How well is customer marketing defined and valued in your organization? Or has it slowly become whatever everyone else needed it to be?

As leaders, we're told we don't always get more resources, but there's one resource we severely underuse, and that's our focus. 

The real problem isn't that we lose it. It's that we give it away. And when we do, someone else spends it for us, and we end up inheriting work we never signed up for.

This article is a mindset reset, not a new checklist. Drawing on my experience repositioning a customer marketing team at EVbox, I'll walk through how to design for the work you actually want to own, not the work that drifted your way. 

The glue that stretches until it doesn't

Customer marketing often feels like being there to smooth over the cracks, to maintain the illusion of a seamless customer journey even when the organisation behind it is anything but. We act as the glue. And glue stretches beautifully, until it doesn't.

By the time you notice it's not stretching anymore, it's usually too late. Your focus is scattered, and you're not entirely sure how you got there.

Why it happens to the most capable people

Here's the thing: this doesn't happen because we're inefficient or bad at prioritizing. It's actually the opposite. It happens because we care. Because we're competent. And that competence becomes a trap.

The more capable you are, the more ambiguity flows towards you. The more gaps you can fill, the more you're expected to fill them. It's noble, but it's also self-sabotage, because the cost isn't just that you get busy…it's that you get invisible.

Scale-ups and enterprises are designed to create chaos and ambiguity. That's not going to change. Priorities shift, strategies pivot, and team structures don't always keep up. If you don't define your focus, someone else will allocate it for you.

From channel marketing to customer marketing: The EVbox story

When I joined EVbox, I led product marketing and inherited a team that was called channel marketing. Historically, they'd owned channel partner enablement – onboarding new resellers and distributors, co-marketing efforts, supporting the partner ecosystem.

Then the company strategy changed. We stopped recruiting new channel partners. And suddenly, the function this team had been built for no longer fit where the company was going.