Issue 14: Influence Without Authority: How to Make Customer Marketing Untouchable
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:
Am I leading with the customer outcome or the program activity and do I know the difference?
Whose number does my work move and can I prove it in their language?
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.