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The 2026 Top 100 CLG Awards honored the leaders rewriting the playbook for advocacy and community across three connected categories: Advocacy, Community, and Referral Programs. Four standouts. Jeff Livingston, Director of Client Advocacy for MAS and Canada at ADP (ranked #4 overall in the Top 100) built one of North America's largest B2B advocacy communities and drove $55.5M in influenced revenue in a single year. Kristin Farwell, Senior Manager of Adoption Marketing at Adobe, has spent her career building the customer experience discipline at the companies that defined modern practice (SiriusDecisions, Forrester, Workfront, Adobe). James Scutt, Director of Community, Customer Learning & Advocacy at Qualtrics, is migrating Qualtrics from manual advocacy to intelligent automation that will double the advocate base globally. And Sydney Hoareau, Customer Advocacy Manager at Prophix, is a one-person advocacy team that stood up a strategic engine in her first year on the job.
Advocacy is having the most important year of its existence and the most under-resourced one at the same time.
The first shift is the buyer. AI agents now read customer voice at the speed of a search query. When a buyer asks ChatGPT to compare three vendors, the agent pulls G2 reviews, Reddit threads, podcast clips, customer-authored LinkedIn posts, and analyst notes from the customer reference database. The vendor that has invested in advocacy shows up in that retrieval. The vendor that has not, does not. Advocacy is no longer a feel-good function. It is the substrate AI agents quote from when buyers ask whether you are worth a demo.
The second shift is the CFO. Boards are asking which marketing line items move revenue. Activity counts (registered advocates, posts, social shares, NPS) are not a budget defense. Influenced revenue, reference-to-deal attribution, expansion lift from engaged accounts, retention delta between participating and non-participating customers, those are the metrics that would defend the budget. Those are also the metrics most advocacy programs never instrumented.
The third shift is the operating model. Most advocacy programs run on a spreadsheet, a community platform, an advocacy management tool, and a reference database that don't talk to each other. The customer marketer chases status updates manually. The CSM does not know which of their accounts are also advocates. The sales rep cannot find the right reference fast enough. The board sees activity, not revenue.
The 2026 Top 100 winners below have changed the conversation. Each rebuilt advocacy and community around revenue measurement, productized the programs so they scale beyond the operator, and used AI to compress the work that did not require a human.
Base AI is the AI engagement OS that runs advocacy, references, community, lifecycle, and customer marketing programs on one connected operating layer. Customer signal (NPS responses, support sentiment, product usage, advocacy intent, reference history, community participation) flows into one place. AI agents inside the platform route the signal to programs automatically. A high-NPS customer with strong product usage automatically gets nominated into the advocacy program. A qualified advocate gets matched to a reference request in minutes. A community member who participated in a Power Play is now eligible for the speaker bench. The Customer Marketing function stops chasing manual handoffs and starts running connected programs.
The four winners below are doing pieces of this thesis at their own companies. Jeff built the connected advocacy infrastructure that influences $55.5M at ADP. Kristin runs the adoption-and-advocacy discipline that defines modern practice at Adobe. James is migrating Qualtrics from manual advocacy to AI-driven automation. Sydney built the same discipline at Prophix as a team of one.
Customer Marketing leaders spend most of their day fighting an internal narrative that is at least a decade out of date. Advocacy is soft. Community is a content channel. References are a sales favor. Storytelling does not show up on the revenue dashboard. That framing produces predictable outcomes. Small teams. No headcount. No executive sponsorship. A function constantly defending its existence in budget cycles.
The structural problem is not whether advocacy and community matter. The CFO already suspects they do. The structural problem is that most programs cannot prove it. The metrics that surface in monthly reviews are activity counts. Activity counts are not a budget defense. The metrics that would defend the budget (influenced revenue, reference-to-deal attribution, expansion lift from engaged accounts, retention delta between participating and non-participating customers) are exactly the metrics most advocacy programs never instrumented.
The 2026 CLG winners below have changed the conversation. Each rebuilt advocacy and community around revenue measurement, productized the programs so they scale beyond the operator, and used AI to compress the work that did not require a human. The four cases below span enterprise, mega-brand, multi-region platform, and one-person operations. The same architecture appears in all of them.
When Jeff stepped into his role at ADP, advocacy was valuable but not central. It was a program, not a priority. The work he has done since is the cleanest illustration in the 2026 awards of what advocacy looks like when it is treated as enterprise infrastructure. "I am deeply flattered and truly honored to have been nominated for the TOP100 Influencers and Strategists in Customer-Led Growth," Jeff says. "Our client voices are no longer an afterthought; they are foundational to how we grow."
Today, advocacy is discussed at every executive committee meeting at ADP, embedded into sales strategy, product development conversations, brand positioning, and leadership dialogue. Jeff leads one of North America's largest B2B advocacy communities, 8,500 Ambassadors growing 20% year-over-year. Scale alone is not the story. The story is the infrastructure he built underneath the scale. He launched a centralized 1,950-quote UserEvidence Client Quote Database fully searchable by product, competitor, industry, and benefit. He rolled out a remote video testimonial platform that quadrupled testimonial output at half the cost. He launched and hosts 49 episodes of Insights@Work, a top-5% globally ranked HR podcast spotlighting client expertise. He runs an Executive Client Advisory Board that shapes ADP's product roadmap.
The commercial results are the part that earned the #4 spot. $55.5M in influenced revenue. 6,200+ client references supporting an average of 251 reference conversations per month. 1.74-day average turnaround from reference request to scheduled call. "My work," Jeff explains, "earned the 2024 ADP CEO Award for rebooting and scaling the advocacy program." His framing is the part every VP CM should write down. "I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to a profession that doesn't just drive revenue, but elevates people." The people-first model is now a movement at ADP, not a program. That cultural shift is the part the metrics actually reflect.
Kristin's career arc maps to the entire history of modern Customer Marketing. "My goal has always been to create exceptional customer experiences," she says. She started in the early days when Customer Marketing was treated as a side-hustle. She moved through SiriusDecisions and Forrester Research, where she created and advised leaders on the formal customer experience best practices the industry now treats as standard. She joined Workfront, then carried the discipline into Adobe, where she is now Senior Manager of Adoption Marketing.
At Adobe, her remit is product adoption and fostering a strong network of advocates. Her framing of the work is the part most VP CMs should write on a wall. Relationships are at the heart of her success, both internally and with customers. Absolutely no one goes it alone. The programs she designs educate, connect, and elevate Adobe customers so they can use Adobe solutions and see tangible value from their investment, which directly drives retention and revenue. She uses activity and engagement data as early indicators, but ultimately measures the work on product usage, acts of advocacy, account retention, and growth. The four metrics that define modern adoption-and-advocacy discipline.
What earns Kristin a seat in this blog is the discipline-versus-tool distinction. Customer Marketing is in the middle of an AI tooling explosion. Every quarter brings a new copilot, a new agent, a new lifecycle automation. The leaders who keep their balance (the leaders who do not let the tool stack drift away from the customer relationship) are the leaders who internalized the discipline before AI arrived. Kristin spent decades building exactly that internal framework, then applied it inside a company where Customer Marketing at scale is a multi-product, multi-vertical operating challenge. The lesson for any leader being asked to "add AI to advocacy" without an underlying discipline. AI amplifies what is already there. If the discipline is strong, AI compounds it. If the discipline is weak, AI just makes the noise louder, faster.
James's 30+ years in customer experience have produced a sharp definition of what modern advocacy is for. "I transform customer advocacy and community from tactical programmes into strategic growth engines," he explains. "I don't just run programmes. I architect systems that turn customer relationships into predictable revenue drivers."
At Qualtrics, he has built an integrated ecosystem spanning customer education and advocacy that collectively serves thousands of customers globally. What distinguishes the Qualtrics approach is the architectural commitment. Most advocacy programs are operated as a portfolio of campaigns. James operates his as a system. Frameworks that connect every customer touchpoint to a measurable business outcome, so advocacy can scale authentically while staying aligned with Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Product. "My success," James explains, "stems from treating customers as strategic partners, building frameworks that connect tactics to outcomes, and leading cross-functional teams toward shared goals that drive measurable business impact."
He is currently leading the migration to a modern advocacy management platform. Moving from manual processes to intelligent automation that will double the advocate base while improving regional diversity across EMEA, APAC, and Americas. The target operating outcomes are board-grade. Quadrupling automated request-fulfilment capacity. Lifting reference-to-deal attribution. Accelerating pipeline through in-person community events. James is also an international keynote speaker and a trustee for Citizens Advice, applying customer-centric principles beyond commercial contexts. The deeper lesson for any VP CM evaluating an advocacy platform decision. Technology is the leverage. The frameworks are the substrate. Buying the platform without the frameworks is the most common mistake in the discipline.
Sydney's story is the answer to the most common question in customer advocacy. What is actually possible with a team of one? "I approach Customer-Led Growth as a strategic engine, not just a side initiative," Sydney says.
As the primary driver of Prophix's Advocacy function and the manager of both Prophix Community and the Reference Program, she aligned advocacy, community, content, and lifecycle marketing to measurable business outcomes in her first year. The result is the existence proof that VP Customer Marketing leaders should keep on hand for every headcount conversation.
From launching scalable advocacy programs and reference strategies to activating customer champions across Sales, Marketing, and Product, she has focused on creating authentic moments where customers can share their success and amplify their voice. The outcomes (increased pipeline influence, stronger retention, expanded accounts, and a community of customers who see themselves as true partners in Prophix's growth story) are the metrics every CM function is asked to produce. The fact that they came from a team of one is the part that matters.
What sets Sydney apart is the systems instinct. "I don't just execute programs," she explains, "but I also build systems that empower customers to lead." Creative storytelling motions, executive-level customer engagement, peer communities, thought leadership initiatives. "I actively share insights," Sydney adds, "mentor peers, and advocate for customer-centric strategies that move our industry forward." For any VP CM staring at a team-of-one situation and trying to figure out whether the discipline scales. Sydney is the case study. It scales if the operator treats it as a system from day one.
Four advocacy and community leaders. Four different team sizes (one global enterprise, one mega-brand, one platform leader, one team of one). One shared architecture.
If your advocacy and community function is still measured on activity counts and treated as a service function for sales references, the 2026 Top 100 pattern translates directly. Instrument advocacy as a revenue line. Productize the programs so they scale beyond the operator. Layer AI on the operational seams. Protect the human moments that make the discipline actually work.
That is what Base AI operationalizes. Advocacy, references, community, lifecycle communications, and customer marketing programs run on one connected operating layer. Customer signal (NPS, advocacy intent, product usage, support sentiment, reference history, community participation) flows into one place. AI agents inside the platform route the signal to programs automatically. The reference request matches a qualified advocate in minutes. The high-NPS customer with strong product usage gets nominated into advocacy automatically. The community member who participated in a Power Play becomes eligible for the speaker bench. The CFO sees one dashboard with influenced revenue, reference influence rate, retention delta, and expansion lift across the entire engaged base.
The next and final blog in the series goes deep on the activation seam where all of this starts. How the 2026 winners cut time-to-value with AI-driven onboarding and adoption.
Next in the series: AI-Powered Customer Onboarding in 2026: 4 Plays to Cut Time-to-Value →
→ See how Base AI operationalizes this pattern: Advocacy Solution · State of Customer Advocacy 2026 (webinar) · FanBase Community
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