How Does Advocacy Begin During Onboarding?
Advocacy begins the moment a new customer feels the impact of your promise and feels seen by your team. Design onboarding to deliver early wins, ask for input, and connect customers to a bigger story—so they become champions long before renewal.
Advocacy begins during onboarding when customers experience an early, meaningful win, see that your team understands their goals, and are invited to co-create the journey. In practice, that means connecting onboarding tasks to business outcomes, celebrating progress, capturing feedback in real time, and identifying champions you’ll later activate for references, stories, and communities.
What Seeds Advocacy During Onboarding?
The Advocacy-First Onboarding Playbook
Advocacy is the outcome of a designed experience, not a lucky by-product of happy customers. Use this sequence to bake advocacy into onboarding from day one.
Align → Design → Activate → Capture → Elevate → Measure → Scale
- Align on the advocacy story: Define what “advocacy” means for your business—references, reviews, communities, peer events—and connect it to onboarding milestones and revenue goals.
- Design for fast, visible wins: Map your onboarding journey to value milestones that are achievable in the first 30–60 days. Ensure each milestone is measurable and story-worthy (e.g., time saved, revenue influenced, risk reduced).
- Activate champions early: Identify potential champions during discovery and kickoff. Give them ownership of outcomes, invite them to advisory sessions, and preview how future advocacy will support their career and brand.
- Capture evidence in real time: Instrument onboarding with surveys, usage analytics, and meeting notes that capture quotes, metrics, and “aha moments” you can later turn into stories and dashboard views.
- Elevate the customer’s voice: Share progress recaps, highlight champion contributions, and invite feedback on the journey design. This turns onboarding from a checklist into a co-created success plan.
- Measure advocacy signals: Track early advocacy indicators—participation in webinars, willingness to be quoted, internal evangelizing—alongside onboarding health metrics in your revenue dashboards.
- Scale what works: Roll high-performing advocacy motions (playbooks, emails, executive updates) into a revenue marketing operating system, so every new customer has a path to becoming a vocal champion.
Advocacy-Ready Onboarding Maturity Matrix
| Dimension | From (Ad Hoc) | To (Advocacy-Ready) | Owner | Primary KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value Design | Tasks and training lists | Onboarding mapped to business outcomes and value milestones | Onboarding / CS Leadership | Time-to-First-Value |
| Champion Strategy | Champions identified ad hoc | Champion roles defined, tracked, and nurtured from kickoff | CS / Marketing | Champions per Account |
| Evidence & “Receipts” | Success stories created only at renewal | Quotes, metrics, and wins captured throughout onboarding | RevOps / Analytics | Accounts with Documented Early Wins |
| Advocacy Motions | Random asks for references | Programmatic invitations to reviews, case studies, and events | Customer Marketing | Advocates Activated from New Logos |
| Revenue Visibility | Advocacy viewed as “soft” | Advocacy tied to influenced revenue in dashboards | Executive / RevOps | Advocacy-Influenced Pipeline / Revenue |
| Operating Rhythm | No formal review of onboarding advocacy | Quarterly reviews of advocacy metrics and motions by segment | Onboarding CoE / Customer Marketing | Advocacy Readiness Index |
Client Snapshot: From Go-Live to Advocates in One Quarter
A B2B provider re-framed onboarding as the first chapter of their advocacy program. By tying onboarding milestones to measurable wins, capturing quotes in every QBR, and creating a shared success narrative, they converted early adopters into case study and reference champions within the first 90 days. This mirrors the kind of transformation seen in our Comcast Business case study , where strong outcomes and clear value storytelling fuel long-term advocacy.
Advocacy doesn’t wait for renewal—it starts the moment customers can see, feel, and explain the value of working with you. Design onboarding to create that story early, and you’ll grow a pipeline of advocates as a natural output of your revenue marketing system.
Frequently Asked Questions about Advocacy in Onboarding
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