I ran a test this week. The answer was better than I expected, and I want to walk you through it before we get to today’s Build With Me.

The scenario I gave the test: I’m a Director of Customer Marketing at a 500-person B2B SaaS company. Tech stack is Gainsight, Pendo, and Salesforce. Annual churn has ticked up from 8 to 11 percent over the last two quarters. My CEO is asking what customer marketing is doing about it.

The question I asked: based on the kit, what’s the first agent I should build, and how do I set it up for our stack?

What came back wasn’t a generic answer about churn. It named the first agent I should build, an early-warning agent that watches accounts for signs they’re about to leave. Then it named the next three to build after that one, in the order I’d build them, and explained why each one had to come before the next. For the Gainsight setup, it told me exactly which signals to wire together (account login patterns, NPS movement, health score drops, support ticket aging), what thresholds to set, and what should happen when an alert fires (a CTA routed to the owning CSM and their manager with a 4-hour response target). It even closed by asking me the next question I’d have asked: are Pendo and Gainsight already talking to each other, because if they’re not, that’s what I’d need to fix first before any of this can work.

I want to tell you about what I was actually testing.

What I shipped this week

The free version of the Customer Continuum Copilot has three modes. Career Coach for when you’re stuck building a promotion case. CLG Strategist for when you’re building a roadmap or a 30-60-90. Content Writer for when you’re trying to turn a real moment from your week into a LinkedIn post that lands.

The paid version, which I shipped to paid subscribers this week, adds a fourth mode: Build Coach. The first three modes are advisors. They coach you on what to think about. Build Coach is different. It’s the one that actually helps you build. It pulls from the full CLG Agentic Blueprint kit I sent to paid subscribers in Issue 24, which is 135 agents organized across the seven pillars of customer marketing. Each agent has setup instructions for the platforms most of you are using (Gainsight, Marketo, Salesforce, ChurnZero, and the rest), the order to build them in, and a 90-day plan for getting the whole pillar live.

When you ask Build Coach mode to help you actually build, it doesn’t talk in abstractions. It names the agents, sequences them, and walks you through the configuration. That’s what the test above was proving.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the install link is in your paid resources folder. The whole thing takes about two minutes. If you’ve already installed the free Copilot, swap it out for the paid one and you’re set. The install README is in the same folder.

There’s something I want to be honest about. The test above proves the kit produces real coaching, not improvisation. It doesn’t yet prove the agents themselves work in production. That part is next week. I’m building the first actual agent from the kit, in public, with a working prototype and an honest implementation log. The Story Prep Agent from the Customer Advocacy pillar. Issue 26 will be the breakdown of what I built, what surprised me, what the kit got right, and what the kit needs to clarify in the next version.

Which brings us to today.

Build With Me, Week 3: Customer Advocacy

Week 1 of Build With Me was the Customer Continuum Copilot itself.

Week 2 was the Lifecycle and Adoption starter, the six-agent foundation for retention.

Today’s Week 3 is Customer Advocacy.

I picked this pillar for the third drop on purpose. Customer Advocacy is the proof engine. It’s the pillar that produces what every other function inside your company wants from you. Sales needs references for the next deal, marketing needs case studies for the next launch, CS needs champions to defuse the next escalation, product needs design partners for the roadmap, and the executive team needs customer quotes for every board deck. Customer Advocacy sits in the middle of all of that.

It’s also the pillar where customer marketing has the clearest line to revenue impact. If you can prove that customers who participate in your advocacy program retain longer, expand more, and pay back the cost of running the program many times over, you’ve made an argument no CFO can ignore.

Here’s the moment that crystallized this for me.

Years ago at Marketo, I sat in a deal review for a seven-figure renewal that was going sideways. The CS team had the relationship. Sales had the commercial conversation. Neither was going to move the deal. What moved it was a 30-minute peer call between the renewal customer and another customer who’d solved the exact same problem the year before. One conversation, one champion, one peer-to-peer credibility moment. The deal closed at full price.

That call didn’t happen by accident. It happened because we’d spent two years systematically identifying who our best advocates were, what they could speak to, and how to surface them at the right moment for the right deal. The work that made that 30-minute call possible was advocacy work, in the background, for months, before the deal review ever happened.

That’s the proof engine. And most customer advocacy programs don’t operate like that.

Most programs run on ad hoc requests from sales, case study deadlines from marketing, and “do we have a customer who’d take a reference call this week” emails from CS. They’re reactive. They burn out the customer marketing team, and they burn out the small group of customers who say yes to everything because nobody is tracking how often each advocate has been touched.

The shift is treating advocacy as a system and not as a shared service. A system that identifies advocates before sales asks, matches them to the deals where they’ll move the needle, generates the assets, runs the programs, and measures what it produced in revenue terms. When that system is running, you stop being the team that produces references on demand and start being the team that produces predictable revenue impact every quarter.

The free starter: six agents to build the foundation

The Week 3 free starter is the foundation of that system. Six agents you can build today, no fancy stack required, all human-runnable as a starting point and ready to be agentified when you’re ready:

1. Advocate Identification Agent. Defines what an advocate is for your business and builds the qualifying signals you’ll use to surface them. This is the foundation everything else depends on.

2. Advocacy Tier Classifier. Sorts your advocates into levels (case study willing, reference call willing, peer call willing, public quote willing, video willing) so you and your CSMs know exactly who can do what, before anyone asks.

3. Story Prep Agent. Generates the pre-interview brief that turns every case study interview or reference call into a focused 30-minute conversation instead of a 45-minute fishing expedition.

4. Reference Match Agent. Matches a specific sales deal to the right advocate based on industry, use case, stack, and seniority. No more “let me think about who might be a good fit” emails.

5. Engagement Cadence Agent. Tracks how often each advocate has been touched in the last 90 days so you don’t burn out your top contributors. The single most common reason advocates go cold is over-asking.

6. Advocacy ROI Agent. Calculates the revenue influenced by your advocacy program in NDR terms, so you can defend it in your QBR without flinching.

Run those six and you’ll have done more than 80 percent of customer marketing teams have built in their entire advocacy practice.

Download the full Week 3 starter here:

Access the free advocacy.md file here

For paid subscribers, the full Customer Advocacy file in the kit goes much further. 24 agents total, the order to build them in, setup instructions for Influitive, ChampionHQ, UserEvidence, and Gainsight, a 90-day plan to get the whole pillar live, and a metrics dashboard you can lift straight into your next QBR to defend the program.

For paid subscribers: your access

Here’s the link to your paid resources folder:

Access the paid advocacy.md file here

Inside you’ll find the Customer Continuum Copilot subfolder (paid Skill zip + install README) and the CLG Agent Blueprint folder with all eight kit files including the updated Customer Advocacy file (24 agents, the full operator depth I described above).

If you ran into the “invalid character” error on a previous install attempt, that’s fixed in the current zip. Re-download from the folder and re-install.

If you’re a brand-new paid subscriber, the install README walks you through the setup in five steps.

What’s coming

Next Thursday is Build With Me Week 4: Community Engagement.

The bigger thing happening next week is the first real agent build from the kit, which I mentioned above. The Story Prep Agent (#3 on the list above) is the one I picked because it’s pure AI, no integration required, and the output is something a customer marketer would actually use. I’ll publish the prompt, the synthetic customer record I’m building against, the actual output the agent produces, and the implementation log. That’s Issue 26.

If the kit is going to live up to what I’m claiming about it, that’s the test that proves it.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue resonated, forward it to one customer marketer who’d save it. That’s the best thanks I can ask for.

P.P.S. The VP Accelerator coaching practice has two slots open for Q3. If you’ve been thinking about working with me one-on-one to map your path from Director to VP in Customer Marketing or Customer Growth, reply to this email and we can chat more.

On Friday afternoon I spent an hour with about thirty customer marketers in Mary Green’s Customer Marketing and Advocacy Weekly community. We walked through the agent blueprints I’ve been writing, the CLG Flywheel app, the copilot I gave away last week. The slides had numbers, screenshots, the works.

The most useful thing I told them wasn’t on any of those slides.

About halfway through, somewhere between explaining a build process and showing the next visual, I said the words “MD file” out loud. Mary jumped in right after to translate for someone in the room who hadn’t heard the term. Her advice was the cleanest version of the lesson I’ve heard anyone give: when you hear something you don’t recognize, jump past the “I don’t know how to do this” feeling and just go ask Claude. I followed her with the truth. A year ago I had no idea what a terminal was. I had no idea how to build anything technical. I just started from ground zero and asked questions.

The room thought I was advanced. The truth is I just started earlier than most of them. The capability gap that looks so wide right now is a willingness gap, and not really a knowledge gap. It’s the willingness to look stupid for ninety days while you figure out what an MD file is and why it matters.

Three signals from that afternoon pinned this down for me. Mary herself, who runs an entire community of customer marketers, admitted she opens the CLG Flywheel app and feels a little overwhelmed by how much there is to work through. Someone else in the room asked carefully whether companies are going to keep cutting these teams in half, and the honest answer is yes, with the survivors expected to vibe-code their way through what used to take a full ops team. A third asked whether companies are already expecting customer marketers to figure AI out without a tool budget, and that answer is also yes, it’s already here. The expectation is moving faster than the training is.

After the call ended, the thing that kept replaying in my head was how many of the people in the room walked away with energy but no first step. That's the gap I started this series to close. Every Thursday from here through the end of summer, a new piece of the Customer Continuum Copilot ships. Real files, real logic, fork it and run it. The point isn't to keep talking about building, I actually want you to build.

What I’m shipping this week

Since I’m asking you to start building, the only honest move is to start with you. Build With Me Week Two is the lifecycle pillar, the first of seven pillar modules that stack on top of the Customer Continuum Copilot base install from Week One. Each week of this series adds the next module. By the time we’ve shipped all seven, you’ll have a complete Copilot built in public, one pillar at a time. The file I’m dropping below is the agent blueprint I’d build first if I were starting a new customer marketing function tomorrow.

It names six lifecycle agents. Each watches specific signals and triggers specific actions. Together they replace the patchwork of manual onboarding nurtures, adoption nudges, save sequences, and renewal plays most teams stitch together by hand.

Onboarding Orchestrator designs and delivers a 90-day personalized journey for every new customer, segmented by persona, triggered by setup milestones. Customers who complete a structured journey hit value milestones about 30% faster than those outside one.

Adoption Signal Watcher continuously monitors product usage and flags adoption gaps before they turn into churn risks. This is the keystone. Every other agent in the blueprint reads from its output. Build it first.

Milestone Celebrator recognizes when a customer hits a value milestone and turns the moment into a story seed, an advocacy invite, or a referral. Most teams celebrate milestones at renewal time, by which point the customer has forgotten. Catching them in the moment compounds advocacy 3 to 4 times.

At-Risk Detector combines NPS, support escalations, login decline, and community signals into a single churn risk score and triggers a save sequence early. By the time most teams identify churn risk, the customer is already 90 days from non-renewal. This agent catches risk 60 to 90 days earlier.

Renewal Orchestrator manages the T-180, T-120, T-90, and T-30 sequence with value framing and risk sweeps. Renewals run on muscle memory in most companies, which is why GRR rarely improves over time. A structured orchestration with personalized value framing typically lifts GRR by 2 to 4 points.

Expansion Nudge detects expansion opportunities and surfaces them with peer-matched proof and an executive entry point. Expansion is where NRR lives. Most teams chase it through outbound, which converts poorly. The lifecycle approach surfaces customers already showing readiness signals and converts 3 to 5 times better.

The file linked below has the full detail for each agent: what it watches, what it triggers, where it pays back, and the order I’d build them in. The starter recommendation is the Adoption Signal Watcher first because it’s the foundation, then the At-Risk Detector second, because saving accounts has higher ROI than expanding them and most teams under-invest there.

One note on what you’re getting. The file below is the free starter version, structured to give you enough to start building. Paid Customer Continuum subscribers also get the Implementation Kit, which holds the operational depth: 20-plus lifecycle agents, JSON schemas, system-specific integration playbooks for Salesforce, Gainsight, Pendo, and ChurnZero, and 90-day rebuild templates. Both are real. The starter is enough to get things going; the kit is for teams ready to rebuild lifecycle end-to-end.

💎 For paid subscribers

The deeper file (01 - Lifecycle & Adoption.md) holds 20 lifecycle agents with full step-by-step build instructions, specific platform recommendations for Gainsight, Pendo, ChurnZero, and Salesforce, signal thresholds for each trigger, and the success metrics that prove it’s working. The free starter below is six of these in a tighter operational frame. Drive folder access details at the bottom of this issue. New paid subscriber? Reply to this email.

How to use it

The lifecycle.md file is designed to work three ways. As a Claude skill you drop into your Customer Continuum Copilot pack from last week. As a build spec you hand to your RevOps or go-to-market engineering team. As a benchmark you compare your existing programs against to find your gaps.

If you want to actually build something this weekend, here’s the shortest path:

1. Download the lifecycle.md file linked below.

2. Open Claude and paste the contents in as instructions, or add it to your skill folder alongside the copilot files from Week One.

3. Tell Claude which signals you actually have access to in your current stack: Salesforce, Gainsight or ChurnZero, Pendo or Mixpanel, your support tool, your community platform, your survey tool. Be honest about what you have and don’t have.

4. Ask Claude to rewrite the Adoption Signal Watcher logic using only the systems on your list. The blueprint is system-agnostic; the customized version is specific to your stack.

5. Take the customized version to your RevOps team as a requirements doc and ask what’s feasible in 30 days versus next quarter.

Build the smallest working version first. Ship one agent, validate it, then add the next.

Download lifecycle.md here

Build With Me Week Three

Next Thursday is the Voice of Customer pillar. Seven pillars total, seven agent blueprints, all built in public over the next few months. By the end of the series you’ll have a complete Customer Continuum Copilot covering every pillar of customer-led growth, assembled module by module. The Voice of Customer drop stacks on top of the Copilot and the lifecycle file: it tells you what signals to surface that feed the Adoption Signal Watcher you’ll have built by then.

If you want to be ready for it, do one thing this weekend. Build the Adoption Signal Watcher in its simplest possible form. Ask Claude to write you a basic version that runs on a Google Sheet of customer accounts with three columns: last login date, feature adoption count, and most recent NPS score. That’s it. The fancy version comes later. Start ugly.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue gave you something useful, forward it to one person who’s been waiting to start. That’s how this grows, one real reader at a time.

P.P.S. If you want the deeper paid version of what I’m building, the Implementation Kit holds the operational depth and ships to paid subscribers as each pillar drops. Subscribe at kevinkennethlau.substack.com.

The VP Accelerator is where I work one-on-one with customer marketers making the jump to the next level. If that’s where you’re headed, reply to this email and we’ll talk.

Read more

Six days ago, at the bottom of last week’s issue, I made a promise. I said I was going to start building in the open, and I gave it a name, Build With Me. I’ll be honest with you about something. When I typed that line, I didn’t actually know what I was going to build first. I just knew I’d said it to a few hundred people, and saying a thing out loud to a few hundred people has a way of turning it into a deadline.

So I sat down this week and built a copilot. A version of my own brain that you can run on your own Claude account, for free. The download is further down, and the whole thing came out of a realization I want to walk you through, because it’s really the point of this issue.

Last week I wrote that the hard part of AI was never personal productivity. The hard part is taking it multiplayer, bringing your team and your customers along instead of just getting a little faster by yourself. I believed that when I wrote it. What I didn’t notice until this week is that I’d been quietly breaking my own rule.

For about a year I’ve had a rough version of this copilot built just for me. I trained it on the way I think about customer marketing, and I used it to draft, to pressure-test ideas, to think out loud. It was genuinely useful. It was also completely single-player. The best tool I’d built was locked inside my own account, helping exactly one person.

That’s the thing about the multiplayer move. It’s easy to preach and uncomfortable to actually make, because making it means giving away the edge you’ve been keeping for yourself. So this week I rebuilt it to give away.

What it does

It runs in three modes, and you pick the one that fits what you’re trying to do.

The first is a career coach. If you’re a customer marketer trying to prove your value or make the case for a promotion, it walks you through the things that actually move those conversations. It diagnoses why you might be stuck, it maps the stakeholders who decide your next title, and it gives you the language to answer the question every one of us eventually gets, which is “show me the revenue impact.”

The second is a strategist. If you’re building or fixing a program, it works through the seven pillars I’ve used for fifteen years, which are community, lifecycle and adoption, voice of customer, advocacy, communications, education, and executive engagement. It connects whatever you’re working on back to retention and expansion, and it hands you a structured plan instead of a pile of ideas.

The third is a content partner. If you want to write about your work the way I write about mine, it pulls the real story out of you first, holds you to a few hard rules, and helps you turn what you’ve lived into something worth reading. It writes in your voice, not mine, which was the one rule I refused to bend on.

What building it taught me

Here’s the part I didn’t expect, and it’s the reason I think you should build something like this even if you never give it away.

Teaching a machine to think like me forced me to write down things I’d carried in my head for fifteen years and never once said out loud. How I actually diagnose a struggling team. The real difference between a director who stays a director and one who becomes a VP. Why I open every post with a scene instead of a statistic. All of it had lived as instinct, and instinct is invisible until you try to hand it to someone else.

You don’t know what you know until you try to teach it. That alone was worth the week.

How to get it

It’s free, and it’s yours. Download using the link below:

Download My Copilot

Once you have it, you can load it into Claude in a couple of ways, and the file walks you through both. The simplest version takes about two minutes, and then you can ask it the kinds of questions you’d otherwise ask me.

If you’ve never added a file like this to Claude before, don’t worry, it takes about two minutes and you don’t need to be technical. Here’s the simplest way, and it works on any Claude plan, including the free one.

1. Download the file from the link above and unzip it. You’ll see a small folder with a few files inside.

2. Go to claude.ai and start a new chat.

3. Click the plus or paperclip icon in the message box, attach the files, and send a message that says, “Use these as your instructions and introduce yourself.”

4. That’s it. Now ask it anything you’d ask a customer marketing advisor.

If you’re on a paid Claude plan and you want it available in every chat without attaching it each time, you can add it permanently instead. Go to Settings, then Features, find the Skills section, and upload the zip file there. Claude will pull it in on its own whenever you ask a customer marketing question. That path needs a paid plan with code execution turned on, so if that sentence means nothing to you, just use the four steps above and you’re all set.

Try it with something real. Ask it to help you build the case for headcount, or to audit a program you’re not happy with, or to turn a hard week at work into a post. See what it gives back. And then tell me where it falls short, because that’s the part I actually want. This is week one of building in the open, which means the next versions get shaped by what you tell me isn’t working yet.

What’s next

Over the coming weeks I’m going to keep adding to it in public. The next pieces are the deeper reference files, the lifecycle engine with the metrics that matter at each stage, the advocacy program structure, the measurement model. Each one becomes its own issue, and each one drops into the same copilot so it gets sharper over time. That’s the whole idea of Build With Me. You watch it get built, and you get every piece as it ships.

— Kevin

P.S. If this gave you something useful, forward it to one person who’s trying to make customer marketing matter inside their company. That’s how this grows, one real reader at a time.

Halfway through my keynote at Demand & Expand yesterday, the room reached for their phones, and not to check email. They were taking photos of the screen.

I had spent the first half of the talk walking through something I’m genuinely proud of, the thirty-person customer marketing function I built at Freshworks. Seven pillars, two years, real numbers behind every one of them. People listened politely, but the notepads mostly stayed closed.

Then I said one sentence. “If I had to build it again today, I wouldn’t build it the same way.” And I shifted the conversation from building a traditional organization to building customer-led growth with a layer of agents doing the operational work.

That’s when the phones came up. I could see it from the stage, a row at a time. They weren’t capturing a slide so much as capturing an idea they wanted to carry back to their own teams on Monday.

The same thing happened across all three talks I gave this week, the same moment landing the same way every time.

The messages afterward all said a version of the same thing: people wanted the slides. One organizer told me the session chat had filled with requests for the deck before I had even left the stage.

What stayed with me longer was a different kind of comment. Person after person came up to tell me they felt validated. They had been quietly building toward this, trusting an instinct they couldn’t quite name, and the talk gave them the language for it. They didn’t walk away thinking they had to start over, they walked away knowing they had been right all along, and that the tools had finally caught up to them.

So this issue is about that moment. Why it landed, and what it means for how you build customer marketing from here.

Single-player is the easy half

Here’s the part of the agent conversation that doesn’t get said enough.

Using AI to make yourself faster is the easy half, and you can do it this afternoon. You take the most repetitive task in your week, hand it to an agent, and get hours back. That’s real and you should do it. But be honest about what it is. It’s a productivity gain, the arithmetic of addition, where one person plus one good tool equals one faster person.

That’s single-player mode, and almost anyone can reach it now. The smaller and nimbler your team, the faster you get there, because you have less to untangle and fewer approvals standing between an idea and a working agent. It’s also why the biggest companies, the ones with the most budget and the most data, are often the slowest to move. They’re carrying a decade of systems that don’t talk to each other and layers of process between an idea and a shipped change.

Addition only ever makes the function you already have run a little quicker; transformation is something else entirely, and it’s the rest of this issue.

Multiplayer is the hard half, and that’s the point

Multiplayer mode is a different thing entirely.

I grew up on video games, and the difference between the two modes was never subtle. I spent years on StarCraft and Warcraft, then World of Warcraft, then Counter-Strike. Single-player was me against the game, at my own pace, and if I made a mistake I was the only one who paid for it. Multiplayer was a different sport. A Counter-Strike round turned on one player being out of position. A World of Warcraft raid put twenty-five people in a room where every one of them had to know their role, because if a few didn’t, the whole group wiped and started over.

That’s the part worth sitting with. Multiplayer was never single-player with extra people added in, it was coordination, roles, communication, and a dozen ways to fail that simply didn’t exist when you played alone. It was harder by an order of magnitude, and anyone who has run a raid knows it.

Customer marketing with agents works the same way. Multiplayer is taking the thing that made you faster and driving it across your team and the people around them. It’s the move from one faster person to a function where the work itself multiplies. And it’s infinitely harder than the single-player win, because the moment other people depend on what you built, you’ve inherited a new set of problems.

You have to maintain it, because a tool a team relies on can’t quietly break. You have to update it as the product changes and the customers change. You have to put governance around it so it does the right thing when no one is watching. You have to build guardrails for the cases you didn’t foresee. And you have to make sure people actually know how to use it, which is its own full job, because a powerful system nobody adopts is just expensive shelfware.

That list is the reason multiplayer is hard, and it’s also the reason multiplayer is worth anything at all.

When you clear all of it, the math stops being addition. One and one stop equalling two and start equalling twenty-five, because the thing you built is now multiplying across every person who touches it. That’s the real line between a productivity gain and a transformation. Productivity is the addition you can feel by Friday; transformation is the multiplication you build over quarters, and it only shows up on the far side of the hard, unglamorous work that most people skip.

The hard part is connection

Here’s what surprised me most in the rooms this week.

The hard part of all of this isn’t the AI getting smart enough, because the models are already good. The real hard part is everything around the model: the change management, the training, and the people who understand the plumbing, how to connect the tool to your data, your systems, and the real context of your customers.

Agents are only as useful as the context they’re given. An agent with no context is a very confident stranger. The work of feeding it the right context and connecting it to the right systems has become serious enough that it now has its own emerging standard, and the name of that standard matters far less than the reason it exists. Context is the hard part, not the intelligence.

So the person who matters most in this next chapter isn’t the fastest individual operator, it’s the strategist who can think in multiplication instead of addition. That’s the person who looks at a new tool and doesn’t ask how it helps them this week, but asks how it becomes something their whole team can run on, and what has to be true for that to work safely.

There’s an old line about power and responsibility, and it belongs in this conversation. The moment you build something a team depends on, you’ve taken on responsibility for what it does, how it fails, and who it touches. That responsibility is the job itself.

One attendee wrote to me afterward with the detail that stuck with me most. She had a 1:1 with her boss right after the session, walked in with the ideas she had just taken from the room, and her boss loved every one of them. That’s the whole point, because the thinking is only worth something if it helps you win the conversation that happens next.

What this means for your career

If you’re a Director of Customer Marketing reading this, here’s the part that matters most.

The old path to VP was a headcount path. You got promoted when your team grew large enough that someone decided the scope deserved the title. The new path is narrower and far more interesting. It belongs to the person who can take a function multiplayer, who can build something a team runs on, govern it, and bring people along without breaking what already works.

That’s harder to point at than a headcount number, and it’s far more valuable, because most people will stop at the single-player win. They will get personally faster and call it a transformation. The leader who earns the seat is the one who did the unglamorous part, the maintenance and the guardrails and the training, and turned a personal productivity gain into something the whole function compounds on.

You don’t need permission to start becoming that person, but rather thinking in multiplication.

How to start

You don’t need budget or permission to begin, just one pillar and one task.

Start with the pillar tied to your company’s top priority right now. If the whole company is focused on net revenue retention, start in lifecycle and adoption. If it’s closing deals faster, start in advocacy. Pick the pillar your CEO is already talking about, because that’s where a small win gets noticed.

Inside that pillar, find the single most repetitive task you do, the one eating an afternoon of your week. That’s your first agent. Build it, measure the hours it gives back, and show your manager what one designed agent did to your week.

That first agent is single-player, and that’s fine, because it’s how you learn. The real career move is what you do next, when you take that one working agent and ask the harder question. What would it take for a teammate to use this too? What has to be documented, governed, and trained before the function can rely on it, rather than treating it as a trick that only works when you run it? The day you start answering those questions is the day you stop being an operator and start becoming an architect.

If you want a map of where this goes, the CLG Flywheel app lays out the full blueprint. You can run the diagnostic on your own function, see where you sit across the seven pillars, and look at the agent designs that map to each one.

One more thing before I go

Someone came up after one of the talks and told me to think bigger about my own career, that I had impressed a lot of people in that room, and then offered to open a few doors for me. I’m sitting with that.

I share it here for one reason. The architect skill isn’t only how you build a function, it’s how you build a reputation. The people who learn to design systems, and who do it in the open where others can see the thinking, get noticed. That’s true for me, and it’s true for you. Build something visible enough and the doors start opening on their own.

What’s next

I want to try something with this newsletter.

Instead of only writing about the architecture, I’m going to build it in the open. I’m going to keep improving the CLG Flywheel app, designing new agents, refining the blueprint, and I’m going to bring you inside the process while I do it.

Call it Build With Me. You’ll see what I’m designing, why I’m designing it that way, what works, what breaks, and the governance and guardrails that make it safe to hand to other people. The goal is that you aren’t just reading about becoming an architect, you’re watching one work in real time, and borrowing whatever is useful for your own function.

That starts in the next few issues, and I think it’s going to be the most useful thing I’ve made here.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue made you think about one task you could hand to an agent this week, forward it to one person on your team and ask them which task they would pick. The conversation is worth more than the read.

If you’re new here, this is the newsletter for customer marketers who want their work to matter at the executive level. Thank you to the 550+ of you reading every week, and especially to the paid subscribers keeping this thing alive.

Last November my team pitched me on a big investment heading into 2026: a customer awards program built specifically to engage executives and influencers our existing programs weren’t reaching.

We already had a robust customer marketing practice. Community at scale. Education hitting 95%+ completion. Advocacy producing 500+ acts a year. A VoC engine feeding product and CS. None of it was the problem. The problem was a specific set of customers our programs couldn’t reach. The CIO and decision makers who became a customer two years ago and never said yes to a CAB invite. The economic buyer whose name was on every renewal but had never met anyone on our team. The exec at our highest ARR account who only took meetings when there was a contract in motion.

The bet my team made was that a properly designed awards program could engineer access to those specific customers in a way no other program in our portfolio could. I funded it. We launched.

Nominations opened in November. Judging happened in March. Winners got announced in April. The recognition event itself landed in May at the F1 Miami Grand Prix.

Six months in, the answer is clear. The program worked.

Eight customer executives in a suite for two days produced reference deployments, speaking commitments, a CAB join, and expansion conversations that started over a cocktail hour. Most of those executives had never engaged with our other programs at this depth before. That was the entire point.

I’ll walk through the full playbook live on Tues with UserEvidence at 9am PT. Grab a seat here. For those who can’t make it, here’s the version in writing.

The mental model most programs get wrong

Most customer awards programs follow the same five-phase arc. You launch in November. Nominations open through January. Judging happens in February. Winners get announced in March or April. The recognition event itself usually lands in April or May.

That last phase is the amplification moment. External buzz peaks. Attention peaks. Brand peaks. The customers you’ve been chasing all year are suddenly in a room with you, holding a trophy, posing for photos.

Most programs treat this peak as the destination. It isn’t. It’s the starting line.

The energy you spend five or six months building does not belong to the dinner. It belongs to the twelve months that follow. What you do with that energy is the program.

The twelve-month post-award system

Five stages turn one event into a year of compounding return.

Q1: Asset capture. The hardest thirty-day window of the year. Video, written case study, social content, headshot, quote bank. You capture everything while enthusiasm is at peak. Day 30 is the difference between a winner who becomes a year of content and a winner who becomes a trophy on a shelf.

Q1: Reference deployment. The winner becomes a deployable reference asset. AMs and CSMs get a bio, talking points, and a capacity protocol that prevents over-asking. Expect four to six reference deployments per winner in the first six months if you do this right.

Q2: Speaking opportunities. Industry events, podcasts, webinars. The winner becomes a category-facing voice for your company. This is where the compounding starts to feel real.

Q2 to Q3: Co-marketing and PR. Joint announcements, analyst briefings, executive op-eds. The story scales beyond your owned channels.

Q3 to Q4: Re-engagement. CAB recruitment, executive sponsor program, peer panel speaking, next year’s nomination push. The relationship moves from transactional to strategic.

Five deliberate stages. None of them happen by accident.

The first 30 days are non-negotiable

If I had to pick one stage to spend most of your time on, it’s the first thirty days after the recognition event.

The window of peak enthusiasm closes faster than people expect. The exec who said yes to your speaking ask at the dinner has a different calendar in two weeks. The customer who agreed to a case study before dessert has a different priority list by the next quarter. The quotes you didn’t capture in the first week are quotes you won’t get.

Here’s what the first thirty days should look like.

Within 24 hours. Candid photos, recognition moment shots, short-form video reactions. Quote snippets captured live during the event itself.

Within 7 days. Structured video interview. 30 to 45 minute Zoom with questions prepared in advance. This is your raw material for everything that follows.

Within 14 days. Written case study draft sent to the customer for review with a clear deadline. Two rounds of edits maximum. Legal review in parallel, not sequential.

Within 30 days. Full asset library packaged. Headshot, logo lockup, video reel, quote bank, case study PDF, social asset suite. One folder per winner. Ready to deploy.

Do this and the winner becomes deployable. Skip this and the winner becomes a memory.

The mistakes that kill year one

Five patterns I see across most programs. I made versions of each one myself in the early months.

Treating recognition as the entire program. The event is the start, not the end. Without the post-award playbook, the program fades and the budget gets cut in year two.

Only nominating biggest accounts. Skips the relationship-building opportunity with new logos and rising stars. The biggest accounts often have the least incremental relationship value because you already have those execs on speed dial. The ones you don’t have are who you want in the room.

Skipping internal communications during the build. Sales and CS need to know who won and why before customers do. Brief them continuously through the six-month timeline. Surprise announcements create surprise resistance.

No follow-up commitment at the recognition event. People leave the room without a specific next touchpoint. The energy dissipates within a week. Every executive who attends needs to walk out with a calendar invite on the books.

Forgetting the thank-you loop. Winners stop saying yes when they feel used. The thank-you note after every reference call is the cheapest insurance you can buy.

What’s next

If you want the live version with the visuals, the Q&A, and the parts I can’t put in writing, join us Tuesday May 19 at 9 AM PT with UserEvidence.

— Kevin

If this is your first issue, the best way to support this work is to forward it to one customer marketer who’s thinking about their next move.

My first job paid $7.25 an hour at Starbucks while I was in college.

I remember the mornings most. Lines stretched to the door, customers who hadn’t had their caffeine yet, every person needing something different in the next 90 seconds. The pressure was real, and so was the part nobody warned me about: most people are at their most irritated when they don’t have their coffee, and the way you handle that moment is the whole job.

What I learned at Starbucks wasn’t how to make a latte. It was that I’m good in environments where customer interaction is the work. The harder the moment, the more I leaned in. I figured out something about myself behind that counter that I’ve carried into every role since.

That insight, more than anything else, is the reason my career took the shape it did.

This issue is about the math, the engine, and the framework that turn a series of jobs into a career you actually want.

The math nobody runs

If you work 40 to 50 years and average 3 to 4 years per role, you only get 10 to 15 operator positions in your entire career.

That’s it.

Most people don’t think about their career this way. They treat each job as the next step on a continuous ladder, with promotions and lateral moves blurring together into a long stream of work. The reality is more discrete than that. You have a finite number of meaningful chapters, and each one is a strategic choice that either compounds toward where you want to end up or doesn’t.

Once you internalize this, every job conversation gets sharper. You stop accepting roles because they’re available and start accepting roles because they move you toward the seat you’re trying to land in twenty years.

For me, that seat is Chief Customer Officer or Chief Experience Officer. Every operator role I’ve taken since I figured that out has been a deliberate step toward it.

The peak earning window

There’s a second piece of math that matters even more.

Most lifetime earnings happen between roughly 35 and 55. The years before are foundation. The years after are typically when career velocity slows. The 20 years in between are when seniority, specialized skills, and reputation compound into peak compensation.

The data is clear on this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows median earnings rise sharply through the 30s, peak between 45 and 54, and start to taper after 55. ADP’s wage research puts the peak earning cohort at 45 to 54 with a median wage of about $97,600. After 55, the curve bends downward as people move into part-time work, reduced workloads, or early retirement.

If you don’t compound during that 20-year window, you don’t get the years back.

I’m 40 today. I’m entering the peak window right now. The work I do over the next 15 years is the work that determines how high the ceiling rises during the years where the ceiling matters most. That math is what makes this issue urgent for me, and it’s why I think it should be urgent for you too if you’re anywhere in that range.

The arc

Here’s how my comp moved across roles, anchored to my Starbucks starting point as a multiplier baseline.

Starbucks (college): $7.25 / hour. Index: 1.0x

Google (2012): about $25 / hour, or roughly $75,000 base. Index: about 5x

First startup (consulting and strategy): about 26% jump. Index: about 6.3x

Second startup: about 27% jump. Index: 8x

Mid-career role: about 33% jump. Index: about 10.7x

Senior role: about 25% jump. Index: about 13.3x

VP role: a larger jump than average that reflected both the title shift and the scope expansion. Index: about 19x

Most recent role: another deliberate move. Index: about 21x

The average jump per move was 25 to 30 percent. Some were higher. The cumulative effect across 7 transitions is a base salary that grew roughly 21x from where I started.

For comparison: someone at a single company averaging the typical 3 to 5 percent annual raise over the same time would have grown their salary by roughly 60 to 100 percent. The compounding gap between staying and moving is enormous.

This isn’t an argument that everyone should change jobs constantly. It’s a data point about what’s structurally possible if you treat your career like a brand-building exercise rather than a series of next jobs.

The engine: brand-building between jobs

Here’s what most people miss about compensation jumps.

The negotiation itself is downstream of the work you’ve done in the years between jobs. The 25 to 30 percent jump didn’t happen because I was clever in the moment. By the time the conversation came up, I had become someone the next role needed, and the compensation followed.

Every role I’ve taken expanded my brand in a specific direction. Adobe and Marketo gave me depth in advocacy and post-sale growth at scale. F5 gave me the chance to lead a function in a different industry and take on a broader remit. Each role added a chapter to the story I was telling about who I am and what I do.

Two things have helped me stay intentional about the brand-building work between roles.

First, having an executive coach or mentor. The market today is harder than it was two or three years ago, but you can still be intentional about your career arc. The right coach helps you see your trajectory from outside the day-to-day grind, ask better questions about where you’re headed, and avoid the drift that happens when you let the job dictate the direction. If you don’t have a coach, find one. If you can’t afford one, find a mentor who’s two or three roles ahead of where you are. That single relationship has changed more about how I think about my career than any single role I’ve held.

Second, niche down. One of my old mentors, used to say “the riches are in the niches.” I’ve thought about that line constantly over the years. The temptation in any field is to broaden your appeal, hedge across multiple specialties, become a generalist who can fit anywhere. The reality is the opposite.

Specialization is what makes you findable, memorable, and valuable.

The deeper you go in your niche, the more the market pays for what you uniquely know. My niche is customer-led growth and post-sale revenue, and the more I’ve leaned into that lane, the more the right opportunities have come to me.

The lesson: don’t optimize for the next title. Optimize for the next chapter of your story. The compensation will follow if the story compounds.

The framework: how to choose your next role on purpose

A few years ago, working with a coach, I built what we called the Good Options Framework. It’s a way to evaluate opportunities across multiple dimensions rather than letting one dimension (usually compensation) dominate the decision.

Eight criteria:

• Strategy: Will I have a seat at the table? Can I shape strategy, not just execute it?

• Growth and Development: Is there real upward mobility here? Promotions, increased scope, budget expansion?

• Vision of Leadership: Do I trust the C-suite? Will they give me autonomy?

• Values: Is this a customer-centric company? Does the brand align with what I believe?

• Title: Is the title one I’m proud of? Does it open future doors?

• Compensation: Does the package meet my number?

• Work-Life Balance: Can I take vacation without anxiety? Will I burn out here?

• Manager Qualities: Empathy, mentorship, player-coach mentality?

The framework alone isn’t the move but the second exercise: forced-choice ranking.

You take all eight criteria and pit them against each other in head-to-head matchups. Strategy versus Compensation. Values versus Title. Work-Life Balance versus Growth. Each round you pick which one matters more, until you have a stack rank.

When I did this exercise, my stack rank looked like this:

1. Values (7 wins)

2. Compensation (5 wins)

3. Work-Life Balance (4 wins)

4. Vision of Leadership (3 wins)

5. Growth and Development (2 wins)

6. Manager Qualities (2 wins)

7. Strategy (1 win)

8. Title (1 win)

Two things became clear.

First, values matter to me more than I realized. I’d been treating compensation as the lead signal in role evaluations, when in reality, values were the deeper filter. Roles that met my comp number but failed my values check would have been mistakes regardless of what they paid.

Second, title matters less than I thought. I had been chasing VP-level titles for years, but in the forced-choice exercise, title kept losing to almost everything else. Once I saw that, I gave myself permission to evaluate roles on substance rather than label.

This framework is the most useful career tool I have. I run it every time I’m considering a meaningful move, and it has saved me from at least two roles that looked good on paper but would have been wrong for me.

For paid subscribers: the worksheet

I built a worksheet to make this exercise easy to run. It walks you through scoring each of the 8 criteria for any role you’re evaluating, the full 28 head-to-head matchups, and a tally section that surfaces your stack rank.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can find the worksheet below:

Access Here

Run it once on your current role to see what you’re actually optimizing for. Run it again on any role you’re considering. The gap between the two answers is usually where the real career decision lives.

The takeaway

A career is 10 to 15 operator roles. Your peak earning window is 20 years, from roughly 35 to 55. The compensation that compounds across those years is downstream of the brand you build between jobs, the niche you commit to, and the framework you use to choose them.

If you take one thing from this issue, build your version of the Good Options Framework. Run the forced-choice exercise. Know your stack rank before the next opportunity lands in your inbox, not after.

The readers who make the best moves aren’t the best negotiators but understand what exactly they’re optimizing for before the conversation starts.

Next week

Issue 21 takes on the playbook for building a customer awards program that creates real strategic value, with the behind-the-scenes from the program we just wrapped at F1 Miami. I’ll also be doing a live session with UserEvidence on May 19 walking through the full system.

Talk soon,

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue helped you, please forward it to one person thinking about their next move. That’s how this newsletter grows.

Read more

If you’re getting value from this, the best thing you can do is forward it to one customer marketer who needs it.

A few years ago I sat across from a CRO who told me, completely confident, that customer marketing was “the team that gets logos for the website.”

He had been at the company for eight months. Nobody had corrected him. Not the CMO, not the previous customer marketing leader, not the VP of Demand Gen who knew better. He built his entire view of the function on a single interaction with a case study request, and that view was now shaping how customer marketing showed up in board materials.

That’s the problem in one scene. The function gets defined by whoever talks about it most confidently in the room, and most of the time that person isn’t us.

This issue is about fixing that.

Yesterday’s LinkedIn post laid out the misunderstanding. The CRO thinks we’re a reference and speaker desk. PMM thinks we just produce evidence. CS thinks we hand out swag and inflated titles to customers. The CMO thinks we’re tactical at best, not strategic. And almost everyone collapses the entire function into customer advocacy, which is one of seven pillars.

The fix is two things, not one. Define the function. Then educate continuously, because bias doesn’t correct itself.

Part one: define the function

Every customer marketing leader should be able to answer four questions in one breath:

• What are the seven pillars of customer marketing?

• Which two or three is your team actually running today?

• Where is the gap between what you run and what the business needs?

• What does customer marketing orchestrate at scale that no other function can?

If you can’t answer those, the function is whatever the loudest stakeholder said it was last quarter.

The seven pillars:

→ Lifecycle and adoption: getting customers to value faster after the sale

→ Customer advocacy: turning happy customers into proof and pipeline

→ Community: building peer-to-peer trust at scale

→ Customer education: making the product easier to master

→ Customer communications: keeping customers informed and engaged

→ Voice of customer: surfacing insight back to the business

→ Executive engagement: building trust at the top of the account

Most teams run two or three of these well and get blamed for not delivering on the other four. It’s not just a performance problem but how we define what we do with our stakeholders.

The deck every customer marketer should build in the first 30 days of any role is simple.

• Page one is the seven pillars.

• Page two is what the team is investing in this year and why.

• Page three is what the team is explicitly not doing and why.

• Page four is what would change if the team had one more headcount, one more dollar, or one more quarter.

• Page five is the orchestration claim.

The orchestration claim is the line that changes the room. Customer marketing orchestrates GTM at scale because no other function sits closer to the customer. Every play and every program runs through us. None of it works without the customer at the center.

That’s the definition. Print it. Use it.

Part two: educate continuously

Definition gets you the room. Education keeps you in the room.

Here is the truth nobody tells new customer marketing leaders. You will define the function in your first 30 days, and six months later you will sit in a meeting where someone confidently describes your team as “the case study people.” That person was not in your kickoff. They joined three months ago. They built their view from a single interaction with one of your team members or from their prior work history.

You don’t get angry. You educate.

Educating continuously looks like this in practice:

Open every QBR with a 90-second restatement of what customer marketing is and what it’s investing in this quarter. Not a recap of work delivered. A restatement of scope. Same slide, every quarter. Boring is the point.

Build a one-page customer marketing charter that lives in the company wiki, in your team’s Slack channel topic, and in the appendix of any deck you present cross-functionally. New hires find it. Skeptical execs find it. You stop having the same conversation in DMs.

Pre-brief every new exec in their first 60 days. Twenty minutes. What we do, what we don’t do, what we need from your function, what your function should expect from us. If you wait for the misunderstanding to surface in a leadership meeting, you’re already losing.

Train your own team to articulate the function the same way you do. If your manager describes customer marketing as “running advocacy and the community” and your director describes it as “lifecycle, advocacy, community, education,” your team is already misaligned. Pick one definition. Use the same words. Repetition is the only thing that changes how a function is understood.

Translate every program into the language of the stakeholder you’re talking to. CS hears retention and adoption. Sales hears pipeline influence and references. PMM hears proof and launch enablement. CRO hears revenue impact and CAC payback. Same work, different framing. The work doesn’t change. The translation does.

The pattern under all of this is simple. You are the curator of how the function is understood inside your company. Nobody else is going to do that job for you. The CMO won’t. The CRO won’t. Your peers won’t. The moment you stop educating, the definition starts drifting back to whatever the loudest stakeholder needs from you this quarter.

The one mistake to avoid

The biggest mistake customer marketing leaders make is treating the definition conversation as a one-time exercise. They write the charter, present it once, and assume the org has internalized it. Six months later they’re frustrated that nobody understands the team’s scope, and they take it personally.

It’s not personal, organizations are in constant flux and leaders are context switching 20+ times a day. We need to make it easier for them to remember us which is why I also created this app in claude code as your cheat sheet on what CLG is and how to tell that story. Companies onboard new execs, restructure teams, change priorities, and forget. The function gets re-defined by attrition every quarter. Your job is to keep redefining it back to the truth.

Define it. Then educate forever.

Next week

Issue 19 takes on the salary and structural ceiling that nobody in customer marketing wants to talk about. The data from UserEvidence’s salary study shows 78% of CMA professionals want to advance, but only 12% have a clear path. We’ll walk through what that means for your career, the moves that close the gap, and the move nobody mentions: leaving on time.

Talk soon,

— Kevin

I built this program at Marketo in 2017.

It helped make Marketo irresistible to Adobe in a $4.75B acquisition.

Then I scaled it at Adobe. Then rebuilt a version at Freshworks. Three companies. Three iterations. Every time it produced results that outpaced anything else we built.

This week’s newsletter tells the full story including an article I wrote in 2019 and never published until now.

Paid subscribers get two assets I have never shared publicly before:

Read more

If this newsletter has brought you value, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person who needs it. It takes ten seconds and it means everything.

Adobe Summit just wrapped up yesterday in Las Vegas.

I still have a ton of colleagues and friends that went which is probably why I’m thinking about it more than usual.

For several years, Summit was the centerpiece of everything we built. The stage where our Champions spoke. The conference we once had twelve weeks to merge with an entirely different event. The moment that tested everything we had built and proved it was real.

So this week felt like the right time to finally publish something I wrote six years ago and never shared. If you read until the end, there’s a special bonus for paid members.

In April 2019, the week after Adobe Summit, I sat down and wrote about the program that had defined the previous two and a half years of my career. I wrote it while everything was still fresh: the energy, the chaos, the emotion of what we had just pulled off.

Then I closed the document and never published it.

I am not entirely sure why. Maybe it felt too personal. Maybe the story was not finished yet. Maybe I knew, even then, that what we had built was still becoming something I did not fully understand.

Reading it now, six years later, I think I was right. The story was not finished. It is still not finished. One of the Champions I mention in that article is now at Adobe. Another went on to speak at Summit five times. Several of them became lifelong friends and collaborators who shaped my career in ways I am still discovering.

So here is the article. Exactly as I wrote it in 2019. With one addition at the end: the part of the story I could not have written then.

“We #BleedPurple” — A Recipe for Building Best in Class Customer Experiences

Written April 2, 2019. Never published. Until now.

“Our customers #bleedpurple.”

That was one of the first things I heard when I joined Marketo nearly two and a half years ago. I did not understand the phrase at first. I quickly came to realize that Marketo’s Marketing Nation was one of the most vibrant, passionate, and diehard fanbases in the world.

My challenge was how to take an already extraordinary community of customers and reimagine how we engaged them across our advocacy programs at scale.

These programs included the Marketing Nation Community, Marketo User Groups, Purple Select, the Champions, third party reviews, a reference program, customer success stories, the Fearless 50, and Summit and customer events.

These programs would later become part of a larger initiative called the Advocate Nation, launched in 2018 to give customers ongoing opportunities to build their personal brands, network with peers, and earn recognition for their participation.

The recipe for advocate growth

To build best in class programs, you need a recipe.

One part engagement platform. Two parts opportunities for personal branding: thought leadership, speaking, and blogging. Three parts active listening and proactive outreach with customers. Four parts gamification, recognition, and rewards. Five parts purple swag. A pinch of good luck. And a dash of surprise and delight, what I used to call shock and awe campaigns.

That is the foundation for cultivating an army of loyal advocates. And if you really want to accelerate growth, work closely with your biggest brand ambassadors when making decisions.

Enter the Marketo Champions

It is hard to imagine a time before the Marketo Champions.

Even before I joined Marketo, I had heard of this legendary group of 60 expert practitioners who had to apply each year for a chance to be named a Champ. It was not just the title: these people genuinely knew their Marketo.

The community recognized them as true experts at their craft.

Honest, loyal, and deeply passionate about the work. For the most part we could have continued operating just as we had and nothing would have changed. But for programs to go from good to great to exceptional, we needed new thinking, new perspective, and a customer-first mentality.

So I went down a rabbit hole of conversations with Champions; what was working, what was not, where we could go next.

It became clear that to scale our advocacy initiatives we needed to be more customer centric. We needed to use our Champions across the entire customer journey, not just in one lane.

That is when the transformation began.

We partnered with the Champions to create a new program charter outlining the criteria for future classes and launched a Leadership Committee to give power back to the members. Making sure their feedback was recognized and heard was critical to the program’s success.

Around the same time our charter in Customer Marketing expanded to incorporate adoption initiatives, helping customers to be more successful using Marketo. By providing both advocacy and adoption opportunities, we were able to accelerate not only the program’s awareness but also our impact to the business.

The Advocate Nation grew by over 50% in the first three months. Champions contributed regular content to our customer nurture programs. And then, when Adobe told us we had twelve weeks to merge Marketing Nation Summit with Adobe Summit, the Champions made the impossible possible.

From start to finish they provided expert advice on what would resonate with customers, helped drive attendance, led some of the top performing breakout sessions, drove four times the number of Revvie Award applications (eventually called the Adobe Experience Maker Awards) in under six weeks, and contributed to main stage keynotes.

Early in my career I learned from one of my mentors, Mari Smith, that to create exceptional experiences you need to put your faith, love, and trust in people.

That is exactly why I love this work. We get to see the direct result of our efforts in helping customers be successful, grow their careers, and train the next generation of marketers.

Magic moments are forged when you bring the right people and experiences together.

Champions, thank you for inspiring me and the next generation of fearless marketers everywhere. Your biggest cheerleader will always be here watching.

— Written April 2019

What I could not have written then

When I wrote that article, one of those 60 Champions was a woman who had made one of the most unlikely career pivots I had ever seen.

She had started as a PhD student in cancer biology at Stanford. Somewhere along the way she discovered marketing operations and taught herself Marketo. She became a Marketo User Group Leader, then a multi-year Champion, then a Revvie Award winner, then a Summit speaker. She spoke on that Summit stage in 2019 even while 7 months pregnant because she was that passionate about Marketo.

We worked together again at F5, where she was Senior Director of Marketing Operations. Then she went to Cloudflare as Senior Director of Demand Operations.

And then, in one of those moments that makes you believe the universe has a sense of humor, she went to work at Adobe. The company that acquired Marketo. The stage she first spoke on in 2019. Full circle.

Her name is Jess Kao. In the Adobe universe, she’s a true celebrity. And her story is not a footnote to the Champions program. It is the point of it.

The program did not just produce references and case studies and Summit speakers. It produced a decade-long friendship and a career trajectory that neither of us could have predicted when she first raised her hand to be part of something we were still figuring out.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately.

The programs end. The companies change. The titles come and go.

The relationships compound.

That is not a tagline. It is the truest thing I know about this work.

Next issue: what happened inside those twelve weeks when we had to move an entire conference, and what 60 skeptical Champions taught me about leading through uncertainty.

— Kevin

P.S. The Champion Program Charter we used to build this program is available to paid subscribers. Not a template. Not a recreation. A sanitized version of the actual charter from the program that became a model for advocacy programs across the industry. If you want to build something that lasts, you can access it here.

If you get value from this newsletter, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person who needs it. It takes 10 seconds and it means everything.

Everyone is talking about agentic-led growth right now.

Agents that sell. Agents that onboard. Agents that expand accounts autonomously, priced on outcomes, not seats.

Mark Benioff calls it “service as software, not software as a service.” The shift is real and it is coming for every post-sale function.

But there is something missing from most of the conversation.

Agents cannot earn trust. That is still a human job.

And here is the part most people are skipping: before you add agents to your post-sale motion, you need to understand what infrastructure those agents actually depend on to work.

That infrastructure has a name. It is the Customer-Led Growth (CLG) system.

This issue is about what I built to show exactly how agents and CLG connect, and how you can use it before your next planning conversation.

What I built

The CLG Flywheel app that I built in claude code now has a new tab: the CLG Agentic Blueprint.

It is a fully interactive architecture diagram showing what a complete agentic CLG system looks like: from human strategy at the top to tech stack at the bottom. Five layers. Seven pillars. 135 agents. Six orchestrators connecting everything. I created it because I wanted to show a real diagram to help explain how all these agents can work together to help you address some of the biggest painpoints or obstacles that often impact our ability to do our job: building relationships and engaging customers.

Here is how it is structured.

Layer 1 — Human Strategy

Seven human leads sit at the top of the architecture: Community Lead, Lifecycle Lead, VoC Lead, Advocacy Lead, Comms Lead, Education Lead, and Exec Engagement Lead.

These are not roles being replaced by agents. They are the roles that become dramatically more powerful because of agents. Judgment, relationships, and business case ownership still live here. Agents free these people to focus exclusively on what only humans can do.

Layer 2 — Orchestration

Six routing engines sit between human strategy and agent execution. This is the layer most teams miss entirely.

The CLG Signal Router ingests signals from all pillars and routes them to the right agent cluster. The Revenue Attribution Engine maps CLG program activity to pipeline, expansion, and retention outcomes. The Account Intelligence Hub aggregates account-level signals into a single 360 view. The Proof Library Orchestrator routes customer evidence to the right deal, campaign, or channel. The Rewards Fulfillment Orchestrator triggers rewards when advocacy acts hit thresholds. The Comms Governance Controller enforces send limits and prevents communication overload across all systems.

Without this layer, agents work in silos. With it, they work as a system.

Layer 3 — Agent Execution

135 agents across 7 pillars. Each pillar column is expandable, click any pillar to see every agent in it, what it does, and what it writes to.

A few examples of what lives here:

• The Champion Scout Agent scans community activity for advocacy-readiness signals and surfaces the right customers before your team even thinks to ask.

• The At-Risk Flag Agent combines login drop, NPS movement, and support escalations into a single churn risk score and routes it to the right CSM with a recommended next action.

• The Sentiment Cluster Agent groups NPS verbatims, support tickets, and review content by theme and delivers a weekly brief to your product and VoC teams.

• The Reference Match Agent matches open deals to the best-fit customer references by industry, use case, and deal stage in seconds, not days.

• The Briefing Prep Agent generates pre-meeting exec briefs from health scores, usage data, and relationship history before every EBR or CAB.

• These are not hypothetical. Every agent in the blueprint has a name, a trigger, a data input requirement, an output, and a recommended platform.

Layer 4 — CDP / Data Backbone

Every agent action fires an event. Every event is captured. Every record stays current.

This layer shows how the data flows: what feeds into the CDP, what the CDP writes out to your systems of record, and which platforms handle it. Segment, Rudderstack, mParticle, Treasure Data on the CDP side. Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift on the warehouse side. Real-time writes to Salesforce, Gainsight, your advocacy platform, and your analytics dashboard.

Without this layer, your agents are working from stale data. That is where agentic motions break down.

Layer 5 — Tech Stack

Fifteen categories of platforms that agents read from and write to. CRM, Customer Success, Advocacy, Community, VoC, Education, Content, Marketing Automation, Rewards, Product Analytics, BI, Conversation Intelligence, Support, CDP, and Data Warehouse.

Every platform in the app’s tech stack selector is mapped here. You can customize it for your own stack. Please note that it’s not intended to be exhaustive especially as new vendors launch. If anything, this should cover the majority of the core solutions that are well known across most B2B SaaS organizations.

How to use the blueprint right now

Open clg.thecustomercontinuum.com and click the Agents tab.

Start with your lowest-scoring CLG Diagnostic pillar. Find that column in the Agent Execution layer. Expand it. Read the first three agents. Ask yourself: which of these already exist in my stack in some form, and which are completely missing?

That gap is your roadmap.

If you are heading into a planning conversation or a budget discussion in the next 30 days, screenshot the architecture and bring it. Not as a “here is what I want to build” slide. As a “here is what best-in-class looks like and here is where we are today” slide. The visual does the work for you.

If you want to go deeper and actually start building these agents paid subscribers to the Customer Continuum get something else entirely. I published a companion piece with the full implementation kit: eight downloadable markdown files, one for each pillar plus the CDP backbone layer, each with every agent fully specced and ready to hand to your IT team or AI strategy lead.

Free to start at clg.thecustomercontinuum.com. Upgrade for the build specs.

ACCESS THE CLG AGENTIC .MD FILES HERE

Other updates to the app this week

Beyond the Agents tab, a few things worth knowing:

The Revenue Impact Model now factors in your number of customers and average deal size alongside ARR, NRR, and churn rate. The output is a more precise directional business case.

The Company Intelligence tab has a privacy disclaimer and handles concurrent searches cleanly. Type in any company and get a CLG maturity brief in about 30 seconds.

My Ask Kevin GPT now renders markdown in responses and has a 40-message conversation limit before prompting a fresh session.

The tech stack selector now includes a CDP category with Segment, Rudderstack, mParticle, Treasure Data, Adobe CDP, Salesforce Data Cloud, and Tealium. Freshdesk is added to Support. Gong, Chorus, and Clari are added under Conversation Intelligence.

See you next Thursday.

— Kevin

P.S. The implementation kit for paid subscribers covers all 135 agents with full build specs. If you are a customer marketer who has an AI strategy conversation coming up, this is the resource that makes you the most prepared person in the room. Link above.

A lot of you asked the same question after seeing it: how do I actually build these?

That is what this kit is.

Eight Claude Code-ready MD files. One per pillar. Every agent spec includes what it does, what data it needs, what it outputs, and five specific steps to build it inside your stack.

Start with the pillar that matches your biggest problem right now.

Churn is your problem? Lifecycle and Adoption.

Sales asking for more references? Customer Advocacy.

Community has no ROI story? Community Engagement.

Agents are stack-ranked inside each file so you know exactly where to begin.

Your full kit is here.

P.S. Please make sure to read the file called “READ ME FIRST - CLG Blueprint Master Guide.md” first.

-Kevin

If you get value from this newsletter, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person who needs it. It takes 10 seconds and it means everything.

I need to come clean about something.

This weekend I did something I have never done in 15 years of working in tech.

I built a web app.

Not “I described what I wanted and a developer built it.” Not “I used a no-code tool and dragged some blocks around.” I mean I opened a terminal, used Claude Code, and built something from scratch.

15 years in marketing. Zero technical background. Zero production code before this weekend.

The hardest part was not the code. The hardest part was figuring out how to take what I had built on my computer and get it to GitHub so the world could actually see it. I spent more time on that than on anything else. The terminal. The commands. The errors that meant nothing to me. Well, almost nothing with the exception of a few painful moments.

But the back and forth with Claude Code kept me going. I would describe what was broken in plain English. It would fix it. I would move forward. That loop, human clarity, AI execution, is something I did not expect to find so compelling.

By Sunday night I had something real enough to demo in front of a room full of community practitioners at Community Week.

Here is what I built, why I built it, and why you are getting it first.

The problem I kept hitting

Every time I explained the Customer-Led Growth system: seven pillars, one engine, people got the concept immediately.

Then they hit the same wall.

“Okay, but where do I actually start?”

A framework without a diagnostic is just a slide. It tells you what the system looks like. It does not tell you where you are weak, what to fix first, or how to make the case in numbers your CFO already uses.

I kept having that conversation. So I built the thing that ends it.

What I built

Three things you can do with it right now:

CLG Diagnostic. Score all seven pillars on a 1-5 scale. Get a health score, a radar chart, and a prioritized action list. Five minutes. Free. No login.

Revenue Impact Model. Input your ARR, NRR, and churn rate. Get a directional business case for investing in the full system in language your CFO speaks. Run this before your next budget conversation.

Company Intelligence. Type in any company name. Get a CLG maturity brief across all seven pillars in about 30 seconds. I use this before executive briefings and customer conversations.

There is also a Freshworks Case Study, a Glossary, and a new revised Kevin Lau GPT tab for open-ended CLG questions.

You are getting this before anyone else. It goes public Friday.

You can also watch this short tutorial video on how to best leverage the app below:

»»»ACCESS THE CLG FLYWHEEL«««

What the build actually taught me

The bottleneck was never the technology. Claude Code handled that.

The bottleneck was always clarity. What should this actually measure? What makes a health score meaningful and not arbitrary? What does the action list need to say to be genuinely useful?

Those questions only I could answer. And wrestling with them forced me to get more precise about the CLG system than any deck or document ever had.

But the bigger lesson was not about the framework.

It was about what is possible.

I walked away from that weekend thinking about the glass as half full in a way I did not expect. We can move faster than we think. We can build things we never imagined building. The only real ceiling is how clearly you can articulate what you want.

That is not a small thing. Most of us have ideas sitting in a notes app or a back-of-mind folder that we have written off because we assumed we needed something we did not have: a developer, a budget, a team, a timeline.

The model has changed. You bring the domain expertise. AI handles the execution. Neither of you builds this alone. Together you build something neither of you could have made otherwise.

If you have been sitting on an idea, Claude Code is worth an afternoon. The barrier is lower than you think. The bottleneck is your clarity, not your skill set.

How to use it this week

Run the diagnostic. Look at your radar chart. The biggest gap is your roadmap: not one I hand you, the one your own data reveals.

If you have a budget conversation in the next 30 days, run the Revenue Impact Model first. Three minutes. One number.

Reply and tell me your health score. I read every reply. Genuinely curious what the data shows across different company sizes and team structures.

And if you have feedback on how I can improve the app, by all means please tell me.

— Kevin

P.S. You got this before anyone else. If it is useful, forward it to one person fighting the same budget conversation you are. That is how this newsletter grows. One practitioner to the next.

The VP Accelerator is a 90-day program for Senior Managers and Directors ready to make the move to VP. Reply “Accelerator” and I will send you details.

If you enjoy The Customer Continuum, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If you refer friends, you will receive benefits that give you special access to The Customer Continuum and new things that I build and develop for our community.

How to participate

1. Share The Customer Continuum. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

Refer a friend

2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll receive special benefits.

• Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals

• Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals

• Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals

Visit the leaderboard

To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Thank you again for subscribing and please do let me know how else I can best serve you in the future.

I want to ask you something your CMO has probably not asked yet.

When a buyer in your category opens ChatGPT or Perplexity and types “what is the best solution for enterprise IT service management” — where does your brand show up?

Not on your website. Not in your paid ads. Not in your last campaign.

In the answer the AI generates. Built from what the internet believes about you. Assembled from peer reviews, community discussions, customer-authored content, third-party mentions, and forum conversations, most of which you did not write and cannot directly control.

That is the new discovery layer.

And almost nobody in customer marketing is treating it like the strategic priority it is.

I have been running experiments on this for the past several months. Testing how customer evidence, community content, and targeted review strategies shape brand visibility in AI-generated buyer recommendations. The hypothesis I keep coming back to is simple and uncomfortable.

The customer is the single greatest driver of AI visibility.

Not your SEO. Not your content team. Not your campaigns.

Your customers. What they say. Where they say it. How often they say it. And whether the systems that aggregate that information can find it, trust it, and surface it when a buyer asks.

If that is true, and the data increasingly suggests it is, then your community program is not a nice-to-have engagement layer.

It is your AI strategy.

How buyers are actually researching in 2026

Here is what the research is showing.

89% of AI citations come from earned media and peer content. Not owned content. Not paid placements. What other people say about you in public.

Only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT are also cited by Perplexity. These systems have fundamentally different retrieval architectures. What gets you visible in one does not automatically transfer to another. Anyone selling you a single “AI optimization” strategy is selling you false certainty.

When buyers use AI tools to research vendors, they are not getting your marketing message. They are getting a synthesis of what the internet has decided about you based on years of accumulated signal.

The brands winning in that synthesis are the ones whose customers have been the loudest and most credible voices in the spaces that matter: review sites, community forums, peer networks, industry publications, and third-party platforms, this is nothing new.

Not months. Years.

That is the moat. And the window to build it is open right now but it won’t stay open forever.

What community actually feeds

Most community leaders think about their program as an engagement play. Keep customers active. Drive retention. Create connection.

All of that is real. None of it captures what community is actually producing in an AI-first discovery environment.

Here is what a well-run community generates that directly feeds AI visibility.

Peer-authored content at scale. Every forum answer, every discussion thread, every community post is a piece of indexed content that gets picked up by search engines and AI retrieval systems. A community of 50,000 members generating thousands of authentic conversations per month is producing more discoverable content about your product than any content team could write.

Review velocity. The customers most likely to leave detailed, credible reviews are the ones most engaged in your community. They have stories to tell. They have outcomes to share. They have language that maps to exactly what buyers are searching for. Community is your review pipeline if you activate it intentionally.

Third-party citations. When your customers speak at industry events, publish case studies, contribute to analyst reports, and write about their experience on LinkedIn, those citations compound over time into the credibility layer that AI systems draw from. Community is where you identify and develop the customers who will do that work.

Category authority. The brands that show up consistently in AI-generated recommendations are the ones that have built a visible customer ecosystem. Your competitors cannot fake that ecosystem overnight. It takes years of relationship building, program investment, and community cultivation.

The community you built three years ago is paying dividends in buyer discovery channels that did not exist three years ago. The community you build today will pay dividends in channels we cannot fully anticipate yet.

What I am actually doing about this

I want to be specific here rather than theoretical because I think specificity is what is missing from most conversations about AI visibility.

At Freshworks we are running a Reddit AEO pilot. The hypothesis is that authentic, helpful engagement in category-relevant subreddits, not promotional, not branded, just genuinely useful answers from people associated with the product, creates indexed content that surfaces when AI tools query Reddit data.

We are running targeted peer review campaigns connected to analyst report cycles. Not spray and pray review drives. Deliberate sequencing of the right customer profiles to the right review platforms at the right moment to influence the specific reports that buyers and AI systems reference.

We are tracking community engagement data against brand mention frequency in AI-generated responses. Trying to close the loop between what our customers say in community and whether that content is showing up when buyers ask AI tools for recommendations.

None of this is science yet. The feedback loops are long and the attribution is messy. But the direction of travel is clear.

The brands that treat community as an AI visibility infrastructure investment today will have a compounding advantage that is almost impossible to buy your way into later.

What this means for how you run your program

If you accept the premise that your community is your AI strategy, it changes some decisions.

It changes how you think about content moderation. Forum answers that are detailed, accurate, and helpful are SEO and AEO assets. Thin content and low-quality engagement are noise. The signal-to-noise ratio of your community matters more than raw volume.

It changes how you think about customer expertise development. Customers who become recognized experts, who earn certifications, build reputations, publish their knowledge, create credible third-party signals that no marketing team can manufacture. Investing in customer expertise is an AI visibility strategy.

It changes how you think about review programs. Generic review campaigns that generate volume produce diminishing returns. Campaigns that generate specific, detailed, outcome-oriented reviews from credible customer profiles in the right categories produce compounding signal.

It changes how you think about content co-creation. Every piece of content your customers author: case studies, blog posts, webinar presentations, conference talks, is a citation that feeds the AI layer. Your job is to make that content creation as easy and appealing as possible.

And it changes how you justify the investment internally. The question is no longer just “what is our community doing for retention?” It is “what is our community doing for brand visibility in the channels where buyers are making decisions before they ever talk to sales?”

That is a different and much more powerful budget conversation.

The three things to do this quarter

I want to leave you with something concrete rather than just a framework.

First, audit where your brand shows up in AI-generated responses for your top five buyer queries. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Ask them who the best solutions are in your category. See what comes back. Map the gap between where you are and where you want to be. That gap is your AEO roadmap.

Second, identify your top ten community contributors and activate them as content creators. Not for your channels, for their own. LinkedIn posts, review sites, industry publications, conference proposals. Give them the support, the recognition, and the resources to publish. Every piece they produce is a citation in your favor.

Third, connect your review program to your community engagement data. Your most engaged community members are your best review candidates. Build that pipeline intentionally. Do not run review campaigns divorced from the relationships you have already built.

I am covering all of this and more at Community Week next Wednesday April 8 at 9 AM PT. Free to attend online. Built for community, customer marketing, and CS leaders.

My session: Stop Building Community. Start Orchestrating Influence.

If this issue got you thinking differently about what your community program is actually producing, the talk will give you the full playbook for turning those insights into a conversation your executives will fund.

See you Wednesday.

— Kevin

P.S. If you are already running AEO experiments or tracking community content against AI visibility metrics, I want to hear what you are finding. Reply to this email. I read every one.

Welcome back to The Customer Continuum.

I want to tell you about one of the most important pitches I ever gave.

It was not to a customer.

It was to my CMO.

We had a new CMO at Adobe. Sharp. Strategic. Came from AWS. Not a people person in the traditional sense; quiet in rooms, a little socially awkward, not the type to work a crowd. But he understood something most marketers miss.

He understood the power of a movement.

I was running the Experience Maker Awards program at the time (and I’m proud to say that it still lives on even after 8+ years)! For those who have not been inside Adobe’s customer marketing world, the Experience Maker Awards were our way of celebrating customers who were doing extraordinary things with the platform. It was loud, emotional, and full of energy. Customers flew in from around the world. They got on stage. They told their stories. The room felt like a concert.

And my new CMO looked at it and said: what does this actually do for the business?

Fair question.

My old answer would have been: it builds community. It strengthens loyalty. It recognizes our best customers.

All true. None of it lands with a CMO from AWS.

But before I figured out how to speak his language, I got a harder lesson from someone else in the room.

The Head of Product.

I was presenting the Experience Maker Awards program to about 40 senior leaders. Explaining the benefits. The community engagement numbers. The customer stories. The energy at the event.

She stopped me mid-presentation.

In front of everyone, she said something I have never forgotten.

The real problem we are trying to solve is not how to build a better awards program. It is how we make it easier and more effortless for customers to do business with us. That is what creates better outcomes for the customer. And better outcomes for the customer is what creates happy customers that buy more stuff.

I felt the blood drain from my face.

Not because she was wrong.

Because she was completely right.

I had walked into that room thinking about my program. She was thinking about the customer’s experience of the entire company. I was one lens. She was the whole picture.

The embarrassment lasted about an hour.

The lesson lasted a career.

After that moment, every conversation I had with her changed. I came prepared. I connected our work to customer outcomes before she could ask. I learned to think at the level she was thinking at, not the level I was comfortable at.

She did not humiliate me. She promoted my thinking.

That is what real cross-functional influence looks like when it goes in the other direction too. The best leaders in the room will push you to the right lens if you let them.

The lesson I took: never lead with the program. Lead with the customer problem the program solves. The program is the mechanism. The outcome is the point.

So I went back to my CMO with a different story.

I stopped talking about the awards program and started talking about what it created.

I told him: adoption is the onramp to advocacy.

The customers on that stage were not just happy customers. They were customers who had gone deep. They had figured out the product. They had built workflows nobody else had built. They had hit a level of mastery that made switching feel unthinkable.

The awards program was not a celebration event. It was a proof-of-adoption engine.

And the community around it: the vibrancy, the energy, the customers geeking out together about what was possible: that was not a nice-to-have. That was the competitive moat.

He got it immediately.

Because he had seen it at AWS. He had watched developers fall in love with infrastructure products and build ecosystems nobody could compete with. Not because of features. Because of community density. Because of the switching cost that forms when your customers become each other’s best resource.

Community vibrancy is not a metric. It is a moat.

And once I translated the Experience Maker Awards into that language: adoption, moat, movement, it stopped being a budget conversation.

It became a strategic investment.

That is what influence without authority actually looks like.

Not persuasion. Not politics. Translation.

And before the translation, something even more fundamental.

Elevating your own lens.

The framework: Influence Without Authority in three moves

Most customer marketing leaders make their case too late, in the wrong room, with the wrong scoreboard.

Here is the system that changes that.

Move 1: Elevate your lens before you enter the room.

The Head of Product taught me this the hard way.

Before you translate your work to anyone else, ask yourself: am I thinking about this at the program level or the customer outcome level?

Program level sounds like: we ran the awards program, we hit our metrics, here is the engagement data.

Customer outcome level sounds like: we identified the customers who achieved the highest product mastery, we created an engine that accelerates that journey for others, and here is what that does for retention, expansion, and competitive differentiation.

Same program. Completely different lens.

The customer outcome lens is the one that earns a seat at the table.

The program lens is the one that gets cut.

Before any senior conversation, ask: what customer problem does this solve? What becomes easier or more effortless for the customer because of this work? What is the outcome, not the activity?

Answer those questions first. Then translate.

Move 2: Map the room and speak their number.

Every executive has a number they protect like oxygen. Know the number before you walk in.

CFO: net revenue retention, churn exposure, cost to retain versus cost to replace.

CRO: pipeline velocity, win rate, sales cycle length, late-stage deal support.

CPO: adoption, time to value, feature stickiness, support deflection.

CEO: durable growth, category credibility, trust at scale, the story the market believes.

Your program does not change. Your translation does.

The Experience Maker Awards spoke to every one of those numbers. I just had to learn to speak all four languages instead of one.

CFO hears: customers who reach product mastery renew at higher rates and expand more predictably.

CRO hears: customers who have achieved real outcomes become the proof that removes fear in late-stage deals.

CPO hears: community vibrancy drives peer-to-peer education that accelerates adoption and reduces time to value.

CEO hears: this is the movement that makes our platform a career-defining choice, not just a software purchase.

Same program. Four true stories. Each one aimed at a different fear.

Move 3: Connect your work to the company’s growth architecture & not just your program.

This is the move most customer marketing leaders miss.

Individual stakeholder translation is necessary. It is not sufficient.

The reason customer marketing gets cut is not just poor framing. It is that programs look like rogue acts of marketing. Disconnected motions that cannot explain how they connect to the next thing or the thing after that.

When customer marketing operates as a system, every pillar feeds the flywheel.

Advocacy creates proof. Proof accelerates sales. Sales creates more customers. More customers feed community. Community drives adoption. Adoption improves retention. Retention funds expansion. Expansion creates more advocates.

That is not a department. That is a growth engine.

Budget owners do not cut growth engines. They cut nice-to-haves.

Show them where your program lives in the flywheel. Show them what slows if it is removed. Show them the compounding effect of keeping it running.

Adoption is the onramp to advocacy. Advocacy is the onramp to growth. The whole system depends on the early work nobody celebrates: the onboarding, the enablement, the community thread that answers a question at 11pm, the awards program that tells a customer their mastery is worth recognizing.

Remove any of those pieces and the flywheel slows.

Move 4: Show up before budget season.

If customer marketing only shows up at budget planning, it is already framed as a cost.

It needs to show up in the pipeline call. The renewal forecast. The QBR. The product roadmap review.

Not with a presentation. With a data point.

One sentence in the pipeline call: three of those late-stage deals have customer references mapped, here are the contacts.

One sentence in the renewal forecast: these accounts have declining community engagement, we flag them as renewal risk.

One sentence in the product roadmap review: the top-requested feature in the community right now has 340 votes, here is the customer language around it.

Small presence. Continuous. In the rooms that matter.

When the budget conversation comes, you are not asking for protection.

You are reporting on a motion that is already embedded.

The three questions to ask yourself before any budget conversation:

1. Am I leading with the customer outcome or the program activity and do I know the difference?

2. Whose number does my work move and can I prove it in their language?

3. Am I showing up in the rooms that matter before budget season, or only during it?

If you cannot answer all three clearly, the budget conversation is already harder than it needs to be.

The good news: these are learnable. They are not political skills. They are translation skills.

And translation is something customer marketers are uniquely qualified to do.

We translate customer language into product decisions every day. We translate customer stories into sales assets. We translate customer sentiment into executive briefings.

The only translation most of us forget is the most important one.

Our own work into their language.

The Head of Product who stopped me mid-presentation in front of 40 people did me the greatest professional favor of my career.

She did not embarrass me.

She gave me the lens I needed.

Do that: elevate the lens, speak their number, show up in the right rooms, connect to the flywheel and your program stops being optional.

It becomes infrastructure.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue helped you think differently about how you position your team’s work, forward it to one customer marketer heading into a tough budget conversation. They need this more than they need another framework deck.

That’s me on the wall.

My face. Printed large in Influitive’s office in Toronto. Somewhere around 2015.

I remember seeing it and feeling genuinely proud. We had built something. Customers were engaged. The hub was active. The metrics looked good. And apparently, someone thought our program was worth putting on the wall.

I was not wrong to feel proud.

I was just not asking the right questions yet.

I had been using Influitive since 2013 — one of the early adopters. The concept made immediate sense to me. Give customers meaningful ways to engage. Recognize them. Reward them. Turn passive users into active advocates.

And it worked. In the ways we were measuring it.

What I did not fully understand yet was what “working” actually needed to mean.

By the time I reached Marketo in 2017, the model was already under pressure. We had to have hard conversations about what our hub, we called it Purple Select, was actually driving.

The customers most active in the gamification loop were mostly brand fans. The ones who loved the purple swag. The ones who showed up to every webinar. They were enthusiastic. They were not the customers moving deals.

Some of them churned within a year of us winning an award for the program.

That was the moment I started to understand something that took a few more years to fully articulate.

We had been optimizing for acts of advocacy. Not for impact of advocacy. Transactions, not trust. Volume, not credibility.

The concept was right. The execution had limits we had not yet named.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a hit piece on any platform or the people who built them. The category grew up in important ways. Real lessons were learned.

But some of the thinking calcified.

The idea that you could systematize advocacy through enough points, enough challenges, enough incentives: that idea stuck around longer than it should have. Because it is easier to build a leaderboard than to earn a relationship.

And here is what that era actually did to customer marketing as a function.

It reinforced the exact narrative we have been fighting ever since.

Soft metrics. Nice-to-haves. Relationship stuff that does not translate to revenue. When executive leaders saw advocacy programs in those years, mine included, they drew a conclusion that took years to reverse. The disconnect between customer marketing and demand generation did not happen by accident. We built it ourselves by optimizing for activity instead of outcomes.

I built one of those programs. My face was on the wall.

What I know now is that advocacy has always been real. We were just solving for the wrong version of it.

And the deeper problem was this: we were treating advocacy like a house. When it was really just one pillar.

Customer marketing is a house with many pillars.

Advocacy is not the whole strategy. It never was.

The programs that fail are the ones built on a single pillar: get customers to do things, reward them for it, report the numbers, repeat. No lifecycle engine feeding the right accounts forward. No community creating the peer relationships that make advocacy feel natural. No voice of customer telling you which customers have outcomes worth sharing. No education layer ensuring customers have results worth advocating for.

A fan club is what happens when you build one pillar and call it a strategy.

A real customer marketing function is what happens when all seven pillars work in synergy. Voice of customer. Advocacy. Community. Education. Lifecycle and retention. Customer communications. Executive engagement.

Each pillar feeds the others. Advocacy without community feels transactional. Community without lifecycle feels random. Lifecycle without proof feels invisible.

When they work together, the whole becomes something no single platform can manufacture.

That is what the industry has been learning. Slowly. Often the hard way.

This issue is about the practical side of that lesson, specifically, how to build the advocacy bench the right way.

Why motivation matters more than mechanics

Before we get to the how, we need to name the real problem with most advocacy programs.

They are built almost entirely on the weakest motivator.

Motivation to advocate lives in three places. I think of it as the Advocacy Motivation Stack.

Recognition. Customers want to be seen as experts in their field. A speaking slot at your conference. A seat on your customer advisory board. A byline in your content. An introduction that positions them as a thought leader in front of their own peers. These things do something swag never can. They make your customer look smart in front of their boss. That is a different kind of currency.

Peer connection. The most underestimated driver of advocacy is the relationships customers build with each other through you. When your customer meets another operator solving the same problem, learns something real, makes a hire, gets an introduction that changes their quarter; you earned something that points and gift cards cannot touch.

Swag and gifts. These are not nothing. But they are the weakest of the three. They drive transactions. The customer who advocates for swag will stop advocating the moment the swag stops. The customer who advocates because you made them look credible in front of their CMO will advocate for years (will cover this in a future post).

Most programs are built almost entirely on tier three.

The best ones treat tier three as a thank-you, not a driver.

How to actually build the bench

Here is the full model. This is the part most content skips.

Step 1: Map before you recruit.

Pull your top 20 accounts by revenue, tenure, and expansion history. That list is your real advocacy bench. Not the people who clicked a form. Not the people already in your hub. The accounts that matter most to your business and to the deals you want to close next quarter.

Start there.

Step 2: Read before you ask.

Before you touch a single account, read the CS notes. Talk to the CSM. Understand the relationship history. What was onboarding like. Where did it get hard. What did they ask for that you delivered. What did they ask for that you did not.

The first move is never an ask. The first move is understanding.

Step 3: Align with CS before you act.

CS is not blocking you to be difficult. They are protecting accounts from clumsy marketing asks. They have seen it go wrong. One bad email to the wrong contact at the wrong time and a healthy account becomes a tense one.

The way through that door is trust. Show them you understand the account. Show them you will brief the customer before any ask. Show them you will debrief after. Show them you will close the loop every single time.

CS becomes your biggest ally when you treat their relationships with the same care they do.

Step 4: Give before you take.

The customers who become your most credible advocates say yes after value has already shown up. Long before you make any ask.

Give them recognition. A speaking opportunity. A seat on your customer council. A chance to shape your roadmap in a way that feels real, not performative.

Give them connection. An introduction to a peer solving the same problem. A room where they learn something they could not have found on their own.

Give them leverage. A tight one-page success summary they can drop into their next QBR. A slide that makes them look smart in front of their CFO. Help them win internally before you ask them to help you.

Step 5: Make the first ask small.

Not “join our program.”

A two-sentence quote they can approve in one minute. A logo update. A 15-minute call with your PM about one feature they care about. A short written answer to one question.

Small yes. Then another. Trust builds like that. So does advocacy.

Step 6: Protect them like a scarce resource.

The fastest way to burn a great advocate is to treat them like a list.

Set rules. Match reference calls by industry and use case. Limit how often you ask. Always brief them before. Always debrief after. Always close the loop with the outcome. Always say thank you in a way that feels human, not automated.

The customers who move deals are not the ones who volunteer.

They are the ones you had to earn.

That poster on the Influitive wall is still one of my favorite artifacts from my career.

Not because I was proud of the program. Because it represents a moment I did not fully understand yet.

Understanding came later. With the hard conversations. With the churn data. With the deals that slipped because we had fans but not closers. With the exec leader who looked at my advocate count and asked “but what is it actually doing for revenue?”

The answer I had then was not good enough.

The answer I have now is built on all of it. The early wins. The limitations I did not see. The evolution that followed.

Your advocacy program is not measured by how many people are in it.

It is measured by how many deals it protects. How many renewals it saves. How many conversations it starts before you walk into the room.

Build the house. Not just one pillar.

Build the bench. Earn the advocates.

The rest follows.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue was useful, forward it to one customer marketer who is still measuring their program by advocate count. They need this more than you do. And if you want to go deeper on any of the seven pillars, reply to this email and tell me which one is your biggest challenge right now. I read every reply.

Issue #12: The Weight Nobody Talks About.

A few years ago my remit changed overnight.

Two teams were becoming one. I was asked to lead the combined function. More scope. More people. More responsibility than I had carried before.

I said yes.

Then I had to figure out what that actually meant.

What I walked into was a team that had been through a difficult period. Talented. Capable. But the trust was thin and the energy was low.

Nobody was waiting for a strategy deck.

They were waiting to see who I was.

That was the moment Adobe did not prepare me for.

I spent years at Adobe getting comfortable. Great brand. Strong team. Clear runway. I was good at the work. Delivered results. Built programs.

But I had never walked into a room where people needed to believe in leadership again before they could believe in the work.

I set up an all hands. Walked in not knowing what to expect.

Someone asked me directly: what are you like as a leader?

I had never been asked that so plainly. In a room full of people who needed a reason to trust again.

I did not have a perfect answer.

What I had was honesty. I told them I would not have all the answers. That I would protect them from noise they could not control. That I would tell them the truth even when it was hard. That we would figure it out together.

What I did not say, but know now, is that I was just as unsure as they were.

I just chose not to show it.

That is the job.

Not having certainty. Giving it anyway.

What nobody tells you before you become a VP

Adobe prepared me to be good at customer marketing.

That role prepared me to lead.

There is a difference.

Being good at the work means delivering results, building programs, proving value.

Leading means showing up for people when the ground is moving.

It means making principled decisions when the playbook runs out.

It means trusting your gut when nothing is certain.

It means sitting in a room full of people who need confidence you do not fully have. And giving it anyway.

Here is what that actually looks like:

You filter. Between what leadership is deciding and what your team needs to hear. Not everything gets passed down. Your job is to separate signal from noise and give people what they can act on.

You absorb. Reorgs. Budget cuts. Leadership changes. Strategy pivots. Your team does not need to feel all of it. They need to feel you.

You reflect. When your team is panicking they look at your face first. Your calm is not weakness. It is data. It tells them whether to run or to trust.

You carry. The weight does not go away. You just get better at holding it quietly.

The duos principle

When I brought those two teams together I did not open with a strategy deck.

I opened with Clifton’s Strengths.

I wanted every person in that room to see themselves clearly first. Before the org chart. Before the new structure.

Then I introduced a concept I called duos.

Two different people. Two different strengths. Coming together to build something neither could build alone.

2 + 2 = 20.

Not because of a framework. Because of trust.

I paired people intentionally. Strengths next to gaps. Skeptics next to believers. People who were tired next to people who still had energy to give.

It did not fix everything overnight.

But it gave people a reason to show up for each other instead of waiting to see what happened next.

That is how you rebuild after disruption.

Not with a perfect plan.

With a reason to trust the person next to you.

You may have heard of the framework: forming, storming, norming, performing…this was exactly how it was playing out IRL.

What I want to leave you with

If you are a Manager, Sr. Manger or even Director reading this and the VP title feels like the goal, here is what you are actually signing up for.

Not more strategy. More weight.

Principled calls when the playbook runs out.

Confidence you give on the days you need someone to give it to you.

It is worth it.

Because the moment a room full of people who had stopped believing in leadership looks at you and exhales; nothing manufactures that.

You earn it by showing up. Over and over. Even when it costs you.

Everything works out in the end.

And if it has not worked out yet. It is not the end.

P.S. If this resonated, forward it to a customer marketer navigating uncertainty right now. They probably need it more than they are letting on.

ON THE RADAR: WHO’S HIRING

First listing in the newsletter: and it came the right way. A reader referral.

Customer Marketing Manager — Coder Referred by Preston Lam. Role posted by Cassandra Jowett, who built her own customer marketing practice and is now hiring. → [Add link to Cassandra’s post]

Want to share a role? Reply to this email with the details.

CUSTOMER MARKETING SPOTLIGHT

One customer marketer. Five questions. Real answers.

Want to be featured or nominate someone? Reply with SPOTLIGHT.

If you are new here, every week I share what I have learned building customer marketing programs across several companies and 15+ years. The real stories. The frameworks that actually work. And the honest version of what this career looks like from the inside.

Hey there,

Let me name the thing nobody is saying out loud right now.

Customer marketing budgets are getting cut. Roles are being eliminated. And in a market where every function has to justify its existence, customer marketing is still walking into rooms without a decoder ring.

Not because the work is not valuable.

Because we have never learned to translate it into the language that makes it impossible to cut.

That changes today.

This week I want to connect three things that have been living in separate conversations for too long.

A moment from last week’s post that many people connected with.

A slide from Forrester that explains why customer marketing has an identity problem.

And a conversation I had yesterday that changed how I think about where our function is headed.

Let me start with the moment that surprised me most this week.

Last Thursday, I posted about being two years into my first VP role. The imposter syndrome at the top. The strategy ask in week two. The gap between who I am at work and who I am at home.

The comments and DMs came from GTM leaders, Chief Customer Officers, VPs of Sales. Senior people who do not usually stop to comment on leadership posts.

What they all said in different ways was the same thing.

Nobody told me this either.

And that is when I realized something.

The emotional weight of stepping into a senior role is universal. It does not matter if you are a VP of Customer Marketing or a VP of Sales or a Chief Revenue Officer. The feeling of walking into a new level and realizing the floor has changed underneath you is something every leader knows but almost nobody says out loud.

But here is the part that connects to your career right now.

That same identity crisis does not just happen when you get promoted.

It happens every time you have to explain what you do to someone who does not get it.

A new boss. A skeptical CFO. A Sales leader who thinks customer marketing is the case study team.

And if you cannot explain your value clearly in those moments, the identity crisis is not just personal.

It becomes professional.

The decoder ring problem

When I got a new boss recently I had to do something I have done multiple times across my career.

Rebuild my credibility from scratch.

Not because my track record disappeared.

Because my new boss had 50 other things competing for her attention and customer marketing was not yet on her radar as a strategic priority.

She needed a decoder ring.

Not a 40-slide deck explaining the seven pillars of CLG.

A simple translation.

Here is what customer marketing does. Here is why it matters to the numbers you care about. Here is what happens to the business if we do not do it well.

Most customer marketers cannot give that translation in under two minutes.

Not because they do not know their work.

Because they have never been forced to translate it into executive language.

We speak in programs. Executives think in outcomes.

We say: we ran 12 webinars, created 8 case studies, hosted 2 customer events.

They hear: activity. Cost. Nice to have.

We should be saying: our advocate cohort influenced $2M in pipeline last quarter. Customers who completed our education path expanded 40 percent faster. Our community members churn at half the rate of customers who never engage.

That is the decoder ring.

Not more programs. Better translation.

The Forrester slide that explains everything

I’ve shared this diagram many times in the past on how most organizations treat the overall customer lifecycle.

In theory: every stage of the journey is covered. Discover, evaluate, commit, initiate, participate, actualize, advocate. A complete flywheel. Beautiful.

How marketers address it: only the top half is active. Discover, evaluate, commit. Acquisition focused. Everything post-sale is grey. Barely touched.

How customers live it: the bottom half is where the experience actually happens. Initiate, participate, actualize, advocate. Customers are living the journey that marketers are ignoring.

The gap is not a strategy problem.

It is an attention problem.

Marketers are focused on bringing customers in.

Customers are living an experience nobody is designing.

And the moment a customer hits that grey zone, the unmanaged middle, is exactly when churn starts warming up.

We say we are customer obsessed.

But our org charts and budgets tell a different story.

Demand gen owns the top. CS owns the renewal. And customer marketing is supposed to cover everything in between with a team of two and a shared designer.

That is not customer obsession.

That is customer neglect with good intentions.

The companies that close this gap are the ones that treat customer marketing as a lifecycle engine, not a content factory.

Every stage of that bottom half of the flywheel is customer marketing territory.

Onboarding that drives adoption. Education that deepens value. Community that creates stickiness. Advocacy that generates proof. Executive engagement that protects and expands relationships.

That is not a support function.

That is a growth engine.

Where it is all heading

This week I had a conversation with an agency that stopped me mid-sentence.

They described something called influence orchestration.

The idea that your entire customer ecosystem, advocates, community members, reviewers, champions, can be mobilized with precision to influence how your brand shows up across every channel.

Not at scale. Surgically.

The right customer voice in the right place at the right moment.

In AI-generated answers before a buyer forms a query.

In Reddit threads where your prospects are already talking.

In peer conversations that happen before a single sales call.

And I realized this is not just an agency trend.

This is what Customer-Led Growth looks like when it is fully activated.

Most companies run CLG programs in silos. Advocacy over here. Community over there. Education somewhere else.

Influence orchestration is what happens when you connect them all with intent.

But here is why it matters to you right now specifically.

Paid campaigns are delivering diminishing returns. SEM is getting harder. LLMs are rewriting search results and your carefully optimized pages are disappearing from the conversation.

The thing that shows up in AI-generated answers is not your campaign.

It is your customers.

Their reviews. Their quotes. Their community posts. Their peer conversations.

Which means customer marketing now sits on the most valuable acquisition channel in B2B SaaS.

Even if nobody gave you the budget for it.

Even if your KPI still says retention.

Even if your team still gets treated like a service desk for sales.

The function that owns customer voice owns the front door.

That is you.

The decoder ring for your next exec meeting

Here are three translations to have ready before you walk into any leadership conversation.

Translation 1: From programs to pipeline Instead of: We hosted three customer webinars this quarter. Say: Our webinar attendees closed at 35 percent higher rates and expanded 20 percent faster than non-attendees.

Translation 2: From advocacy to acquisition Instead of: We have 50 active customer advocates. Say: Our advocate network influenced 12 late-stage deals last quarter and sourced 8 net new referrals. That is pipeline we did not have to pay for.

Translation 3: From community to retention Instead of: Our community has 10,000 members. Say: Community members churn at half the rate of customers who never engage. At our current ARR that represents X million in protected revenue.

You do not need new programs to use these translations.

You need to connect what you already do to the numbers leadership already tracks.

That is the decoder ring.

Where to go if you feel stuck

A lot of people responded to last week’s post feeling seen but not sure what to do next.

So here are three moves depending on where you are right now.

If you are a Director trying to get to VP: Stop reporting programs. Start reporting outcomes. Every conversation with your CMO should connect your work to pipeline, NRR, or CAC payback. Build that muscle now before you need it.

If you are navigating a new boss: Do not wait for them to ask what customer marketing does. Schedule the 30-minute session yourself. Come with three numbers. Leave with one clear priority they care about. Make it easy for them to sponsor you.

If you are rebuilding your identity after a transition: Remember what I learned going from Adobe to F5. The brand was a megaphone. You were always the voice. Your credibility does not live in your last company. It lives in how you show up when nobody knows your name yet.

What is next

Next week I am going deeper on the influence orchestration idea. What it actually looks like inside a company. How to start building it with the resources you already have. And the Forrester gap, how to close the middle of the journey before your competitors do.

— Kevin

P.S. If this issue helped you think differently about your role, forward it to one customer marketer who needs to hear it. That is how this newsletter grows. One right person at a time.

On the Radar: Who’s Hiring in Customer Marketing

Every week I share open roles in customer marketing, customer success, and community submitted by hiring managers in this community.

If you are hiring, send me the role. I will include it here and share it with 600 plus customer marketing leaders who read this newsletter every week.

No charge. No form. Just reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn with the link.

Roles featured here starting next issue. Submit yours today.

Customer Marketing Spotlight

Every issue I feature one customer marketing leader doing interesting work. Their story. Their lessons. The thing they wish someone had told them earlier.

If you want to be featured or know someone who should be, reply to this email with the subject line SPOTLIGHT and tell me who and why.

If this was forwarded to you, please consider subscribing.

And if you’re new here: check your spam folder and mark this as “not spam.”

Takes 2 seconds and makes sure you never miss an issue.

Today, I want to talk about the fear.

If you’re in tech right now, you feel it. Budgets tightening. Headcount frozen. Every dollar scrutinized. Every team justifying its existence quarter by quarter.

If you’re in customer marketing, you’ve probably been here before.

I have.

The Marketo story

When Marketo was acquired by Adobe, I was part of customer marketing inside a business that suddenly had eight different teams doing some flavor of the same thing. Community here. Advocacy there. Stories somewhere else. Customer communications owned by someone you had never met.

Every team had a reason to exist. Every team had a sponsor. And every team was doing their version of customer marketing in their own corner.

We had a choice. Compete for territory or make the case for something better.

We made the case for centralization.

Not because it was cleaner on an org chart. Because it was better for the customer and better for the business. A customer should not have to navigate eight different teams to feel supported, recognized, and heard. And the business should not be paying for eight versions of the same motion with zero coordination.

We took that argument to our General Manager and our BU leaders. Not a marketing argument. A business argument.

And then we did something that changed everything.

We got ruthlessly clear on what we wanted to be known for and what we did not.

We planted our flag on retention.

At the time, nobody was calling it that. Retention lived in PM and Customer Success. It lived in renewals. It lived in a dashboard somewhere that sales owned and marketing occasionally looked at.

We said: this is the untapped potential to change everything. And here is why it matters.

Five years later, retention is still one of the most misunderstood parts of the customer journey. Most companies still treat it as a CS metric, not a growth lever. Most customer marketers still do not own it with confidence.

That is the opportunity sitting in front of you right now.

Why the economics are on your side

Let me say something obvious that most customer marketers know in their soul but very few leaders truly realize.

It costs less to grow an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Existing customers buy more. They refer others. They close faster when they show up as references. The math is not close.

Most of us know this intuitively. We got into this work because we love the relationship side. The human side. The trust-building side.

But here is the problem.

We never learned the math.

And if you cannot speak the math, you cannot speak to the people who fund the math.

CFOs do not think in programs. They think in CAC, LTV, NRR, and payback periods. GMs do not think in community engagement rates. They think in revenue protected, revenue expanded, and revenue at risk.

The good news is the economics almost always argue in our favor.

Acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than retaining an existing one. NRR above 100% means your business grows without adding a single new logo. Advocate-influenced deals close faster and at higher ACV. Customers who are educated, engaged, and activated churn at dramatically lower rates.

You do not need to become a finance expert.

You need to learn enough to translate what you do into the language executives already speak.

That is not a skill you were learned initially but it is a skill you can build in practice.

And it starts by understanding that the economics have always been on your side. You just never picked them up and used them.

The 3 sentences that change the conversation

You do not need a new budget to change how customer marketing is perceived. You need new language.

Here are three that work:

“Customers who engage with our advocacy program renew at 94%. Customers not involved renew at 71%. That is X million dollars in protected revenue.”

“Deals with an active customer reference close 28% faster. We have the references. We just need to activate them.”

“We have customers who have never been asked for anything. That is untapped pipeline sitting in your existing base.”

Walk into your next executive conversation with one of those.

The camera turns on. The phone goes down.

That is not a coincidence. That is the language of the business coming out of a customer marketing leader.

What this means for you right now

The CAC crisis is not going away. Paid channels will keep getting more expensive. Boards will keep demanding efficiency. The pressure on acquisition-led growth is only increasing.

That makes what you do more valuable, not less.

But only if you can say so in a language the business understands.

Learn the fundamentals of SaaS economics. Know your NRR. Know your CAC payback. Know what a one-point improvement in retention is worth in your business.

Then walk into the room and connect those numbers to what your team produces.

That is the shift. From programs to proof. From activity to economics. From nice-to-have to impossible to ignore.

Retention is still the most underrated growth lever in SaaS. And we are just getting started on this.

— Kevin

P.S. If this resonated, forward it to one marketer who needs to hear it. That is how we grow this community.