Welcome back to The Customer Continuum. Issue #37.
When I was early in my career at Marketo, I believed that doing a good job just meant earning more of it. And for a while that was fine, because I wanted to prove I was worth it. So when they asked me to help bring five hundred CMOs to our summit in under ninety days, I said yes. When they layered an executive engagement program on top, and a handful of other things after that, I said yes to those too. I was new, and “sure, let’s do it” felt like the thing that got you taken seriously.
Then the reality of it landed. My team was only so big, and we were already stretched thin, staring down a deadline none of us felt good about. We pulled it off, and the event was amazing, the program too. But it cost us. People started to leave, and morale slid. Then we turned around and spent the next nine months getting ready to do the whole thing over again the following year.
What stayed with me is that we rebuilt almost everything from scratch every time, because we’d never stopped to build the systems underneath. If we could have kept a version of what we made and started the next round at seventy percent instead of zero, that job would have felt completely different. The volume of work was real, but doing all of it from a blank page, year after year, is what wore us down.
That’s the gap I think we can finally close, because the work that used to get rebuilt by hand can now be built once and run by a system. And it changes what a customer marketing team even needs to look like.
For as long as I’ve been in this industry, a complete customer marketing organization falls under seven pillars: community, adoption, voice of customer, advocacy, communications, education, and executive engagement, and the org chart for them has always been a headcount plan. Want more advocacy, you hire an advocacy person. Want a real community, you hire a community manager. The work grew with the number of people, which is why “do more with less” felt impossible, since fewer people just meant less work done.
So when the headcount doesn’t come, you get creative with what you’ve got. You bring in a contractor or an agency to cover the gap. Or you take the program dollars you can’t turn into a hire and try to spend them where they’ll actually move the work forward. Or you buy a tool and hope it does the job the extra person would have. Either way, you make cuts, you make concessions, and you find a way to deliver, but none of it solves the underlying problem. A tool dropped on top of a broken process just makes the broken process faster.
The real work has always been balancing those four things, headcount, program spend, the contractors, and the tools underneath, to improve the value you deliver and not just the volume you push out. What’s changed is the reflex. Because customer marketing has mostly been a tactical function, we learned to assume that more workload means more headcount. That isn’t automatically true anymore.
A person plus a set of narrow agents can now cover a pillar that used to take a full-time hire, and that tips the whole balance. The org chart turns into an operating model: one practitioner at the center, running a set of agents, each pointed at a pillar, with a governance layer that keeps the whole thing honest. And because the work lives in that system instead of getting rebuilt by hand each cycle, the next round starts where the last one left off, and not from a blank page. That’s the loop we didn’t create when I first joined Marketo.
I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of this that sounds like a layoff pitch, and it isn’t one. The agents aren’t there to replace the customer marketer. They take the part of the week that was never customer marketing in the first place: the account research, the CRM digging, the spreadsheet aggregation, the fourth rewrite of the same account summary. That’s the work that pulls you away from customers. Hand it off, and the person gets their week back for the part only a person can do, which is the relationship building.
Five things make the model work, and none of them are necessarily exotic. The context each agent reads lives in plain files you own, one canonical home for each thing, so every agent works from the same truth. Each agent is narrow, a specialist for one pillar instead of one bot trying to do all seven. Every agent checks its work against a real source instead of guessing, which is what earns the trust of the people who’ll ask how you know. Anything that goes to a customer is drafted by the agent and sent by a human, every time, because that’s where judgment and reputation live. And nothing gets built in the abstract: each agent starts from one real task you already repeat every week, and gets better by running for real and fixing what breaks. You start with two, not a hundred.
If you want to feel this in your own week, don’t start by building anything. Write down what pulls you away from your customers, the research, the CRM digging, the spreadsheets, the summaries you redo every week, and point your first agent at the top of that list. And fix your data before you point anything at it, because an agent reading a messy source just makes it worse.
None of this is a someday idea. It’s the argument I’m walking a room through next week at the Customer Marketing Summit in SF: the operating model, the org chart, and a working version of it running on my own operations. This issue is the short version.
This week’s free starter: the pillar-to-agent map
A one-page worksheet. List your seven pillars down one side, and for each, name the single repeated task an agent could take off your plate first. That map is where you start, before you build anything, and it’s the whole “start with two, not a hundred” idea in the smallest form I could make it.
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The map above isn’t theoretical for you, because your kit already has the pillar archetypes, agents mapped to each of the seven pillars. So this week, pick the two pillars dragging you most, open the matching agents in your Blueprint, and stand them up on one real task each. The task briefs are written, so you’re not starting from a blank page. By Friday you’ve got two pillars running on the operating model instead of on your evenings.
— Kevin
P.S. If you’re the one or two people covering all seven pillars, forward this to the leader who keeps asking for more without more headcount. It’s a better conversation to have than the one where you quietly burn out proving you can do it all.