Welcome back to The Customer Continuum. Issue #33, the finale of the champion series.
We’ve done the hard part twice now. One build found the champions: an agent that reads your customer base and points to who’s worth pursuing. The next reached them, with an invitation built around what that specific person had actually done. Getting champions in is the front of the work, and it’s the part that gets all the attention. This issue is about the part nobody wants to talk about, which is what happens in month four, when the launch glow is gone and the calendar has moved on and the program is either running or it isn’t.
I learned this the hard way with Adobe Analytics.
When I stood up the champion program there, I didn’t sit in a conference room and guess at what would keep people engaged. I called them. I talked to fifteen or twenty of the customers our product and customer success teams had nominated, and I asked them straight out what they cared about, what their hot buttons were, what made them tick. What surprised me was how little separated them from the Marketo customers I’d spent years with.
These were data people. Nerds in the best sense, the ones who build the workflows and the analytics architectures, who’ll argue Adobe Analytics versus Google Analytics for an hour, who geek out over a clean data model and a well-drawn system diagram. Their daily grind was living in that data and then translating it, turning it into something a marketing team or a C-suite exec would actually act on. I figured they’d want something completely different from the marketing-automation crowd. I found out they wanted the same three things.
Peer networking came first. They wanted to be in a room with people who did the same job and spoke the same language, who understood what it’s like to be the data person everyone leans on. Second was recognition. Their name in lights, the kind of career exposure that shows up in a performance review, which is why we built feeders straight into the Experience Maker Awards and the user groups. The clearest example I’ve got is Jess Kao. She leaned all the way into the awards and leading a user group, and it reshaped her career, a run of recognition and a kind of visibility she’s carried ever since. The third was access. A shorter path to the people building the product, a seat in the betas, a hand in shaping the education courses. They wanted in on the actual work.
Peer networking, recognition, access. Give a champion those three on a schedule and they stay. Skip a quarter and they drift, and you usually don’t notice until the renewal date has already slipped past.
That became the architecture, and it outlasted the org chart. What started as Advocate Nation still runs today inside the broader Adobe Experience Cloud portfolio, the same shape I built back then: the Experience Maker Awards, the reference program and customer stories, the user groups, the voice-of-customer work, the adoption and retention plays, the champion program itself, the webinars. It didn’t quietly wind down the way most of these do. The reason is honestly kind of boring. Somebody just kept running the cadence long after the launch was over, which is the whole job this issue is about.
What I built
So this week I built the engine that runs the keeping. It’s called the Champion Program Agent, and it does the unglamorous work that starts the day after a champion says yes.
Quick context if you’re new here. A champion program is a small, invitation-only group of your most influential customers, the ones who’ll advocate, speak, refer, and mentor other customers, in exchange for recognition and real access. The first two builds got them in the door. This one keeps them there, and it runs on three jobs.
Tiers first. The agent sorts champions into levels, Community Champion at entry, Product Champion in the middle, Executive Champion at the top, and it re-checks the advocacy score every month to catch who’s earned a bump up and who’s gone quiet and slid down. Nobody keeps this up by hand past the first quarter, which is exactly why the agent does it.
Then benefits. When someone moves up a tier, the agent fires off that tier’s benefits and posts the recognition, so the thing you promised them at signup actually lands in their inbox instead of dying in a spreadsheet you meant to get to when you had 15 min.
Then renewal: every champion has an anniversary, a year from the day they joined, and the agent sends the re-invite sixty days ahead of it and confirms they’re still eligible. That’s all renewal means here, the yearly ask to stay another year. Miss it enough times and the cohort lapses because of neglect and not providing the same level of attention as when you started the program.
The honest run
Then I ran it. Cold, against the seven champions who accepted in last week’s build, with nothing else attached, no tiers, no benefits on record, no join dates. These are a test cohort, not a live roster. I wanted to see the engine’s honest floor, what it can do on day one before anyone’s had time to clean up the data.
It did nothing, and that turned out to be the best outcome.
It assigned zero tiers, out of seven. The three levels exist on paper, Community, Product, Executive, but the agent places a champion by reading an advocacy score against each tier’s criteria, and this cohort showed up with neither. No scores. No thresholds written down. It could tell from the recruiting notes that a couple of these folks had deep track records and others were lighter, but a hunch isn’t a tier, so it wouldn’t stamp one on. It flagged all seven and told me what it needed first.
It couldn’t confirm a single benefit. With no tier there’s no benefit set to check against, but the real gap was deeper. Nothing on record said what any champion had been promised at signup, or whether one thing had ever been delivered. So all seven came back the same, unconfirmable, because the program had never kept a ledger of what it owed these people.
It couldn’t schedule one renewal. The renewal step fires sixty days before a champion’s anniversary, and not one of the seven had an anniversary on file, so there was no way to know when to re-invite anyone. Two got flagged a second time, the agency and partner champions whose eligibility nobody ever resolved when they were first reached, because the agent won’t queue a renewal for someone the program hasn’t confirmed is even allowed to be a member.
Here’s what all of it had in common. The program was built to bring champions in and never keep track of their engagement and records. No join dates, so renewal has nothing to run on. No written criteria, so the tiers are just names. No benefit ledger, so no way to prove you kept your word. No score feeding the monthly check that’s supposed to catch someone going quiet. Every one of those is something that should have been created the day a champion signed, and wasn’t.
I’ll be honest, I expected it to at least limp through a few of these. It didn’t, and the zero is the lesson. The engine ran clean and still couldn’t tier, reward, or renew a single person, because the records that keep a program alive didn’t exist yet. That’s the exact gap that lets a program fade the moment the launch is over.
What this means for your team
Here’s the line I’d steal for your next kickoff deck. Most champion programs are strongest the month they launch and quietly fade by the second quarter, because nobody runs the cadence once the launch energy wears off.
And it has nothing to do with how good your launch was. The launch is the fun part. It’s the announcement, the welcome call, the swag, the Slack channel that buzzes for two weeks. Then the quarter turns, the next fire starts, and the tiers stop getting checked, the benefits stop going out, and the renewal dates slide by unnoticed. Six months later the program is a logo on a slide and a channel nobody’s posted in since spring.
Keeping a program alive is just a different job than launching one, and it’s the job nobody staffs for, because it’s invisible when it’s working. A champion who quietly renews for the third year doesn’t get an announcement. She just keeps showing up, keeps referring, keeps taking the call when your AE needs a reference on a Friday. That steady compounding is worth more than any launch week, and it never makes the highlight reel. The agent exists to do that invisible job on a schedule, so the program you were proud of in Q1 is still alive in Q4.
What’s next
That’s the arc. Find, reach, keep, all three built in the open and yours to use as you wish.
Where I take the build with me series next is up in the air. If there’s a pillar you want me to build in public, lifecycle, community, voice of customer, whatever’s keeping you up at night, hit reply and tell me. The next build gets shaped by what comes back.
This week’s free starter: the Champion Renewal Agent
It’s the renewal piece of that engine, pulled out so you can run it on its own. Paste it into a fresh Claude Project, hand it your champion roster, and it drafts each person’s annual re-invitation, timed ahead of their anniversary, and flags who’s gone quiet or is already overdue.
Here’s the part I actually like. To write an honest re-invitation, it has to notice what’s missing first, a champion with no tier, a benefit you promised and never delivered, a renewal with no date to schedule against. So it hands you the drafts, the quick win, and it shows you the holes in your program in the same pass. It won’t thank a customer for a year of benefits they never got, which is a mistake I’ve watched real programs make.
Grab it below and save it next to the scoring agent and the outreach agent, the find and reach halves from the first two builds.
For paid subscribers
The free starter drafts the renewals. The paid kit runs the whole engine on a schedule, which is the difference between a program that launches successfully and one that dies 6 months later.
Your Champion Program Toolkit is updated with this week’s build. The full Champion Program Agent is wired with all three tiers and their criteria, the benefits that fire when someone moves up, and the renewal engine that re-invites every champion sixty days before their anniversary and checks they’re still eligible. It runs the monthly tier check and spits out the quarterly roster report for your CS and Sales leaders, so the program keeps itself honest between your reviews instead of drifting.
The promise here is specific, and it’s this week. By Friday you can have the renewal cadence running against your real roster, so your cohort compounds instead of fading. That’s the thing to buy, a program that keeps itself alive, not another library of agents you’ll get around to someday.
Three folders in your paid Drive bundle:
→ This week’s champion kit, updated with the renewal agent:
→ Copilot to install:
→ Full 135-agent Blueprint:
— Kevin
P.S. If you’ve ever watched a program you were proud of fade out by summer, forward this to the one person on your team who’d keep it alive. That’s how this newsletter grows.