​Impact Academy Advocacy training starts June 10!​

The other day I did an informal poll on LinkedIn, Instagram, and even asked you to just reply to my email to tell me who owns Advocacy in your company.

The result: a relatively even split between CS and Marketing (slight edge to Marketing on LinkedIn).

But the comments and replies add much needed context.

Again, this is informal but tracks with what I've seen in the wild: while one of those departments may "own" Advocacy, the reality is most companies simply don't have a formal Advocacy program.

At best, Marketing will spin-up a campaign to try to get reviews (generally to off-set a swath of bad reviews) and enlist the help of CS, and this generally fails to deliver the desired results.

Or CS does the same thing, hoping to give Marketing and Sales some help or generate some Social Proof to use to motivate action with existing customers, but again, it fails.

It fails because it's a one-off "campaign" or "project" and not something that's strategic, operationalized, and orchestrated.

Like most things done on a whim or some urgent mandate to "fix" an issue (like bad reviews) it's going to deliver subpar results, at best.

And then, because it didn't work, well... we're certainly not going to invest in creating a real Advocacy program. We tried that already and failed.

Right. Except you didn't.

So the answer to who owns Advocacy is... no one, really.

The answer to who SHOULD own Advocacy?

I'll tell you on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

~ Lincoln

BTW: Our next 2-week training program at Impact Academy is all about Customer Advocacy - that is, to get your customers to spread the good word for you - and it starts on June 10, 2024,

​Learn about the program and sign-up here.​

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