Prism

Advocacy Program

Prism Customer Success Handbook — Section 2.10

What advocacy is here

Advocacy is a non-exclusive overlay on the Healthy state (1.4 Customer Lifecycle), not a lifecycle stage every account reaches. Most accounts renew happily for years and never give a reference. That's fine. Advocacy is something a subset of healthy accounts opt into, not a finish line.

The governing principle: an advocacy ask is a withdrawal from the relationship account. It spends goodwill the CSM has built. Asked well and at the right moment, it deepens the relationship — customers who publicly endorse something become more committed to it. Asked badly, early, or too often, it converts a good relationship into a transactional one.

Who qualifies

An account is an advocacy candidate when all of these hold:

  • Healthy state — not At-Risk, and not recently recovered from it
  • Past Value Realization — all four milestones complete (1.7 Success Plans). An account that hasn't reached value has nothing to advocate about.
  • No active risk playbooks
  • No open escalations — and none recently closed. An account two weeks past a P1 is not a reference, however well it was handled.

Preferably plus a moment: something concrete and recent that makes the ask natural rather than arbitrary.

Moments worth acting on

Moments decay. An ask three days after a great EBR lands very differently from the same ask three months later. When a moment appears, act on it or let it go — don't bank it.

The ask ladder

Advocacy asks vary enormously in cost to the customer. Ordered cheapest to most expensive:

Ask Cost to them Notes
Review (G2, Capterra) ~15 minutes, no approvals The entry rung. Almost anyone happy will do this.
Reference call An hour, repeatable Low risk for them; high value for Sales.
Case study Real effort, plus their marketing and legal approval Frequently blocked on their side for reasons unrelated to satisfaction.
Speaking / CAB Significant time, reputational exposure The top rung. Reserve for genuine partners.

Ask up the ladder, not down. Start at the cheapest rung. Someone who has said yes to a review is far more likely to say yes to a case study later — commitment compounds. Leading with a case study ask on a good-but-untested relationship is how you get a no that closes the door to the smaller asks too.

A no is information, not failure. It may mean policy, timing, or internal politics rather than dissatisfaction. Record it, don't re-ask for a while, and don't read it as a health signal.

Reference fatigue

The failure mode nobody documents: a handful of excellent accounts become the reference for everything. Sales asks them monthly because they're reliable. Eventually the account feels used, and the best relationship in the book quietly sours.

Three rules:

  1. Track usage per account — what they've done, when, and when they were last asked
  2. Cap asks at one per quarter per account, across all requesters. Exceptions require a real reason and the CSM's agreement.
  3. Sales routes reference requests through CS, never directly to the account. The CSM knows what that account has already been asked for, whether anything is currently wrong, and whether now is a bad time. (See 2.5 Cross-Functional Interfaces.)

The cap exists to protect the relationship, not to ration Sales' access. Growing the reference pool is the answer to demand, not squeezing the same four accounts harder.

Running it

Identification is continuous — advocacy candidates surface from EBRs, closed feedback loops, expansion wins, and captured praise. Reviewed as part of the monthly rhythm (2.3 Operating Rhythm).

The ask is made by the CSM, in context, referencing the specific moment: "You mentioned in the EBR that this cut report prep from six hours to one — would you be willing to say that in a G2 review?" Specific asks tied to something the customer already said get yes far more often than generic ones.

Reciprocity matters. Advocacy is a favor. Acknowledge it, and where possible return value — early access, a direct line to Product, visibility at their organization for the champion who did it. A champion who becomes a public reference has taken a personal reputational position on Prism; that deserves something back.

Recording — what was asked, what they did, when, and any standing constraints ("legal won't approve case studies") so the next requester doesn't re-litigate it.

Advocacy as a signal

Advocacy runs both directions as information:

  • An advocate who declines a renewal-adjacent ask or goes quiet is a meaningful early warning — someone who was publicly enthusiastic and now isn't has usually changed their mind about something.
  • Advocacy participation is a stakeholder engagement signal: an advocate is by definition a live, engaged relationship.
  • Champion departure at an advocate account (3.4 Champion Departure) is doubly consequential — the relationship and the public endorsement leave with them.

Not yet modeled — v2 scope

The CSP has no Advocate flag and no advocacy record (asks made, activities completed, last-asked date, standing constraints). Both are logged in BUILD_BACKLOG.md — the flag was already scoped from 1.4 Customer Lifecycle; the usage record is new here and is what makes the fatigue cap enforceable rather than aspirational.