Creating Effective Rules of Engagement for Sales and Customer Success Teams in Advocacy Programs

Karen Thomas · 2026-02-26T19:15:21.050Z

Hello ALL - has anyone created a Rules of Engagement content to share with different sales teams, and customer success teams? I've created one, and its pretty cut/dry lol "you feed me happy customers, I get them to enroll in our Advocacy program = we all win". The Advocacy program is new to this company, and some sales teams are slow to adopt/adapt to the support I am offering.

Creating Effective Rules of Engagement for Sales and Customer Success Teams in Advocacy Programs | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

11 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Christine Newman
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What are you wanting Sales to do? Nominate advocates, request references, etc?
Mary Green
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This is very common, Karen Thomas. There are a lot of approaches that can help. I'll see what others say first.
Christine Newman
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I’ll add that for getting CS to nominate advocates, we initially tried the carrot, but didn’t see real success until we turned to the “stick” and worked with CS leadership to write it into goals
🤣1
Jacqueline Thetsombandith
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Adding on to Christine Newman’s point - In terms of customer nominations, we've done SPIFFs for our CS team and depending on the profile of customer it has led to some success. (ie. when we were just trying to grow our program, we left the requirements pretty general and we had a lot of advocates join.) However, you'll usually see the same 3-5 highly engaged CSMs participating. But do agree, if there's a way for CS leadership to add it to their KPIs, that would likely be a big driver.
Karen Thomas
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Thank you all for the feedback, makes sense. Its definitely what I've started with as far as building the program, carrot/stick theory lol, just wanted to see if there were some other hidden gems this group had used in times past. I hate to lean on a SPIFF but at this point, I may have no other option
Kristine Kukich
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There is enough data on the backend regarding engagement to be able to submit a slate of participants to the CSM's. My biggest problem was always asking them to suggest participants. Once I got ahead of the game and pushed them a list that said "Pick the top 3 from this list for me", I got better traction.
👍1
Gabrielle Herrera
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What is your goal here? To recruit more advocates? Or help those teams understand advocacy? Those a very different goals that require different approaches to address.
Karen Thomas
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Its really a little of both at this point. Most of my Direct sales teams are pretty green still, and have not had support from an Advocacy perspective in the past.
Christine Newman
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What does advocacy mean to you as it relates to your sales teams? References? Customer stories? A combo?
1
Abigail Benson
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Do you have something like notion or confluence? I'd create a customer marketing/advocacy directory. 1) overview page of what the function is in relation to your company, what programs look like etc. 2) in-depth processes of recruiting advocates (give them email templates, guidelines for when to do warm outreach vs direct asks)
Abigail Benson
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^ this is what I have on hand, it's EXTREMELY helpful to answer questions by a quick "hey check out this overview resource and lmk if you have any outstanding q's"

Christine Newman
·
·
What are you wanting Sales to do? Nominate advocates, request references, etc?
Mary Green
·
·
This is very common, Karen Thomas. There are a lot of approaches that can help. I'll see what others say first.
Christine Newman
·
·
I’ll add that for getting CS to nominate advocates, we initially tried the carrot, but didn’t see real success until we turned to the “stick” and worked with CS leadership to write it into goals
🤣1
Jacqueline Thetsombandith
·
·
Adding on to Christine Newman’s point - In terms of customer nominations, we've done SPIFFs for our CS team and depending on the profile of customer it has led to some success. (ie. when we were just trying to grow our program, we left the requirements pretty general and we had a lot of advocates join.) However, you'll usually see the same 3-5 highly engaged CSMs participating. But do agree, if there's a way for CS leadership to add it to their KPIs, that would likely be a big driver.
Karen Thomas
·
·
Thank you all for the feedback, makes sense. Its definitely what I've started with as far as building the program, carrot/stick theory lol, just wanted to see if there were some other hidden gems this group had used in times past. I hate to lean on a SPIFF but at this point, I may have no other option
Kristine Kukich
·
·
There is enough data on the backend regarding engagement to be able to submit a slate of participants to the CSM's. My biggest problem was always asking them to suggest participants. Once I got ahead of the game and pushed them a list that said "Pick the top 3 from this list for me", I got better traction.
👍1
Gabrielle Herrera
·
·
What is your goal here? To recruit more advocates? Or help those teams understand advocacy? Those a very different goals that require different approaches to address.
Karen Thomas
·
·
Its really a little of both at this point. Most of my Direct sales teams are pretty green still, and have not had support from an Advocacy perspective in the past.
Christine Newman
·
·
What does advocacy mean to you as it relates to your sales teams? References? Customer stories? A combo?
1
Abigail Benson
·
·
Do you have something like notion or confluence? I'd create a customer marketing/advocacy directory. 1) overview page of what the function is in relation to your company, what programs look like etc. 2) in-depth processes of recruiting advocates (give them email templates, guidelines for when to do warm outreach vs direct asks)
Abigail Benson
·
·
^ this is what I have on hand, it's EXTREMELY helpful to answer questions by a quick "hey check out this overview resource and lmk if you have any outstanding q's"