This article comes from Bev Barnett’s insightful talk, ‘Going bold means never going back’, at our 2023 San Francisco Customer Marketing Summit, check out her full presentation here.

If there's one thing I've learned over my unconventional career journey, it's that going bold means never going back. 

There’s no such thing as backward - there is only now and what's next. 

This philosophy has guided me through many twists and turns to arrive at my current role as a Principal of Customer Advocacy at Workday.

My journey

Can you imagine, my career started all the way back in public relations in 1981? I've worn a lot of different hats since then. 

I'm an artist who creates 2D sculptures from found objects,  a songwriter, a grandmother, and yes, even at 62 years old, I can still deadlift 95 pounds, so don't underestimate me!

Everywhere I've been and everything I've done has shaped who I am today, even the stupid decisions. 

In the early days of my career, there was no time to worry about whether I had relevant experience or not. I was in my early 20s and all I could do was keep boldly moving forward into the unknown. 

I remember my very first day at a new in-house PR job - I flew to Boston, landed close to midnight, rented a car, and then sat stumped in the snowy airport parking lot wondering "What do I do now?" 

With only paper maps for navigation back then, I had no choice but to laugh at myself and forge ahead, even if that meant driving the wrong way down some one-way streets. Hey, I made it in the end!

The spark

While facing uncertainty like that might make some people want to cling to the familiar and comfortable, I got excited by the possibility of change. 

That excitement, to boldly embrace the unknown, is really about exercising your creativity. And we all have creativity within us, even if you don't think of yourself as an "artsy" type.

Creativity is how we navigate all parts of our lives and work. It's how you take a detailed report and summarize it for leadership in a compelling, insightful way. 

It's how you design innovative campaigns to energize customers and inspire advocacy. It's how you turn a roadblock into an opportunity.

One of my favorite examples of channeling creativity is the old metaphor of grabbing the brass ring on a vintage carousel. 

When's the last time you really thought about what it takes to reach out and snag that elusive ring? You have to fully commit, standing in the stirrups of a galloping horse, letting go of the reins just long enough to extend your arm at the perfect split-second. Sounds ridiculous, right?

But think about it - how often do you let go of what's comfortable and think about your customer marketing strategies in a totally new, bold way?

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Bringing life and work together

This idea of boldly embracing creativity comes from an artist's perspective, but it applies to absolutely every part of our lives and work. I'm reading this book called Art & Fear that drives this point home. It says:

"When we decide that we need certainty in our lives, we are not likely to risk creating something new. We have to be open and free to move as things change. And the vision is always greater than our current reality."

Don't those ideas speak loudly to our world of customer marketing and advocacy? We are always working towards a bold new vision, constantly pushing to take customer engagement and advocacy to new heights. 

As soon as we achieve one innovation, we move the goalpost further to bust through the next boundary. That's the heart of "going bold" in this game - if we're looking backward, we're stagnant.

We all profoundly experienced this universal truth during the 2020 lockdowns. Remember how much we longed to "go back to the way things were" before COVID? 

To revive all our in-person customer events, meetups, and conferences? But of course, there was no going back.

This should serve as a powerful shared reminder that there are turning points when we must boldly shift our customer strategies and tactics, ready or not.

At those moments, the choice is binary - either cling to the cozy status quo out of comfort or courageously embrace change with an adventurous, creative mindset.  

My mantras: "Never be afraid to suck" and "Go where the yeses are"

Two simple mantras have helped me navigate many such turning points with that adventurous spirit. 

The first is "never be afraid to suck at something new." You have to try bold new customer campaigns without judging yourself. Experimentation and failures are inevitable when you're charting a creative new course.

The second is "go where the yeses are." You'll often face many "no's" and rejections at first. So you have to boldly keep exploring in the direction of where customers, partners, executives - anyone, really - is saying "yes" to your vision.

These mantras remind me to approach our work with humility, curiosity, and grit. To not get derailed by setbacks and "failures," because those will always be part of the journey when you're blazing bold new trails. 

What matters is using those missteps as fuel to iterate and advance forward with persistence.

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This mindset was put to the ultimate test when my team had to navigate a major shift in how we empower and advocate for customers.

For years, our typical process was to work hand-in-hand with the customer success managers (CSMs) who have direct relationships with our customers. We'd have the CSMs invite their customers to our advocacy programs, identify ideal advocates, share feedback and insights, and more.

Then Workday started rolling out a new digital customer success model that uses automated engagement tools to provide scalable, personalized experiences with way less human touch from the CSMs.  

When we first heard about this change, my team went through something like the five stages of grief. First came sheer shock, quickly followed by denial that we could keep partnering with CSMs like we always had. 

Then we tried bargaining, which inevitably spiraled into frustration and sadness at being shut out from those established relationships.

But after some time, we reached acceptance. We realized this "roadblock" was the wide-open door we'd been looking for all along!

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One of the big reasons we advocated for implementing an advocate engagement platform was to help us scale our manual processes for identifying and connecting with customer advocates. 

Suddenly, NOT having to go through the CSM layer became our opportunity to truly put that streamlined scale into practice through digital strategies.

That's when I reminded everyone of those guiding mantras - Instead of fighting the changes, we made the bold commitment to move forward, testing innovative digital advocacy tactics through this new model.

I'll be fully transparent - our first new outreach approach straight-up failed. But you know what? That's perfectly okay! 

Failures are inevitable when you're boldly pioneering a new path. We learned a ton from that test and used the insights to iterate a better approach. 

The most innovative companies understand that "failing" is an expected part of trailblazing - what matters is having the courage to keep experimenting to keep advancing.

Final thoughts

For all of us in customer marketing, advocacy, and sales enablement roles, "empowering customers" is at the heart of our mission.

But true empowerment doesn't come from stubbornly clinging to familiar processes. It requires the boldness to recognize when you must transform, even if that first attempt at change is a miss.

My career journey has been anything but linear or conventional. Yet every strange twist and turn has shaped my philosophies for consistent creative growth.

So I encourage all of you to internalize these mindsets around going bold in your own unique way. They will empower you to embrace changes with confidence, humility, and resilience.

So be bold in relentlessly advancing your vision for customer marketing and advocacy. Let go of what's comfortable!