Customer advocacy: when customers sell for you

B2B buyers trust peers more than vendors. When someone in a community asks "what do you use for X?", a reply from a happy customer often does more than any ad. Advocacy doesn't get purer than that moment: unpaid, specific and public.

Advocacy shows up in several forms:

• Referrals. A customer introduces a colleague.
• References. A customer takes a call with a prospect late in a deal.
• Reviews. Ratings on review sites or app marketplaces.
• Public recommendations. Replies in threads where buyers ask for tools.

Programmes can help, but the base is a product that solves the problem and a team that treats customers well. Put incentives on top of a weak product and you get hollow praise. Buyers can tell.

Advocacy often appears as a reply to a buyer's question. Below are sample posts, scored 0 to 100 for buying intent the way HearBuyers scores posts. The score is for the person asking, not the advocate:

• Sample, score 91. "Our agency needs a time-tracking tool clients can see. What are you all using?" A buyer is inviting recommendations. The customers who reply here are your advocates.
• Sample, score 30. "We've used Tool B for two years and it's been solid." This is advocacy in a reply, and the writer isn't buying.
• Sample, score 4. "Leave a review for a chance to win a gift card!" This is an incentive post, not advocacy.

If you watch for posts like the first one, you can see when customers recommend you, thank them, and learn what they say about you.

• Asking too early. Ask for referrals once a customer has seen results, not on day one.
• Scripting advocates. A recommendation that sounds like copy loses its value.
• Replying under fake accounts. Posing as a customer in a public thread is deceptive and breaks community rules. People find out.
• Never saying thank you. A short note to a customer who recommended you costs nothing.

• Dark social: advocacy that happens in private messages.
• Voice of customer: what advocates say in their own words.
• Social selling: joining the same threads openly, as a seller.
• Share of voice: advocacy raises it.

To see the threads where buyers ask peers for recommendations in your category, set up Reddit monitoring for the problem you solve.