[ Managed Advocacy · Retained ]
Your customers are the salespeople your buyers actually trust. We turn them into a channel.
Existing customers already influence your deals. It's just not a channel yet. Kindling's managed service installs one.
Recruiting, content prompts and coaching, verification, compliance, tax forms, analytics: handled. Your customers create content in the places your next buyer is already looking. You own the channel it becomes.
1. Forrester, 2023 B2B Brand and Communications Survey (90% trust peers; 29% trust vendor salespeople) · 2. Engagement research cited in The Advocacy Operating System · 3. Edelman-LinkedIn, 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
[ 01 — The problem ]
You are overpaying for the attention buyers trust least.
Every month you buy impressions from a company page, and every month buyers apply the same filter: this is an ad. Meanwhile the conversation that decides the deal happens between peers, in places your analytics cannot see.
Every month starts from zero.
LinkedIn CPMs run $30 to $80 and climb every year. Stop paying and the impressions stop. No residual value, no library, no memory in the system. It is the only line item on your budget guaranteed to be worth nothing the day you pause it.
The Promoted label costs you the click.
The same story earns 5 to 10 times the engagement from a personal profile as it does from your company page. Buyers discount what you say about yourself, and only 23 percent ever take a vendor-supplied reference call. They ask peers instead.
Enthusiasm is not a channel.
Your happiest customers say remarkable things in renewal calls. A screenshot lands in a slide deck, and then nothing: no system to encourage more of it, support it, or measure what it influenced. A happy accident, quarter after quarter.
None of this needs new budget. It needs reallocated budget: move a slice of the paid line item into the channel where the same dollars buy trusted voices instead of filtered ones, and the trajectory the underlying dynamics predict is paid down, earned up, compounding from there.
[ 02 — The trust shift ]
Buyers trust peers three times more than your best rep. Own the channel that math favors.
There is a moment in every B2B purchase that matters more than any other. It happens outside your funnel, your sales team does not control it, and your marketing team did not create it: the moment the buyer asks someone they trust whether your product actually works. The practitioner who posts about your product and reaches 2,000 of the exact people you sell to is doing something your brand account cannot do at any budget. They are being believed.
1. Forrester, 2023 B2B Brand and Communications Survey · 2. TrustRadius, 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect
The trust gap between companies with active customer advocates and companies without them widens every quarter. A competitor can match your features and undercut your price. They cannot buy twelve months of authentic customer content at any price.
[ 03 — The system ]
The Advocacy Operating System.
Every working advocacy program runs four functions, whether it knows it or not. When a program underperforms, the diagnosis is almost always one of these four being weak or missing. Most companies run two of them well. The engagement installs all four, on software built for exactly this.
Source and verify.
Find the customers who fit the advocate profile and confirm they are real: they work at a customer account, they use the product, their experience is true. Verification is the credibility mechanism of the entire channel.
Without it: influencer marketing with extra steps, and one soft advocate damages the channel for good.
Activate and produce.
Turn willing advocates into a steady stream of content without ever crossing into assignment. Briefs are a menu, never a quota. Onboarding, rate card, 24-hour review, and prompt, transparent payment.
Without it: verified advocates and nothing happening. Enthusiasm without infrastructure is a trickle.
Distribute and amplify.
The organic post is the foundation. Then paid amplification behind the winners as Thought Leader Ads targeted at your ICP, repurposing with permission, and content tagged so an AE can surface a peer voice mid-deal.
Without it: great content nobody sees. A screenshot in a slide deck, and the story ends.
Measure and attribute.
Earned media value, content velocity, and pipeline influence tracked deal by deal with confidence levels, assembled into the case finance accepts. Advocacy competes with channels that have cleaner dashboards; this function wins that fight.
Without it: the program works and nobody can prove it. That is how real channels lose budget fights.
[ 04 — The engagement ]
We run it until it runs itself.
Retained consulting and a working program in one number: $60,000 for six months. Not a strategy deck you file after the readout: an install. The four functions go live one by one, every phase ends with a named artifact, and first advocate content is typically public inside 60 days.
Audit and design.
Discovery interviews with your sponsor and CS lead, customer base mapped against the advocate profile, opportunity sized in pipeline terms, and the program designed: rate card, content guardrails, payout rails, and goals a CFO would sign.
→ Artifacts: Earned Influence Audit · advocacy strategy · rate card
Build, recruit, first content.
The program stands up on the Kindling platform, configured to your accounts. Your first advocate cohort is invited, verified, and onboarded, W-9s collected before the first dollar moves, and the first organic posts go public.
→ Artifacts: live program on the platform · verified cohort · first published content
Operate and optimize.
The weekly rhythm runs: prompts tied to real milestones, editorial support that never puts words in an advocate's mouth, payouts on the 1st and 15th, Thought Leader Ads behind the winning posts, and pipeline influence tracked deal by deal.
→ Artifacts: monthly performance reports · amplification campaigns · a growing content library
Ingrain and hand over.
Your team is trained on all four functions and the program is yours: advocate bench, rate card, content library, reporting. Keep us on retainer after that or run it yourself on the platform. Both are wins.
→ Artifacts: program operations manual · 90-day forward plan · the channel
[ 05 — The division of labor ]
We run the program so you can run marketing.
Every row below is a job the channel requires. None of them should be yours.
We recruit and verify every advocate,
so you never ask a buyer to trust a stranger.
We deliver content prompts tied to real milestones,
so the feed never goes quiet and nobody is ever assigned a post.
We review every post inside 24 hours for accuracy and FTC disclosure,
so compliance is never the reason you lose sleep.
We collect W-9s and file 1099-NECs,
so your finance team never touches a tax form.
We run payouts on the 1st and 15th,
so advocates stay paid, happy, and posting.
We monitor verification and engagement for fraud,
so every number you report is real.
We amplify winning posts and tag content for your sales team,
so your best stories reach buyers your advocates' networks miss.
We track pipeline influence deal by deal,
so you can defend this budget in one slide.
We write it all into the operations manual,
so in month six the machine is yours.
[ 06 — The offer ]
One engagement. One number.
Advocacy Audit
We map your advocate bench and size the channel in pipeline terms before you commit to anything larger. Every dollar credits toward the engagement.
- Customer base mapped, likely advocates identified
- Opportunity sized in pipeline terms
- Program design you keep either way
Managed Advocacy Program
Program creation, weekly operation, and optimization until advocacy is ingrained. Everything below is included. No setup fees. No per-advocate charges.
- Program design and a standing weekly working session
- Advocate recruiting, verification, and onboarding
- Editorial support in the advocate's own voice
- Payments and tax compliance end to end: Stripe Connect, Tremendous, W-9s, 1099-NEC filing
- Attribution reporting your CFO will actually read
- The Kindling platform, included and configured
The platform normally runs $299 a month. Inside the engagement it is simply included, and it is what your team graduates onto in month six.
[ 07 — A quick diagnostic ]
Do you have an advocacy problem?
"Advocate content is organic or it's worthless. The system doesn't produce content. It creates the conditions where content happens naturally."
[ 08 — Accountability ]
Run by a system. Signed by a person.
The method exists because we watched the same failure for twenty-five years of selling enterprise software to marketing and revenue leaders: budget poured into channels buyers ignore, while the happiest customers were never once asked to speak. Kindling is the system built to fix that, and it does not depend on any one of us being brilliant in a given week.
It does come with a name on it. Every engagement has one accountable owner, a standing weekly session, and a playbook that is yours whether you keep us or not.
"I am not learning this buyer. I am this buyer." · Brian De Groodt, Founder
[ 09 — FAQ ]
The things people ask first.
Is this a consultant or a product?
It is a system that arrives with an operator. The Advocacy Operating System is documented, every phase ends with a named artifact, and the Kindling platform underneath handles recruiting, tracking, payouts, and reporting. The six months installs the system in your team. What you keep is an operations manual and software, not a dependency on us.
We need pipeline this quarter, not in six months.
First advocate content is typically public inside 60 days, and your paid program keeps running while the library builds; this is a reallocation, not a pause. Six months is not how long it takes to see the channel work. It is how long it takes until the channel runs without us. Shorter engagements produce decks. This produces a channel.
Where does the budget come from?
Usually from the paid line item it outperforms. A company spending $10,000 a month on LinkedIn ads can redirect a third of it into advocate compensation and program operation, keep the rest running for launches and hard CTAs, and end the year owning a content library instead of a receipt for impressions that expired.
What happens after month six?
Two good outcomes. Most teams take the program in-house with the operations manual and run it on the Kindling platform. Some keep us on a lighter ongoing retainer. You choose in month five, not on day one, and there is no penalty for choosing independence.
Do you make our customers post?
Never. No quotas, no deadlines, no scripts, no minimum posts per month. Briefs are a menu advocates browse when they have something worth saying, and every piece is paid transparently. The moment a brand assigns content, advocacy becomes advertising, and buyers can tell. That line is the entire value of the channel.
How is this different from influencer marketing?
Influencer platforms start with strangers who have audiences and rent their reach. We start with verified customers who have real experience: their customer status is confirmed before a single post, so when a buyer asks whether this person actually uses the product, the honest answer is the good answer.
Isn't paying customers strange?
It is transparent and documented. Published rates everyone can see, cash or gift cards or a charitable donation at the advocate's choice, a W-9 on file and a 1099-NEC at year end. What is strange is a customer who loves your product staying silent while you buy ads.
What if we're too early?
If you have happy customers, you are ready. Stage does not decide this. Enthusiasm does.
Start with two weeks.
The audit is $3,500, takes two weeks, and credits toward the engagement in full. You will know what your advocacy channel is worth in pipeline terms before you commit another dollar. And if the numbers say you are not ready, we will tell you that too.
If you do nothing else today: pull the transcripts from your last ten renewal calls and read what your customers said. That language is your best ad copy, and right now it is reaching no one.