No business thrives without its customers. And in today’s ultra-competitive climate, customer engagement and advocacy aren’t just nice-to-haves – they’re essential drivers of long-term success.

From personalized onboarding experiences and peer-to-peer communities to reference programs and success stories, customer advocacy plays a critical role in retention, expansion, and brand credibility. 

Yet, many organizations struggle to align these initiatives with their broader business goals, leaving advocacy efforts fragmented and underutilized.

So, how do you turn customer engagement into a strategic growth engine?

In this article, I’ll walk you through how adopting a lifecycle marketing model at Ivanti has transformed our approach to customer advocacy. We’ll explore:

  • The challenges of a post-acquisition customer landscape
  • How we built a structured, data-driven customer advocacy program
  • Practical use cases, including Project Thrive and our reference program
  • The business impact of aligning advocacy with the customer lifecycle

Overcoming post-acquisition chaos to build a unified advocacy strategy

Let me paint a rather bleak picture – one that may sound familiar to many of you.

Following a series of acquisitions, Ivanti’s customer advocacy efforts were scattered across different teams, each operating in silos. Processes were manual, our data was messy, and most critically, we couldn’t effectively demonstrate our business impact. 

It wasn’t for lack of effort – the teams were working incredibly hard – but we were missing the mark. We didn’t have clear priorities, everything felt urgent, and we lacked a comprehensive understanding of our customer journey.

The reality was that no one truly knew what it was like to do business with Ivanti from a customer’s perspective. That uncertainty created inefficiencies, confusion, and, frankly, a lot of anxiety.

Reframing our approach

At the start of this year, we took a step back and reframed our approach. It may sound obvious, but we were committed to seeing everything through the eyes of our customers. This was no small task – we undertook a major initiative to map out our full customer journey, identifying key touchpoints and aligning all our initiatives, customer experience strategies, KPIs, and business outcomes to each stage of that lifecycle.

A crucial part of this shift was the foundation of our voice of the customer (VoC) strategy, ensuring that we could listen, understand, act, and respond to our customers in a structured and meaningful way throughout their journey. 

For the first time, our entire team had complete clarity on what they were working towards and how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.

To reinforce this alignment, we developed a mission statement, a goal and metrics scorecard, and a visual framework that is now embedded at every level of the organization. It has executive buy-in, is consistently communicated across teams, and serves as a guiding reference for everything we do.

A shift in customer advocacy

One of our biggest challenges had been the siloed nature of our advocacy efforts, leading to operational inefficiencies and a disconnect from our go-to-market strategy. That is no longer the case.

First, we leveraged Ivanti’s well-established demand generation engine – scaling its methodologies and tools to expand our peer-to-peer customer community. Previously, our small advocacy team was responsible for everything, but now we can tap into subject matter experts across different teams, allowing my team to become specialists rather than generalists.

This shift also meant we could access deeper business performance analytics, creating a unified focus on driving outcomes across the customer lifecycle. 

The impact? A stronger, more strategic role for customer advocacy within the organization. We’re no longer an afterthought – we’re an essential part of the business strategy.

Demonstrating business impact and securing investment

Another major win was our ability to showcase the tangible impact of customer advocacy on business performance. The operational efficiencies we introduced allowed us to gather better data than ever before, proving the direct value of our work.

And that proof translated into action. Just this week, thanks to the metrics and reporting we built, we secured executive sign-off on a six-figure investment into our customer community programs – an initiative we had struggled to get off the ground in the past.

For us, this is more than just a financial win. It’s a validation of the work we’ve done to align advocacy with business outcomes, demonstrating that when we put the customer at the center of our strategy, both engagement and revenue follow.

This is just the beginning, but it’s a massive step forward in how we elevate customer engagement and advocacy at Ivanti.

Bringing the lifecycle marketing model to life

To truly illustrate the power of our lifecycle marketing model, let me share a couple of key initiatives that have transformed customer engagement and advocacy at Ivanti.

Accelerating adoption and value for our customers

One of our flagship programs, Project Thrive, focuses on the onboarding phase of our lifecycle. 

The goal? To help customers successfully adopt our solutions, accelerate time to value, and ultimately, thrive with Ivanti. This initiative was directly aligned with our corporate North Star goals, ensuring it had strategic weight across the organization.

What we did

The lifecycle model allowed us to bring together a cross-functional team – including stakeholders from marketing, product management, and technical teams – to design solutions that addressed key pain points in our customer experience. These challenges surfaced directly from our customer community, and we took action.

Here’s what we implemented:

  • Streamlined product release methodology – Customers now have exclusive early access to upcoming features, providing feedback before launch.
  • Biannual solution and strategy roadmap webinars – These ensure customers understand our long-term vision and strategy.
  • Monthly “RC Expert” sessions – Customers get direct access to subject matter experts to ask real-time questions and deepen their understanding.
  • Empower hours – One of my personal favorites, these are live-streamed stories told by customers, for customers.

Beyond cross-functional collaboration, Project Thrive allowed us to move beyond campaign-based advocacy and integrate a programmatic approach across the entire customer lifecycle. 

The results speak for themselves – community membership has grown significantly, and more importantly, those members continue to engage because they see real value in these initiatives.

And from a business perspective? Higher customer retention and reduced churn. But the opportunity didn’t stop there. This highly engaged, satisfied customer base became the perfect pool for advocacy – which brings me to the next major initiative.

Transforming our reference and success story program

When I took over our customer reference and success story program at the end of last year, it was – putting it politely – a mess. I debated whether to take it on at all, given that the business had produced only a handful of stories in the previous two years.

Across 40,000 customers, we had no structured way of identifying which were in a strong position to advocate for us. Compounding the issue, post-acquisition restructuring meant that our sales and customer success teams weren’t in a position to proactively surface potential advocates either. 

But under the new lifecycle marketing model, there was nowhere to hide – this was now on our leadership’s radar as a critical priority.

What we did

Given Ivanti’s large global sales organization and diverse portfolio of nearly 100 different solutions, we knew we needed technology to bring structure and scale. We implemented ReferenceEdge into our Salesforce CRM to streamline customer advocacy identification and tracking.

But as anyone in customer marketing knows, technology alone isn’t enough – adoption is everything. So we focused on:

  • Cleaning up and standardizing our story production process – We outsourced content creation to free up our team to focus on recruitment and internal alignment.
  • Rebuilding program credibility – Advocacy had a poor reputation internally, so we launched an internal education campaign to prove the program’s value to our sales and customer success teams.
  • Aligning advocacy with lifecycle moments – By integrating advocacy recruitment into key customer journey milestones, we ensured that reference opportunities naturally emerged from engaged, happy customers.

The impact

This structured approach secured executive buy-in and firmly established advocacy as a business priority. Customer references and success stories have increased, and because we now align these assets with go-to-market priorities, they are delivering measurable business impact.

And here’s what’s most exciting: for the first time, we’re beginning to attribute closed deals to the reference program. We’re only just getting started, but the potential is huge. I can’t wait to see how these numbers evolve over the next year.

The bigger picture

The adoption of a lifecycle marketing model has fundamentally changed how Ivanti engages with customers. We now have:

  • Clear business buy-in for advocacy as a strategic function.
  • Stronger internal alignment, allowing us to focus our efforts where they drive the most impact.
  • A culture of accountability, where teams across the organization actively contribute to advocacy efforts.

As a result, demand for advocacy assets is higher than ever, and most importantly, we are now seen as a trusted strategic partner in delivering business outcomes.

This is just the beginning. With a solid foundation in place, the future of customer advocacy at Ivanti is brighter than ever.

Bringing it all together: How you can apply these lessons

If you have the ability to influence a lifecycle marketing model within your organization, I hope I’ve shown you just how game-changing it can be. But even if a full lifecycle approach isn’t feasible right now, there are still valuable lessons you can apply.

For example, in the buy stage, if you’re not leveraging the processes, tools, reports, and automation your company already uses to acquire new customers in the way you engage and support existing ones, you’re missing a huge opportunity. 

Tapping into those resources – and the expertise behind them – allows your team to become specialists rather than generalists. It also enables you to be data-driven, working smarter, not just harder.

Be relentless in proving business impact

One of the biggest gaps we had for a long time was our ability to demonstrate the business impact of customer marketing and advocacy. Addressing that changed everything for us.

 If you don’t yet have the right data and reporting mechanisms in place, be relentless in getting them. You don’t need a full lifecycle model to start applying this – simply build cross-functional teams that can help design and deliver programs that drive adoption, retention, and advocacy.

And don’t do it alone. Partnering with teams across your business expands your reach and influence, making advocacy an integrated, strategic function rather than an isolated initiative.

See through the eyes of the customer

At every stage, the most important thing you can do is see things through the eyes of your customers. If possible, let them take the lead. 

Our customer-led community was already in place, but Project Thrive complemented and enhanced it – allowing us to strike the right balance between serving our customers and achieving our business goals.

The key is to map out, track, and report on the moments that matter in your customer journey. You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Progress is incremental, and every step forward counts.

Identifying and nurturing customer advocates

If you don’t yet have lifecycle maps or detailed customer journey frameworks, that’s okay. Start by conducting your own discovery process – identify the key moments of interaction your customers have with your business, and assess where you can either influence their journey toward advocacy or identify potential advocates.

And when it comes to go-to-market alignment, if you’re unsure about the business’s priorities, find the people who do know and get their support. Advocacy must be aligned with overarching business goals to be truly effective, and strong internal partnerships are key to that success.

Remember: this is a team sport. 

Advocates don’t just appear overnight – they need to be nurtured, supported, and empowered. And above all, never underestimate the power of data. Know the impact your programs have on the business, and don’t be afraid to shout about it.

This article is based on a presentation given by Louise at our Customer Marketing Summit in London, 2024.

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