Issue 19: Customer Marketing's Identity Crisis.
Define the function before someone else does. Then educate continuously, because bias doesn't correct itself.
Welcome back to The Customer Continuum. Issue #19.
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