Building a Customer Evidence Program: Making Sure Your Hard-won Evidence Gets Used

This is the final installment of our 3 part “Building A Customer Evidence Program” series. (Part 1 here, Part 2 here).

TL;DR

You’ve built your library of customer evidence—now it’s time to make sure it actually gets used. This post covers the operational side of customer evidence: how to roll it out, get buy-in, and embed it across your go-to-market teams.

We’ll cover the key building blocks:

• Delivering customer evidence to your team
  
• Distribution and enablement strategies
  
• Scaling success and measuring impact
  

Whether you’re launching a new program or evolving a mature one, this guide walks through how to turn customer evidence into a core part of your GTM motion—and your org’s culture.

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In the first two parts of this series, we explored how to identify your Evidence Gap and build a comprehensive customer evidence library. Now comes the most critical part of all: actually getting your customer evidence used.

As marketers, we’ve all felt the pain of creating great assets that end up collecting digital dust. Despite our best intentions, the slide decks, one-pagers, and case studies we pour time and energy into often remain right where we put them—GDrive, knowledge bases, that internal wiki. 

Customer evidence is too valuable—and too hard-won—to suffer that fate.

In the final post of this series, we’ll tackle the operational side of customer evidence, laying out a clear framework for deploying your assets, enabling your teams, and maintaining your program for long-term success. No more “if you build it, they will come” wishful thinking. We’re going to address the hardest part head-on: making your customer evidence program a true centerpiece of your GTM motion. The best part about this hardest part is these tips can be applied outside customer evidence as well. Learning how to get your team bought in and using your work will expand your influence in your org and impact your career well beyond just this. 

Winning in this area means you’ll become a center of excellence for customer evidence. It means your impact will be felt and appreciated by your team, and it means customer evidence will be present across all areas of your go-to-market strategy. 

Here’s the broad areas we’ll cover:

1. Delivering customer evidence assets to your team
2. Distribution of customer evidence so it gets used
3. Training and enablement: Making it stick daily 
4. Use cases for customer evidence
5. Future-proofing your customer evidence program

Let’s get to it. 

The Delivery Challenge: From Library to Launchpad

The classic marketing bottleneck isn’t creation—it’s adoption. You’ve spent weeks or months building a library of powerful customer evidence. Now it’s time to bridge the gap between your carefully curated library and the teams who need it most.

This is enablement. Which is an inherently human discipline. Enablement also focuses on others, not you. Our guidance today will split between operational ideas and human ideas. Both happen together to make this work. And it’s not about your work, it’s about what it will do for your sales and marketing teams and for your prospects. 

Preparing your assets for prime time

Before you roll anything out to your broader organization, ask yourself: are your assets ready for showtime? This means from the last post you should have these main points dialed:

1. Brand consistency – All assets should follow your brand guidelines and look professional. This isn’t just aesthetic—it builds credibility with prospects.
2. Distribution-ready formats – Different teams need different formats. Sales might need slides, while social needs image cards. Create a variety of formats upfront rather than scrambling later.
3. Searchable metadata – Tag everything in a way that makes sense to the end user, not just to you. Your sales team thinks in terms of industries, company sizes, and use cases—not marketing taxonomy.
4. Clear usage guidance – For each asset, include context on when and how to use it. Also always include the benefit to your team. How can this asset help them? For example: “This ROI stat works well when speaking to Finance personas concerned about implementation costs, one of our main objections.” Bonus points if you can share a story of it working from someone on your team. 

With your library and guidance ready, it’s time to prepare for the rollout.

Delivery principles for success

The way you introduce your customer evidence program is just as important as what’s in it. Remember these principles as you prepare for launch:

1. Connect to what they care about
2. Recruit your champions
3. Make it ridiculously easy
4. Show don’t tell

Connect to what they care about

Frame your rollout around the problems your customer evidence solves for sales and marketing, not the process you used to build it.

For sales: “Here’s how this helps you close deals faster and overcome objections.” For marketing: “Here’s how this strengthens campaigns and generates more qualified leads.”

Jane Menyo, Head of Customer Marketing at Gong, puts it perfectly: “Every leader understands that customer evidence is essential to close the deal. And they’ll always gravitate back to it as a way to grow revenue.”

Telling this story should be easy—you already did your homework in Part 1 by interviewing these stakeholders and learning their pain points. Now, you need to connect their pain to what you’re giving them (namely, why it will fix that very real pain).

Recruit your champions

Remember that “strike team” of 2-3 reps you identified early in the process? Prepare them to be your internal advocates. Show them the goods first, get their feedback, and ask them to speak up in support during the broader rollout.

The magic happens when your peers—not just you—talk about why customer evidence matters. When a top-performing AE tells their team, “This competitive evidence helped me close my biggest deal last quarter,” people listen.

Make it ridiculously easy

The bar for adoption isn’t “possible to use”—it’s “impossible not to use.” Your goal should be creating a program so intuitive and valuable that using it is easier than not using it.

Think about how you can reduce friction at every step:

• Can you integrate with tools your team already uses daily?
• Can you create templates that make customization a breeze?
• Can you automate distribution of new evidence?

Show, don’t tell

Don’t just tell your sales team you have great customer evidence—show them exactly how to use it in their workflow.

For example: “When a prospect asks about implementation time, go to the library, filter by ‘Implementation,’ and grab this stat showing ‘87% of customers fully implement within 6 weeks.'”

Better yet, create examples showing how evidence can be worked into sales emails, presentation decks, discovery calls, and objection handling.

The more detailed the better here, and if your internal champions can add their own use stories over time this is what will really help it hit home. 

Distribution: getting evidence where it’s needed

The most beautiful customer evidence library in the world is useless if your team can’t find it when they need it. Let’s talk about distribution strategies.

Home base: your customer evidence library

Your evidence library needs a permanent, accessible home. This could be:

1. A dedicated platform – If you’re using UserEvidence, your library is already built in.
2. Sales enablement tools – Platforms like Seismic or Highspot are designed to hold content for sales. 
3. Knowledge base – Tools like Notion, Confluence, or Google Drive can work but require more manual organization.
4. Microsite – A standalone internal site dedicated to customer evidence. This could be a Google site or any sort of private webpage.

Wherever it lives, make sure it’s searchable, filterable, and regularly updated. Many folks try to use a single GSheet, we’ve done this ourselves, but you’ll struggle to keep final assets clean and organized if you have any sort of volume.

Meet them where they work

The best customer evidence is the kind that finds your team, not the other way around. Consider these integrations to put evidence at your team’s fingertips:

1. CRM integration – Surface relevant evidence directly within Salesforce or other CRM tools based on prospect industry or stage.
2. Slack integration – Build a Slack bot that serves up customer evidence on demand (like UserEvidence’s Slack bot).
3. Sales enablement platforms – If you’re using Seismic, Highspot, or similar, make sure your customer evidence is fully integrated.
4. Email/calendar tools – Consider plugins that suggest relevant evidence when reps are crafting prospect emails.

The goal is to reduce the steps between “I need evidence” and “I have the perfect proof point.”

AI-powered discovery

AI is revolutionizing how teams find and use customer evidence. If you’re using UserEvidence, you can leverage Evi, an AI assistant that helps surface the right testimonials based on natural language queries.

But even without a dedicated platform, you can explore options like:

1. Creating a custom GPT trained on your customer evidence
2. Building simple search functionality that understands conceptual queries
3. Setting up automated recommendations based on deal context

Training and enablement

Rollout is just the beginning. To ensure long-term adoption, you need a thoughtful enablement strategy.

Make a splash

People love a launch. It’s so much easier to get buy-in when you make a splash around a new initiative. You can apply this to your whole customer evidence program, or make a point to do a mini “launch” every time you release a new batch of assets to your team. Regardless, making a big deal about what you’re doing, and explaining the “why it matters to you” is crucial. 

1. Cross-functional kickoff – Bring together sales, marketing, and customer success for an official launch.
2. Executive sponsor – Have a leader (ideally from sales) introduce the program and explain why it matters.
3. Live demonstration – Show real examples of finding and using evidence in common scenarios.
4. Q&A session – Address questions and concerns upfront.

Record this session for future reference and onboarding.

Make it stick

Not-so-fun-fact: did you know that the typical human needs to hear something 5-7 times before it’s committed to memory? Have you heard that stat 5-7 times yet? It means you can’t expect to launch it and leave it. Instead, build some ongoing education into your calendar to ensure that the team is understanding the what, why, and where of the latest customer evidence at their disposal:

1. Regular team meeting slots – Get 10 minutes on the calendar for monthly sales and marketing team meetings to share updates.
2. Evidence of the week – Highlight one powerful new piece of evidence each week in Slack or email. Recurring delivery like this can become the cornerstone of distributing new content. 
3. Win stories – Celebrate when customer evidence helps close a deal or improve campaign performance. Ideally this comes straight from reps or other team members.
4. New hire onboarding – Build customer evidence training into your onboarding process.
5. Office hours – Hold regular sessions where teams can drop in with questions. Make yourself available for feedback on what’s missing still too. 

Make it count

There are going to be some teams (or even some individuals) that need customer evidence more than others. We’re talking: top AEs working strategic accounts, teams selling into specific competitive verticals, etc. It’s great to give them more strategic support to ensure that 1) they’re using the evidence you’ve given them and 2) you’re continuing to collect more of what they need to keep moving the needle. Here are a few ways you can support these customer evidence champions:

1. Custom collections – Create targeted collections for specific accounts or industries they’re pursuing.
2. Deal clinics – Offer to join their prep sessions for big presentations to identify the right evidence.
3. Feedback loop – Actively ask what’s working, what’s not, and what evidence they need next. These folks can be your greatest internal advocates, and where you can find your biggest wins. 

Use cases: Customer evidence in action

Let’s get specific about how customer evidence should be deployed across your GTM motion. Here are some of our tried-and-true ways to put customer evidence into action across your GTM org. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list–just a few of our favorite and most common use cases that we see from our customers. And, to prove that we’re not pulling this out of thin air, I pulled a few quotes from our customers who are using customer evidence within these GTM functions to highlight the impact that they’re feeling:

For sales teams

1. Discovery calls – Use industry-specific ROI stats to build credibility early. 
2. Objection handling – Counter specific objections with targeted proof points.
3. Competitive positioning – Share why customers chose you over specific competitors.
4. Business case building – Provide ROI metrics that help prospects justify the purchase internally.
5. Deal acceleration – Use testimonials showing rapid time-to-value to create urgency.

“We estimate that voice-of-the-customer content is now used in more than half of our sales deals.” – Ayleen Beltran Customer Engagement Program Manager, Vanta

For marketing teams

1. Website social proof – Place targeted testimonials on key pages based on visitor segment.
2. Demand gen campaigns – Build campaigns around compelling customer outcomes.
3. Content marketing – Create thought leadership backed by customer data and stories.
4. Social media – Share bite-sized proof points across platforms.
5. ABM campaigns – Use industry-specific evidence for targeted account outreach.

“We’ve been able to incorporate social proof into marketing materials like blogs, email campaigns, and landing pages to improve conversion rates.” Senior Content Marketing Manager, Medium Enterprise Company

For customer success teams

1. Onboarding – Share best practices from similar customers.
2. Expansion opportunities – Use success stories to highlight additional use cases.
3. Renewal conversations – Demonstrate continued value with comparative ROI data.
4. Customer communities – Create spaces for customers to share their own success stories.

Ongoing maintenance: Keeping your program fresh

A customer evidence program isn’t a “set it and forget it” initiative. It requires ongoing attention to stay relevant and valuable.

Get refresh cycles on the calendar (literally)

Just like your gym schedule (or lack thereof), it’s gotta be on the calendar or it’s probably not happening, right? The same goes for building the muscle of your customer evidence library. Establish a clear cadence for updating your library, and literally put it on your calendar:

1. Quarterly audits – Review your library for outdated evidence or gaps in coverage.
2. Annual overhauls – Conduct a more comprehensive assessment of your program’s effectiveness.
3. Programmatic surveying – If you’ve implemented always-on surveying as discussed in Part 2, make sure new responses are regularly reviewed and added to your library.

Share the big picture

One of the coolest things about running a customer evidence program is that you’re the keeper of the evidence. While one-off pieces of proof are super valuable, sometimes the most valuable insights to your wider team are actually the aggregate insights only you have purview into. Your customer evidence program gives you unique insight into customer sentiment and success. Don’t keep it to yourself. Here are some of our favorite ways to ensure that we’re sharing the bigger picture insights:

1. Survey summaries – Share key findings from your evidence collection with product, customer success, and leadership teams.
2. Product feedback – Identify patterns in how customers are using and finding value in your product, as well as specific feedback on where you can improve. Pair this with measurements like NPS to get a strong view of satisfaction and sentiment. 
3. Voice of customer briefings – Host regular sessions to share what you’re hearing from customers.
4. Messaging alignment – Analyze similarities and differences between how you talk about your product and how your customers do. Then you can use customer evidence to validate whats working, or find opportunities to fix what misses the mark. 

This positions you as a strategic partner across the organization, not just a provider of marketing assets.

Measure impact quarterly

Remember those metrics you identified in Part 1? Now it’s time to track them. I’d recommend a quarterly cadence, just because it can become overwhelming to do more often than that. As a refresher, here are a few metrics I highly recommend assessing on a quarterly basis:

1. Usage metrics – How often is evidence being accessed and by whom?
2. Sales impact – Are win rates improving in areas where you’ve added targeted evidence?
3. Marketing performance – Are campaigns using customer evidence outperforming those without?
4. Deal velocity – Is your sales cycle shortening in deals where evidence is effectively deployed?
5. Customer feedback – How do customers feel about participating in your program?

Be ready to share these metrics with leadership to demonstrate the ROI of your program.

Inside two real customer evidence programs: How they operationalize

Operationalizing customer evidence doesn’t follow a single blueprint. It flexes to fit your company’s needs, culture, and go-to-market motion. But the most successful programs—no matter how different—share one thing: they make customer evidence easy to access, use, and trust.

Here’s how two very different companies are putting scalable systems in place to maximize the impact of their customer voice.

Gong: Speed, scale, and self-service

When your product is used by sales teams—and your sales team sells to sales teams—you can’t afford friction. At Gong, the customer evidence program is a well-oiled machine designed for efficiency and fast distribution across use cases.

Key moves:

• Centralized Library: Customer stories are housed in a tagged, filterable library—so sales reps can instantly find proof by industry, region, or competitor.
  
• Automation for Reuse: One link, many stories. Reps grab a curated microsite, drop it into an email, and move fast.
  
• Always-On Creation: From product launches to industry expansion, Hannah Hapin’s team uses targeted surveys and strategic outreach to continuously generate fresh stories.
  
• Scalable Storytelling: The Golden Gong Awards generate multiple case studies in one campaign, while industry-specific proof enables expansion into healthcare, financial services, and beyond.

“With UserEvidence, we can do a ton because it takes us less time. I’m more open to saying yes to new projects and taking on things for other teams.”

— Hannah Hapin, Customer Marketing Specialist, Gong

Gong’s approach proves that with the right systems, a small customer marketing team can support a large, fast-moving GTM org—without burning out.

HackerOne: Adaptation, advocacy, and alignment

In cybersecurity, even your happiest customers often can’t go on the record. But that hasn’t stopped the HackerOne team from scaling customer insights across their entire go-to-market engine.

Key moves:

• Multifunctional Inputs: Customer journey surveys, product feedback loops, and vertical segmentation initiatives all draw on UserEvidence to capture both metrics and voice-of-customer insights.
  
• Cross-Functional Enablement: Advocacy is built into Customer Success OKRs, with reps and CSMs contributing new advocates each quarter. Product marketing and comms collaborate on survey strategy and content.
  
• Campaign & Content Fuel: Customer insights powered HackerOne’s 2023 Annual Report (their top MQL driver) and major AI launch campaigns—offering proof even when names can’t be shared.
  
• Searchable Source of Truth: Advocacy Program Manager Cara Peterson is building a central repository where reps can find the right story, right when they need it—with confidence it’s approved for use.

“Customer marketing goes where the business’ need is. We’re utility players, and we can adjust our advocacy actions, the way we approach customers, and the messages we take to them.”

— Elizabeth Raffa, Sr. Manager, Customer Marketing, HackerOne

HackerOne’s program shows how creativity, collaboration, and strategic use of anonymous feedback can overcome even the most complex industry constraints.

Different paths, same goal

Whether your team is focused on frictionless scale like Gong or adaptive alignment like HackerOne, the lesson is the same: operationalizing customer evidence requires more than just creating assets. It means integrating customer proof into every motion—sales, marketing, product, success—and making it accessible, visible, and valued.

The evolution from program to culture

The ultimate goal isn’t just to build a customer evidence program—it’s to build a customer evidence culture. In the most successful organizations, customer evidence becomes woven into the fabric of how teams think and operate.

Signs you’re creating a customer evidence culture:

• Sales reps proactively request new types of evidence based on conversations they’re having. You really know you’re winning if reps help provide each other with the right evidence too. 
• Marketing teams automatically incorporate evidence into campaign planning.
• Product teams seek out evidence to validate roadmap decisions and use evidence in decision making.
• Leadership references customer evidence in company all-hands and board meetings.
• Customer success teams contribute to evidence collection without prompting.

When customer evidence is no longer “your program” but “how we do business,” you’ll know you’ve succeeded.

Putting it all together: A 30-60-90 day plan

Let’s wrap up with a practical roadmap for operationalizing your customer evidence program:

First 30 Days: Foundation

1. Prepare your library – Organize, brand, and tag all your evidence.
2. Identify distribution channels – Determine where your evidence will live.
3. Brief your champions – Prepare your strike team to support the launch.
4. Create training materials – Develop guides, videos, and examples.

Days 30-60: Launch

1. Hold your kickoff event – Officially introduce the program to all teams.
2. Enable key integrations – Connect your library to the tools your team uses.
3. Conduct team trainings – Hold dedicated sessions for sales, marketing, and CS.
4. Begin tracking usage – Set up analytics to monitor adoption.

Days 60-90: Optimization

1. Collect feedback – Survey users on what’s working and what’s not.
2. Address gaps – Fill any missing evidence types based on early usage.
3. Share early wins – Highlight successes to build momentum.
4. Establish ongoing cadence – Set up regular updates and office hours.

The future of customer evidence

We’ve come a long way in this series. We’ve moved from identifying your Evidence Gap to building a comprehensive library to operationalizing your program across your organization.

The customer evidence landscape continues to evolve rapidly. As AI capabilities advance, the way teams collect, curate, and deploy evidence will become even more sophisticated and personalized. The companies that embrace these capabilities will gain a significant competitive advantage.

But the core principle remains the same: authentic, relevant customer proof builds the trust needed to move deals forward. No amount of technological advancement can replace the fundamental power of one customer saying to a prospect, “Here’s how this solution changed our business.”

By building a strategic, scalable customer evidence program, you’re not just creating marketing assets—you’re creating a trust engine that powers your entire go-to-market motion.

And that might be the most valuable thing a marketer can build.

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This is the final post in our three-part series on building a customer evidence program. Missed the earlier posts? Check out Part 1: Finding Your Evidence Gap and Part 2: Building Your Customer Evidence Library. And if you’re ready to build and scale your customer evidence program with our made-for-this platform, we’re ready to chat.