Customer marketing rarely starts out strategic. It tends to begin as a collection of individual activities, each valuable, but disconnected from everything else. A CAB here, an awards program there, a customer story sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting to be used. Over time, that adds up to a fragmented customer experience, and any advocacy as a result feels accidental rather than intentional.

I've spent the past year working through exactly that problem, and here's what I've learned: the goal isn't to build more programs; it's to connect what already exists, make those connections meaningful, and build something that earns advocacy rather than hoping it shows up on its own.

Here's how I've been approaching it.

Take inventory

Before you can connect anything, you need to know what you're working with. Think of it as putting the clay on the table: you have to figure out what clay you have before you can build anything with it.

From earlier in my career, when I ran customer briefings, I joined a new organization and was told in my first week that someone named “Steve” needed to be brought in for an upcoming customer session. The only instruction I got was to remind him to put shoes on before walking into the briefing center.

Steve was, to put it gently, a quirky individual. Same wrinkled denim shirt every day, his initials stitched into the pocket. He'd sometimes be found lying on the floor of someone's office, just thinking. My first reaction was: why are we putting this person in front of customers?

Then I watched him in action.

Steve would sit with customers and talk about the decisions his team was making, and more importantly, why they were making them. If a customer pushed back, he wouldn't flinch. "It's okay," he'd say. "You don't have to agree with me. But this was the decision we made, and I stand by it." More customers walked out of that room saying "wow" than after any other speaker I've seen in my career.

The lesson: look around your organization and find the gems. They might be a person, a technology, a process, or something else entirely. Find what makes them stand out, because that's where you'll find the authenticity that creates real connection with customers.

When I joined Simpler and started building the customer marketing program, I took inventory across three areas.

The market

Think about what your customers are experiencing in their own environment.

  • In healthcare, spending is up slightly, but margin pressure is enormous.
  • Simpler has more than 30 products, so the competitive landscape shifts depending on which one you're talking about.
  • We're already in nine out of ten US hospitals, which means our growth path runs entirely through our existing customer base.

All of that shapes how I communicate with customers, and it drives everything else in the program.

Cross-functional partners

Sales, customer success, services, support, business operations, product, and product marketing all care about the customer, and all have something to offer. 

I work especially closely with our VP of customer experience. He looks at advocacy from the angle of finding the right customers with the right stories, while I focus on scaling that across every touchpoint we have. That partnership is foundational to how our program runs.

Technology and data

This is about laundry-listing everything you have access to.

  • Can you see on the back end where your product is being used?
  • Which features are underutilized?
  • What AI tools are available to you?
  • Can you build triggered or behavioral campaigns?
  • Do you have in-app or in-product messaging?

You need to understand the full range of possibilities before you can decide where to focus.

A framework for earning advocacy

I landed on my framework almost by accident, face down on a massage table (bad back spasms are just part of the job) turning over one question: what actually drives genuine advocacy? I couldn't write anything down, so I just kept thinking it through, and what I landed on was this: when the PRICE is right, you can earn advocacy.