I came into customer marketing from sales. That background changed how I think about the function, and probably explains why I get frustrated when people describe it as "the team that writes case studies."

Customer marketing has a credibility problem inside most companies. It sits under marketing alongside corporate, brand, PR and analyst relations, and it's usually the newest of the bunch.

People assume the job is to chase logos for the website, collect a few quotes, and produce the occasional case study. So that's what they ask for. And when that's all you produce, that's all you get measured on. People don’t realize customer marketing helps bridge the gap between what we say our platform can do and what customers are achieving with it. 

I've spent the last five years building the customer marketing function at Gigamon from scratch. Before that, I led customer marketing programs at McAfee and Intel. The pattern is the same everywhere: you have to earn your seat at the table by proving the work moves revenue, not by producing more content.

Here's how I've done it.

Start with the business outcome

The fastest way to lose credibility is to brief in a case study, ship it, count it, and call that a win.

When I plan any program, the first question is, without fail, "What is your company is trying to achieve in the next quarter or year?" The second is whether customer marketing can move that number.

If we're trying to accelerate deals in flight, that's a reference program problem. If we're trying to expand inside the install base, that's a lifecycle problem. If a product manager is trying to validate a roadmap bet, that's an advisory board problem.

The asset is the output. The business outcome is the reason for the work.

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Run customer marketing across three pillars

A lot of teams limit themselves to advocacy and stop there. I run the function across three connected areas, each of which touches revenue in a different way.

Customer advocacy

Testimonials, case studies, reference programs. The traditional core of the work. This pillar supports active deals, so the metric is influenced pipeline and reference-to-close conversion.

Community engagement

Executive briefings, customer advisory boards, customer-to-customer connections, social. This pillar builds the loyalty that shows up later as retention and second-order references. The customers do a lot of the heavy lifting themselves; my job is to give them the platforms.

Customer lifecycle management

This is the area most customer marketing teams don't touch, because customer success usually owns it. I partner with CS on it anyway. Onboarding, renewal, and expansion are all moments where the right message at the right time makes a measurable difference. If marketing only shows up before the sale and disappears after, you're leaving the longest part of the customer relationship on the table.

When the function runs across all three, the conversation inside the business changes. You stop being asked for assets and start being asked to help solve revenue problems.

The Customer & Commnity Engagement Playbook

Get the voice of the customer right

Authenticity gets talked about constantly, especially now that AI can produce a polished case study in 30 seconds. In cybersecurity, the most important part is protecting your customer data; there’s no way you can drop a customer's use case into an LLM. Our job is to keep their data safe; hence, we need to say no to AI. The story has to be real and protect the brand. 

The hardest part of this is internal. Brand and corporate marketing will sometimes ask me to get a customer to say a specific line. I won't do it. The moment you script the customer, you lose the only thing that makes the story worth reading.

My interview questions are open-ended on purpose: I ask:

  • What made them consider us in the first place
  • What nearly killed the deal
  • What advice they'd give someone in their role six months ago
  • About their personal goals
  • What's worrying them at work right now

One of my recent favorite questions is: describe Gigamon in one sentence to a friend. 

We cover the products and the business outcomes too, because that's the job. But the human layer underneath is what makes the story stick. People will read a story about a person. They won't read a generic case study.

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Use the voice of the customer to influence the business

When I joined Gigamon, the company wanted public cloud case studies. That was the messaging direction, and the brief came down accordingly.

The customers weren't buying public cloud. They were buying a mix of private and hybrid. I didn't have the case studies to support the original brief, because the deals didn't exist.

I partnered with product management, ran the research properly, and the company shifted its messaging from public cloud to hybrid cloud on the back of what the customers were actually doing. That's customer marketing influencing positioning, not producing collateral.

The same loop runs through our customer advisory board. We bring product leadership into the room with the customers and ask concrete prioritization questions, including which features they'd pay for if they were holding the budget. I write up an executive summary after every CAB and follow up on the asks. One of the features the board voted up two years ago became a shipped product.

When customers see their feedback turn into product decisions, they trust the channel. When product leadership sees that the input is structured and actionable, they trust the function. Both sides get stronger.

Champion the work internally

Customer marketing has to do for itself what it does for customers. If the work is invisible inside the company, the credibility problem never goes away.

I publish an executive dashboard. It shows what the team shipped, the business impact, and how that ladders to the company's goals. Writing the dashboard felt uncomfortable at first, because customer marketing instinct is to put the customer in the spotlight. I've learned to do both. We talk about champion customers; we should be willing to champion the function too.

The dashboard is how budget conversations get easier, how headcount cases get made, and how the rest of the leadership team starts treating customer marketing as a growth function instead of a service desk.

Stop chasing the perfect case study – build a portfolio instead
Stop chasing the perfect case study. Learn how to build a diverse customer story portfolio that drives real commercial impact.
Customer Marketing AllianceSarah Reynolds

Where to start

If you're standing up customer marketing or trying to expand the remit of an existing team, two pieces of advice.

First, tie everything to the company's business goals before you ship anything. Find out what the priorities are for the next two quarters and work backward from there. Without that, you'll get pulled into a thousand small requests and produce a thousand small assets that don't add up to anything.

Second, get the foundation in place in the first 30 days. A case study library, a reference program, and a tool to track activity. From there, layer in win-loss research and an advisory board. Each new program builds on the credibility of the last one.

Share the wins along the way. The small ones and the big ones. Visibility is what turns a one-person function into a team the business actually invests in.

I'm an advocate for customer marketing as a discipline. The fastest way to grow it is to prove what it can do.