Customer Advocacy Development

Growth isn’t just about numbers. It’s about accountability, culture, and connection that win and keep customers. Here’s how marketing can lead the way 👇 ~~~~~~~~ As marketers, we are running fast, generating tons of top-of-funnel volume… …but not looking closely enough at what happened after the sale. Churn was someone else’s problem. And that’s the trap so many growth orgs fall into. For years, marketing has been trained to chase volume, not value. We celebrate pipeline, MQLs, SQLs, and other vanity metrics that look great on dashboards but don’t always reflect real business health. When marketing stops at the funnel, we lose our strategic seat at the table. We become service providers to sales instead of stewards of long-term, sustainable growth. Marketing must meaningfully impact retention. It’s not just about net-new logos. It’s about net-positive relationships. Not how many customers you win, but how many you keep. Not filling the funnel, but fueling the flywheel. Because at the end of the day, revenue really is everyone’s job, but marketing can lead the way by making it personal, accountable, and authentic. When we reorient around Net ARR everything changes. ✅ Retention becomes a shared accountability across marketing, sales, success, and support. ✅ Culture becomes as important as strategy. ✅ Transparency stops being optional. So what does it look like when marketing supports retention? ➡️ Customer Champion Enablement — Help customers justify their choice. Give them proof points to advocate for your product internally. ➡️ Customer Advocacy — Celebrate customer success stories so they become your best ambassadors. ➡️ Voice of the Customer — Own the Customer Advisory Board and bring real feedback into product and brand decisions. ➡️ Retention Campaigns — Create lifecycle campaigns for existing customers: adoption nudges, milestone celebrations, education series. Each of these strengthens connection and loyalty, the true drivers of long-term growth. How is your marketing team helping drive retention? Let’s brainstorm together!

Here's an email between two CMOs. One who understands why CMA budget should not be cut, the other considering making cuts. Feel free to share. --------------- Subject: Rethinking Cuts to Advocacy – Hidden Costs, Missed Revenue Hi Sharon, I understand you’re considering scaling back your customer advocacy program as part of broader marketing cuts. I completely understand the pressure—we’re all being asked to do more with less. But I’d recommend you to take a closer look at the real ROI of that program before you finalize. Here’s the thing: cutting advocacy seems like a logical place to save budget because it’s not always effectively tied to pipeline in a dashboard. But that’s precisely the trap. It’s a revenue enabler that looks like overhead—until you don’t have it. We ran the numbers before our last board review, and here’s what surfaced: - Deals with advocate involvement closed 25% faster - Win rates were 18% higher in competitive cycles when customer references were used - Our team spent 70% less time chasing references, freeing up bandwidth for actual selling - Without the program, we’re flying blind. Reference fulfillment becomes ad hoc and reactive. Our top customers get over-asked, and sales spends valuable time scrambling for “the right customer” instead of focusing on closing. In a high-stakes, low-confidence buying environment, peer validation isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s table stakes. The advocacy function is one of the only marketing levers with direct influence on late-stage pipeline. Cutting it now is like reducing fuel to your most efficient engine because it doesn’t sit on the front of the plane. If helpful, I’m happy to share how we tied advocacy metrics directly to revenue and earned executive buy-in to protect it—even as we trimmed elsewhere. Let me know if you want to compare notes. Happy to jump on a call.

Had a great conversation with a CMO last week about where marketing budgets are actually going in 2025. The shift is real. Companies have stopped chasing new leads and started looking inward. While demand generation roles have practically disappeared, customer advocacy and customer marketing are the only areas still actively hiring. Why? Simple economics. It's cheaper to grow revenue from existing customers than acquire new ones. Especially when acquisition budgets have been slashed. Companies are finally asking the question: "Can we get more out of our current customer base?" instead of "How do we get more leads for sales?" This isn't just about upselling. It's about building genuine advocacy programs, creating customer success stories, and turning your happiest clients into your best marketing channel. The companies investing here are the ones thinking strategically about sustainable growth rather than just chasing the next quarter's numbers. If you're in marketing and wondering where to focus your career development, customer marketing isn't just a trend - it's become essential infrastructure. Your existing customers already trust you. Now's the time to leverage that. #CustomerMarketing #B2BMarketing #CustomerAdvocacy #MarketingStrategy

It felt like I was talking to an air traffic controller. This customer marketer was getting hit from every direction—logo asks from brand, hyper-specific proof requests from sales, impossible timelines from PMM. No system. Just chaos. Here was my advice: Build a self-service library of customer evidence. Not a folder. Not a spreadsheet. A legit, searchable, stakeholder-friendly source of truth. It’s one of the fastest ways to buy back your time and your brain power. Time to stop reacting and start leading. Time to zoom out and ask: “Do we really need 3 more case studies?” Time to build the kind of advocacy program that earns executive visibility. Within 90 days of building a library, this CM saw inbound requests drop by 60%. And, more importantly, he finally had the space to pitch and run the strategic campaign that’d been collecting dust in his backlog. The library organized content, sure. But it also changed how his team saw him. He went from air traffic controller fielding tons of inbound requests to program owner.

Stop treating every customer like a case study. According to our Evidence Gap report, 56% of marketers struggle to get direct access to customers. Why? My guess is that it’s because we’re always asking for a case study. And if customers don’t want to do one… things get awkward. Fast. But the problem runs deeper. We quickly wear out our best advocates because we use and overuse them once we find one. We're asking for too much all the time. Case studies, references, testimonials, you name it. And then we wonder why they stop responding. So, we're flipping the script and focusing on providing value instead of just taking it. Here’s what’s working for our marketing team right now: 1. Quarterly CAB meetings + a CAB Slack channel Using CAB meetings to help our customers solve real problems, not just UserEvidence-specific ones. The Slack channel keeps conversations going between meetings without putting us front and center. 2. Positioning customers as SMEs Featuring them in our content (like podcasts, video interviews, and events) builds their brands while showing off their expertise. It’s a simple way to give customers the mic and let them do the talking for us. 3. Marketing roadshow dinners Beyond connecting with our ICP, the real value is hearing directly from customers (what they love and especially what they don’t love) in a relaxed, no-pressure environment. 4. Prioritizing surveys over case studies Instead of asking for “the big thing” every time, we use surveys to gather proof at scale and include optional questions to identify potential advocates for future asks. This change in thinking has helped us build trust with customers, form real relationships, and create advocates who genuinely want to be associated with our brand.

Customer advocacy isn’t just a customer marketing function. It’s your most underutilized product marketing asset. After building advocacy programs at Docusign, HubSpot, and now InvoiceCloud, I’ve seen how customer proof becomes the bridge between what you say your product does and what prospects actually believe it can do for them. Here’s how advocacy powers product marketing 👇🏾 1️⃣ Customer stories validate your positioning Your messaging says your product solves X problem. A customer saying “This solved X for us” proves it. When product and advocacy teams align on which stories to tell, your positioning moves from compelling to credible. 2️⃣ Case studies drive adoption Buyers don’t just want to understand your product — they want to see themselves in it. Stories mapped to ICPs and use cases help them visualize success. That’s not just marketing. That’s adoption strategy. 3️⃣ Advocates are your competitive edge Features can be copied. Customer loyalty can’t. When you activate advocates at the right moments — launches, analyst briefings, competitive deals — you’re not just telling your story. You’re proving it through voices prospects already trust. 4️⃣ Alignment creates measurable impact The best advocacy programs don’t live in silos. They partner with Product Marketing on launches, with Sales on deal acceleration, with CS on expansion plays. When customer proof is embedded across your GTM motion, you can finally measure what matters: pipeline influence, deal velocity, win rates. Truth is — customer marketing and product marketing aren’t separate functions. They’re two sides of the same growth strategy. The companies that get this right? They’re the ones turning customers into their most powerful growth engine. #CustomerMarketing #ProductMarketing #CustomerAdvocacy #CustomerStories #B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #GrowthLeadership #SaaSMarketing

100% of my customers in EMEA are advocates 💃🏾 How’d I do it? Assumptive Advocacy 🤓 Salespeople know about the “assumptive sale”. It’s a tactic where you approach a conversation with confidence that a buyer is already on board. This mindset can help ease friction and make the journey to “yes” feel natural. But what if we took that same mindset into customer advocacy? 🤔 I’m calling "assumptive advocacy" a proactive approach to customer partnerships where we don’t just wait for our customers to be ready to share their success; we build our relationships with the assumption that they want to become advocates. Here's how it can look: 💫 Showcase Success Early: Instead of waiting for a “perfect time” for customers to speak up, we actively identify opportunities for them to share their journey, whether it’s through case studies, keynotes, or reference calls. 💫 Normalize Their Expertise: Frame their experiences as valuable lessons for others. By positioning our customers as leaders in their space (which they most likely are!), we empower them to see advocacy as a natural part of their success and of their journey with us. 💫 Make Advocacy a Milestone, Not an Ask: We don’t approach advocacy as an extra favor but as a key milestone that reflects our shared success. When advocacy is assumed, it’s integrated into their journey as naturally as our other growth metrics. With Assumptive Advocacy, we create a customer experience where advocacy becomes a celebrated extension of the relationship. It’s about helping our customers take pride in their wins, while they help elevate our shared story. Could this approach help you redefine your customer partnerships? Or maybe I’m just good at manifesting ✨ customer advocates 😁

Hot 🔥 take: If you’re launching a #customer #advocacy #community and your baseline customers aren’t exactly, uh...happily advocating? Congrats, you’re in for a wild ride. Here’s the thing: you can’t just cherry-pick your happiest customers and hope the grumpy ones disappear. (They won’t. They’ll be on G2 and Reddit instead.) So what do you do? A few moves that actually work: 1. Lead with #listening, not cheerleading (and keep it constructive). Give customers space to vent, run listening sessions, and acknowledge the ugly parts out loud. But, *don’t* let the community turn into a dumping ground. Set ground rules, frame discussions around “what’s hard + what would help” instead of endless complaint threads, and redirect energy toward problem-solving. 2. Turn complaints into co-creation. Make your community a "You Said, We Did" machine. Close the loop on #feedback, give customers a seat at the table for betas/pilots, and give the proper shoutouts when something changes because of their input. I've mentioned this in previous posts: you have to actually demonstrate that the feedback is being used to take action somehow. That's not to say the community is for blind order-taking (product suggestions have to be feasible and work with your company's strategy, obvs), but your customers need to know with certainty they're not just shouting into the void. Even if the answer is no, tell them, and tell them why (but make sure there's *something* you can say yes to). 3. Let customers help each other. You don’t have to solve everything yourself. Peer-to-peer #support is magic: members sharing workarounds, swapping best practices, even commiserating. Sometimes the fastest path to improving #NPS is letting people connect over “yeah, that’s been tough for me too.” Bottom line: A community won’t magically erase #product gaps, but it can transform the relationship. Happy customers advocate. Unhappy customers who feel heard and included will eventually become your fiercest allies. (fun fact: even the Better Business Bureau will only assign an A+ rating to a company when an issue (or multiple issues) have been resolved--which means that the company that never had anything go wrong will actually have a lower rating than the company that had problems they fixed!) PS: One way I make sure this feedback doesn’t just vanish into the void? I’ve built a methodology for aggregating and scoring customer insights from everywhere — NPS, CABs, betas, support tickets, you name it. That way, leadership gets a clear, actionable picture. I’ll break that down in a future post 😉

One of the hardest parts of working in #customermarketing and #customeradvocacy: We saw the problems first. Not because we were looking for them. But because we sat at the intersection of customers, sales, product, and success. We heard the feedback. We saw the patterns. We felt the friction before most of the organization did. And early on, I made the mistake a lot of people make. I escalated the frustration. But, what I learned over time is that frustration rarely creates action. Impact does. When product gaps or implementation issues limited our ability to activate advocates, I stopped framing the issue as a complaint and started framing it as a business risk. Instead of saying: “This is making advocacy difficult," I said: ‼️ “This is affecting expansion opportunities.” ‼️ “This is limiting our ability to support pipeline.” ‼️ “This creates retention risk.” That shift matters. Because leaders don’t align around frustration. They align around shared outcomes. Another lesson I learned? Escalate patterns, not isolated stories. One unhappy customer is feedback. Ten customers saying the same thing is a signal. And one of the most effective ways to elevate that signal was bringing the voice of the customer directly into the room via customer advisory boards, focus groups, and executive briefings. Why? Leaders don’t always fully understand the customer experience unless we bring it to them. When multiple leaders hear the same customer reality at the same time, the conversation changes. It stops being one team or customer's complaint. And starts becoming a strategic priority. #peoplebeforeprofessionals #influencingwithoutauthority

Influencers Aren’t the Future of Marketing—Your Customers Are. People trust people like them, not scripted ads or sponsored posts. If your marketing relies on influencers instead of real customer advocacy, you’re missing out on the most powerful growth engine: community. The goal is clear: turn customers into ambassadors. When people genuinely love your brand, they don’t just buy from you—they promote you, defend you, and bring others with them. Lush is a perfect example. With a zero-spend policy on advertising, they use organic social reach to promote the brand, focusing on content related to issues the brand and its target customer cares about. Instead of paying for attention, they focus on brand values—sustainability, ethical sourcing, and activism—aligning with causes their audience cares about. The benefits of community-led marketing are massive: ✅ Authentic trust—Customers believe other customers, not ads. ✅ Sustainable growth—Word-of-mouth doesn’t need ad spend. ✅ Higher retention—People stay loyal when they feel connected. ✅ Stronger brand equity—A brand with a real community outlasts any campaign. Here’s how to start building a customer-led community: 1️⃣ Engage, don’t just sell – Create conversations, not just promotions. Ask for input, feedback, and ideas. 2️⃣ Feature your customers – Share their stories, highlight their successes, and make them the face of your brand. 3️⃣ Create spaces for connection – Build groups, forums, or live discussions where customers can engage with each other. 4️⃣ Reward advocacy – Encourage and incentivize customers to share their experiences naturally. 5️⃣ Think long-term – A community isn’t a campaign. It’s an ongoing relationship. Nurture it. This strategy comes down to one concept: Community-Driven Growth. People trust brands they feel a part of. By shifting from influencer-driven marketing to customer-powered communities, you’re not just selling—you’re building something bigger. A brand people don’t just buy from, but belong to.