Create systems that ensure that feedback loops are as tight as possible. The more quickly you can acknowledge receipt of feedback, the better. Even if you know you will not do much with the feedback, getting back to your customers to demonstrate that you are listening is the key. Improving the speed at which you can disposition what you will do with that feedback is also valuable. Lastly, the more authenticity, vulnerability, and transparency (think trust-building behaviors) that you can apply to your response, the better the result will be in the long run.

By honoring their feedback, your customers feel appreciated and more willing to share their stories with those around them. Many successful companies in the video gaming community have mastered this concept of including and celebrating direct feedback from their advocate players in developing their next-generation games.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might we ensure that we make it easy for our customers to give us both positive and constructive feedback?
How might you empower your staff to honor the feedback they receive from your customers?
How might we invest in systems that honor customer feedback?
How might we invest in tightening the feedback loops that occur so that feedback is acknowledged faster?
How might we be more authentic with our dispositions on feedback?
How might we reasonably invest in humanizing the feedback systems that we have?

3. Celebrate the Wins Together

Teams that play together, stay together, so the saying goes. Finding ways to celebrate with your advocates at appropriate intervals and with appropriate intensity is a powerful tactic for building authentic relationships. When people can share pride in their professional accomplishments, powerful memories and bonds are formed. In our well-intended desire to keep pushing things forward, leaders often forget the power of celebration, to cement the bond that teams have around their work together.

Create purposeful cycles for this recognition. Establish your own celebrations and craft some traditions and ceremonies that help your teams be purposeful with celebrations like this. The more socially engaging and participative these events are, the better. I have rarely seen teams that celebrate together regularly fail. They tend to learn better, adapt better, and are more resilient.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might we find some third-party awards and recognitions for your people or your clients to celebrate?
How might we create purposeful cycles of celebrations when things are consistently going well?
What do our current celebration cycles look like and how might we optimize them?
How might we invest in improving the memories and stories that are created when we celebrate with our clients and employees?
How might we engage our clients to celebrate our people more regularly?
How might our teams celebrate more powerfully with our vendors and clients?

COMPETENCE

The second three tactics for developing your advocacy relationships are engineered to examine and challenge the ways in which we are systematically demonstrating our competence, specifically around the things we do that uniquely produce advocates. These tactics are about seeding the stories that our advocates might tell by shifting our organizational thinking toward a sense of accomplishment through a mutually beneficial, professional relationship. There are many ways to do this, but these three strategies provide a practical framework to get teams to demonstrate shared competence.

1. Recognize Them

People are generally under-recognized and under-appreciated. Simply acknowledging their names and identifying those loyal customers from the crowd will make them feel special. Your systems should help your staff distinguish your brand advocates and coach them on ways to acknowledge them, recognize them, and celebrate the relationship. Be sensitive to each customer’s preferred mode of recognition. Some will welcome the attention; others may not. But finding ways to acknowledge them in the context of the products or services they are loyal to is a powerful tactic.

I’ve found that honoring your advocates with awards from third parties, no matter how small, in the context of your work together is a powerful way to recognize them. Building systems that say “Thank you, John” vs. “Thank You” also go a long way. Lastly, authentically building recognition into your culture and into your systems, can help amplify your advocacy base in amazing ways.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might our systems acknowledge and recognize users more powerfully? (Examples: use faces, use their names, identify preferences).
How might our systems help our service staff identify those loyal customers and recognize them?
How might we identify third-party recognition for the people in our ecosystem that are contextual to our work together?
How might we simply acknowledge the relationship between the organization and the individuals in our customer and vendor ecosystem more powerfully?
How might we train staff to be more aware and more present for our customers?
How might we train our leaders to model more presence and recognition of our people?

2. Demonstrate Gratitude

Be thoughtful as you consider implementing a reward system for your organization’s most loyal customers. Embrace its underlying purpose, in full gratitude and avoid unintended consequences. Most loyalty programs wreak of insincerity. They are obviously designed to get you to keep coming back and buying more products. Your customers will easily see these tactics for what they are — disingenuous manipulation. Monetary reward systems work, but they have the potential to undermine the actual relationship and become a “game.” When advocacy is authentic, long-lasting relationships are formed. If you train your people about the importance of authentic relationships, customer gratitude, and caring in the context of the reward program, it will pay off handsomely.

Loyal customers have invested tremendous time and energy in their relationship with you. Recognition of that investment must be embedded into your organization’s mindset. The cornerstone of that mindset is “Thank You” — a simple yet powerful affirmation of your relationship. Celebrate customer loyalty with items and experiences that represent your organization and that they cannot get anywhere else.

Simple recognition of their preferred status can be powerful. Airlines and credit card companies — even your favorite coffeehouse — are examples of effective reward programs that can scale. Both Shep Hyken, in all of his books, and John DiJulius, in his book, Secret Service, tell incredible stories of establishing systems of recognition for your best customers. If you find the right things to offer as rewards to your loyal customers, they may even share their experiences with others. However, if this recognition is not built into the fabric of your organizational culture, you will be perceived as inauthentic.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might we thank our customers with things they can’t get anywhere else?
How might we provide them a sense of elevated status due to the relationship (As a “Thank You”)?
How might we integrate this gratitude into our systems?
How might we culturally integrate gratitude for our best, most loyal customers?
How might we teach our people to identify opportunities for demonstrating gratitude at the ground level?
How might the leadership team model gratitude?

3. Simplify Telling

One of the easiest ways to trigger advocacy behaviors is to give a voice to those whose advocacy you’ve already earned. Collaborate with your customers to develop the stories and lore that make up your customer and employee testimonials, case studies, and videos that help them participate in your shared story. When you make it easy to share their experience, you increase the likelihood that they will act as an advocate and recommend or promote the relationship.

As a thought experiment, consider a company that builds professional-style basketball courts for wealthy homeowners. Clearly, wealthy homeowners who build their own private basketball courts are most likely hanging around with other wealthy homeowners who play basketball. You could assemble a high-quality book showing the before, during, and after photos of building the court and produce 50 copies of the book, delivered as a gift to the homeowner. The book might show how easy it was to work with your organization and demonstrate professionalism during the process. What do you think the homeowner will do with those books when he has new friends over, and they ask the player who built his court? This may sound like an extreme example, but it is a real one.

Simplifying the telling of your shared experience will help you build more advocates and improve the depth of the advocacy experience, not only for your customers but for your employees.

Here are some brainstorming questions to ask your team in a workshop environment:

How might you create meaningful stories for your best, most loyal customers?
How might you help them share their stories or make them easier for them to share on their own?
How might you help your employees tell their stories about working with your organization, even after they have left?
How might you solicit more customer advocacy stories to tell amongst your team?

Each of the tactics described here has the ability to turn into the stories that get told about the relationship when that advocacy behavior is demonstrated in the wild. Developing the language and the systems around some of these tactics so that they become operationalized is the key to more powerful relationship performance. I have seen each of these tactics work in different industries, but that does not mean that they are equally valuable. Determining which tactics to experiment with, requires some specific knowledge of your industry and ongoing adjustments to maximize the impact on the relationships you build over time. One thing is certain, in order to get advocacy from your customers, you have to be and behave as an advocate of theirs. Your teams have to invest in developing products and service interactions that are worthy of advocacy relationships in order to achieve it.

THE VORTEX

The goal is to produce an ongoing relationship vortex that produces advocates in a self-fulfilling, sustainable way. The diagram below explains the phenomenon. We want to create and build more relationships in the inner circle, over time, of our best clients and team members who speak and think, in the context of our work together, in terms of “We” vs. “Me.” We do that by building language and systems that are more comprehensively inclusive, cause and support the collective celebration and powerfully honor feedback when it is received, as we discussed in the tactics above. We refer to this as working the “inner circle” of the advocacy framework by systematically improving the caring in our ecosystem.

When we couple this effect with an outer circle that systematically rewards, encourages, and empowers the telling of our collective stories to others, again, improving the likelihood of triggering events, we have a powerful, sustainable vortex. This comes from the three competence-supporting behaviors we are trying to foster by having our team recognize them personally, demonstrating gratitude, and simplifying storytelling, as shown in the diagram below.

The Outer Circle: Spinning Off Stories When You Are Not In The Room

TRIGGERS

These tactics are intended to also serve as triggers. Because the value of an advocate is so great, it makes sense to think powerfully about our own behaviors in the context of this work in soliciting advocacy behaviors from the people in our ecosystems.

When the threshold into Advocacy is crossed, it is a big step in the relationship. When your customer invests in your collective future, often in the public eye, it says something big. They often stake a piece of their own reputation on your products or services, binding them that much closer to you by attaching a piece of their own ego to your organization. It’s profound, and it’s valuable. Sometimes we need to experiment with our own behaviors, features, and service tools to figure out what it is that will trigger advocacy so that we get this result.

THE MAGNETIC EFFECT

Putting it all together, we have both of these circles spinning, one creating a powerful community of people that is investing in the collective future of the organization and the other spinning off powerful stories that have the potential to attract more advocates. The diagram below shows how this creates a magnetic effect, attracting more and more of the customers that we want.

When you have more people concerned about the future of the organization, you naturally get more ideas into your funnel. When you have more ideas, you have more potential to continue to inspire the world through your products and services.

INNOVATION

The only place innovations come from is ideas that come from the people in your ecosystem that care about your future, your advocates. If you want more innovation, invest in building more advocates and getting more depth from those relationships.