A customer just gave you 45 minutes of their workday to talk a skeptical prospect off the fence. Your deal closed. The AE celebrated. Your VP sent a Slack emoji.
And then someone from customer marketing sent the advocate a $50 Amazon gift card.
I understand why it happens. Teams feel like they need to do something to acknowledge the contribution. Gift cards are fast, scalable, and easy to approve. They feel like gratitude.
They're not. They're a signal — and the signal is: we see you as a transaction.
The customers who matter most to your reference program are not doing it for fifty dollars. They're doing it because they believe in your product, because they want to be seen as leaders in their space, because they feel genuinely connected to your team, or because someone asked them in a way that felt like a real relationship and not a cold request.
A gift card tells them you don't know which of those things is true for them. Worse — it commoditizes the relationship. It turns "I showed up for you because I trust you" into "I showed up for you and got paid."
What actually works
The alternatives aren't expensive. They're specific.
The advocate who wants visibility: get their name on something. A co-authored post. A panel invitation. A quote in a piece that their VP will see. Something that builds their brand, not just yours.
The advocate who wants influence: give them early access, a roadmap conversation, a direct line to your product team. Make them an insider.
The advocate who just wanted to feel seen: a direct note — not just from customer marketing, but from a founder or executive — saying the deal closed and their call made the difference. One paragraph. No gift card required.
Advocacy at its best is a genuine relationship between your company and your customer. You can't build that with a rewards catalog.
Know your advocates well enough to know what they actually want. Then give them that.
The ones who wanted a gift card will let you know.
Maria Ogneva is co-founder of Rally, a B2B SaaS customer marketing consultancy.
Next week: the infrastructure that makes a reference program repeatable — what to build in your CRM, how to integrate with CS, and the four metrics that actually matter to revenue leadership.