This is a past send for The Outpost, a weekly newsletter filled with realtime insights and tactics for building more impactful customer marketing programs. To get The Outpost in your inbox every week, subscribe right here.
I’m back from Highline and still riding the high of getting to talk shop with folks who actually understand this job. (“So you just…make TikToks of happy customers and throw appreciation parties?” No, Aunt Debbie. Let’s not.)
I actually spent most of the week doing what I love most: sitting marketing leaders down – on gondolas, Teddy Roosevelt-clad benches (true story), western stagecoaches (also true story) – and asking them to just talk. By the end of it, I’d chatted with leaders from Island, Docebo, LeanData, LaunchDarkly, Trellix, Cisco, BlueCat, Gong, and several more.
Some things came up so consistently that I stopped chalking it up to coincidence and started writing them down. If you lead customer marketing today, I’d wager at least five of these are already on your mind. So if nothing else, hopefully this send helps you feel a little less alone in the wild west of CMA that we’re all living in.
Customer marketing has stopped asking for a seat at the table
Every single conversation eventually circled back to the same tension: customer marketers have always known they bring value, but “valuable” and “funded” are different things. The posture and approach have changed. CMA leaders aren’t pitching customer marketing as a nice-to-have anymore. They’re walking into exec reviews with hard numbers on retention risk, expansion opportunity, and win rates, and telling leadership what needs fixing.
One customer marketing lead at a security company put it best: her team’s data now tells the executive team “these are the three things our customers are saying we need to do”. That’s a verrrrrry different conversation than “HeRe ArE sOmE cAsE sTuDiEs.” That’s a straight up mandate. The shift from asset factory to strategic input is real, and it’s happening fast enough that most of us are becoming data analysts whether we signed up for it or not.
AI’s biggest use case in CMA is…
Not for creating proof (thank goodness) but for housing and surfacing it.
Reps aren’t going out of their way to find case study PDFs. They’re asking Claude/ChatGPT/[insert favorite LLM here] to find them the right quote, and it shows up because their evidence library is connected under the hood.
Enterprise security company Island built what their team is calling a “proposal factory”: the second a proposal goes out, it auto-pulls relevant customer quotes and stats based on vertical and other factors. Emily Coleman (now at Deepgram) told me that when she was at LaunchDarkly, she watched their sales team’s content adoption jump ~150% because everything got embedded directly into the tools reps already live in and trust instead of building them something new to ignore.
The pattern across nearly every conversation: long-form case studies still matter (AEO, anyone?), but AI-era selling runs on micro-content. GTM teams need short, tagged, searchable proof points that can be pulled into a chat, a proposal, or a slide in seconds. People are actively rethinking their content strategy around that shift, not just their distribution.
Headcount follows proof, not the other way around
This came up several times, usually with a rueful laugh because nobody’s getting a customer marketing headcount by asking nicely, especially in today’s tech market. You get it by showing what a program with more hands could unlock.
One leader told me, with only slight hyperbole, that she could get budget approved to build a six-million-dollar facility faster than she could get headcount for a single person. However, what pushed things along for her was building something small, proving it worked, and then letting the results make the ask for her.
Anna Kim at BlueCat put a name to the other half of that equation: “buy-in is never done.” Even with great leadership who genuinely values her work, she’s had to make a habit of continuously reminding them what her team’s doing and why it matters, showing up quarter after quarter with “here’s how we’re helping the business.”
The throughline: show the work first, ask for the team second.
Trust and anonymity are still the biggest problems in the room
For anyone selling into security, healthcare, financial services, PubSec, Fed or SLED, the “will my customer actually go on record” problem hasn’t gone away, it’s just gotten more sophisticated. The fix I heard over and over had two parts: lower the effort bar (customers give a quick thumbs up to a quote they already gave their CSM on a call, instead of sitting through another 45-minute interview), and lean on third-party verification so an anonymous quote still carries weight.
This latter point was discussed at length during one of the breakout tables I moderated. Nearly everyone agreed, for example, that a CISO in a regulated industry would relate to a peer not wanting to publicly attach their name to a quote, especially around sensitive systems or customer-facing risk. I.e., anonymity doesn’t kill credibility if the quote is specific, relevant, and third-party verified.
The “customer intelligence function” is a thing
In one of my conversations, someone mentioned building something bigger than a proof library, and the way she framed it really perked my ears up. I’m dubbing it a customer intelligence function. NPS, user groups, customer advisory boards, and survey data are getting triangulated to flag at-risk accounts, spot expansion signals, and decide who should (and very much shouldn’t) be getting marketing touches right now. She went on to give the example of pausing all outbound to an unhappy account entirely so CS could repair the relationship without extra noise.
I only heard this from one team directly, but I feel like it’s the kind of idea that should be everywhere. The signals we CMAs capture should be feeding critical components and workflows across the org. Customer marketing is increasingly the team that knows the customer base better than anyone, and that’s becoming real leverage internally.
Nobody’s found the silver bullet for advocate incentives
This is the one I selfishly asked everyone I talked to and that people got most candid about. How do you reward your best advocates without turning the relationship transactional? Swag and points work for some audiences (badges and leaderboard status genuinely matter to technical communities, gotta get that network engineer street cred), but most leaders admitted they’re still figuring it out.
What is working, almost by accident, is that surveys themselves are turning into an advocate pipeline. LeanData picked up 300 new advocates from just three surveys. These were people who raised their hand for more without ever being asked to “join a program.” Turns out giving customers an easy way to say something nice about you is itself a form of recruitment. Who knew?
So what’s the common thread?
Every leader I talked to is trying to do the same three things at once:
- Prove the program’s value in numbers leadership trusts
- Get proof in front of buyers and reps without adding friction
- Figure out how AI changes both of those jobs, in real time, while it’s changing.
Nobody’s fully cracked it, but watching this room compare notes, I walked away convinced the teams doing it best are the ones who’ve made themselves indispensable by showing up with answers before anyone asked the question.
All right, now tell me: is there anything here you want to dig into more? I’ve got all sorts of thoughts swimming around from last week that I’m dying to unpack. You just tell me where to start.
Catch you next week!
🤠 More from The Outpost
Chatting with Emily Coleman (Deepgram) at Highline reminded me of her incredible session on building an attribution model for customer evidence. The perfect 45 minute crash course on how you can start to build the context layer for that “customer intelligence function” that I mentioned earlier.
Watch the replay and get the framework for building your own customer evidence attribution model
