Do you ever feel like your customer marketing team is viewed as the "party planners" of the organization?

It’s a struggle that I hear constantly. Over the last six months, I reviewed applications from over a hundred people for a mentorship program I run. Through that process, I uncovered a laundry list of insightful, top-of-mind challenges that our peers face daily.

The consensus is loud and clear: most customer marketers feel severely under-resourced – often a team of one trying to do the work of 10. Worse, they are seen as purely tactical. 

Leadership measures them by the number of case studies produced or references completed, rather than by revenue or retention. Consequently, proving ROI to the board becomes a massive headache.

If this resonates with you, you aren't alone. But there is a way to break out of this box.

In this article, you’ll discover how to reframe customer marketing from a tactical support function into a strategic growth engine. We will cover how to "translate the noise" for your C-suite, the six pillars of a full-lifecycle function, and how to act as the "air traffic controller" for your customer base.

The disconnect between customer marketing and leadership

There is often a fundamental disconnect between how we see ourselves and how leadership understands our role.

To many executives, "customer marketing" is synonymous with "customer advocacy." They know you are the team securing logo rights, selecting case studies, and identifying use cases. 

While important, these are tactical outputs. If leadership only sees advocacy, they assume you only need a fraction of the budget.

To get a seat at the table, you must understand what your leaders actually care about.

Your CEO, CFO, and CMO are looking at the business through three specific lenses:

  1. Efficiency: How are we lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC)? How are we using AI to be more efficient?
  2. Deal velocity: How do we shorten sales cycles and increase win rates?
  3. Net Revenue Retention (NRR): This is the big one. How do we keep the bucket from leaking?

We tend to look at efficiency as busy work or activity metrics. We look at deal velocity as reactive sales reference calls. And often, we struggle to connect our work to NRR at all.

The goal is to bridge this gap. You need to position customer marketing not as a function of "doing favors," but as the engine driving customer obsession.