1. What technical and operational requirements should we establish before comparing platforms?
Before speaking to vendors, start with your own advocacy program. Perhaps your team spends too much time finding suitable customer references, or you're struggling to connect advocacy activities to sales opportunities. Different challenges require different capabilities, so identify your priorities and separate must-have features from those that would simply be nice to have.
Next, consider your existing workflows and technology. Who manages advocate relationships? How do salespeople request references? What information needs to flow between your advocacy platform, CRM, and other marketing tools? Understanding these requirements early will help you identify solutions that fit your operations without creating unnecessary complexity.
2. Can you show us how the platform handles our real-world scenarios?
Software demonstrations can be impressive. Everything runs smoothly, the data looks perfect, and every feature seems just a few clicks away. To understand what you're actually buying, ask vendors to demonstrate your workflows instead of relying exclusively on their prepared presentations.
For example, imagine a salesperson needs a customer reference for a prospect in a specific industry. Can the platform identify suitable advocates, check their availability, and help coordinate the request? What happens if the customer declines? These scenarios reveal far more than a dashboard full of attractive charts.
Pay attention to which steps happen automatically, which require manual intervention, and whether the demonstrated features come with the package you're considering. Involving someone who will use the platform daily can also help uncover unnecessary steps or missing functionality.
3. What evidence supports the vendor's claims?
Most software providers likely have customer success stories to share. You'll hear about companies that saved time, improved efficiency, or achieved impressive returns. Those results can be encouraging, but they deserve a closer look. A claim that a platform reduces manual work by 50%, for instance, means little without understanding what the company measured and how it established the baseline.
Ask for measurable results from organizations with similar program sizes, technical environments, or business objectives. Better still, it's time to ask the vendor for a little customer advocacy of their own: request an introduction to an existing customer. Someone who has used the platform for a year can offer valuable insights into its strengths, limitations, and ongoing operational demands.
Be cautious when vendors make ambitious claims but struggle to explain how they achieved those results. Detailed implementation examples and transparent customer feedback often tell a more useful story than polished testimonials.
4. What limitations might we discover after implementation?
Every platform has limitations. The important thing is understanding which ones could affect your program before they become your problem. A vendor might advertise compatibility with your CRM, for example, but the integration could support only certain data types or require additional development.
Reporting presents another potential challenge. A platform might track advocate participation and content usage without providing the information you need to connect those activities to pipeline influence or revenue. Similarly, some capabilities might require third-party tools, expensive upgrades, or workarounds.
Ask vendors to be transparent about these restrictions, particularly around integrations, reporting, automation, and data exports. And remember that a feature on the product roadmap isn't the same as functionality you can use today.
5. Will the platform still meet our needs in two or three years?
Your advocacy program probably won't look exactly the same a few years from now. You might expand into new markets, introduce additional advocacy activities, involve more internal teams, or develop a more sophisticated approach to measuring business impact.
The platform you select should accommodate that growth without forcing you to rebuild your technology ecosystem. Look for flexibility in workflows, integrations, user management, and reporting, alongside a product development strategy that supports evolving customer needs.
Ask vendors how existing customers have expanded their use of the platform over time. Real examples of long-term adoption provide a more reliable picture than ambitious promises about future releases.
6. What is the actual total cost of ownership?
Subscription pricing rarely tells the whole story. A platform might offer an attractive annual license, but the final investment could also include implementation, data migration, integrations, onboarding, training, and ongoing technical support.
Then there are the costs associated with growth. Adding users, accessing advanced analytics, or introducing new automation capabilities might require a higher subscription tier. Ask for a complete breakdown covering your expected requirements over the next two or three years.
Don't overlook internal costs, either. If your team spends hours maintaining integrations, cleaning data, or completing tasks the platform was supposed to automate, those hours belong in your calculations. A cheaper subscription doesn't necessarily mean a more cost-effective solution.
Choose the platform that fits your program, not the other way around
There's no universally perfect advocacy platform. Different organizations have different priorities, technical environments, budgets, and levels of program maturity.
Selecting the right technology starts with understanding your needs and asking vendors to demonstrate how they can meet them. Define your requirements, test real scenarios, challenge ambitious claims, and calculate the full investment before committing.
And remember that choosing a platform is only part of the equation. How you configure it, connect it to your existing systems, and integrate it into your team's daily work will ultimately determine how much value it delivers.
Need help finding the right advocacy platform?
At Wings4U, our Tech & Data experts can help you assess your existing technology, identify operational gaps, and select the solutions that best fit your advocacy goals. From platform evaluation to implementation, integrations, and workflow optimization, we help you make technology work for your program.
Let's find the right fit for your advocacy program.
