Issue 18: The Time Capsule: How the Marketo Champions Changed Everything
Welcome back to The Customer Continuum. Issue 18.
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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.