Welcome back to The Customer Continuum. Issue #34.
The last few issues, I built the champion outreach system. This week’s a different animal.
A few years ago I pitched a program my leadership thought was a waste of money. We wanted to fly a handful of our most important customers to an executive forum in Sardinia, Italy. Yes, Sardinia. The CRO looked at me like I’d tried to expense a holiday, and I understood the reaction, because on a spreadsheet that’s exactly what it is, a line item with a beach behind it.
The idea underneath it was bigger than one trip. Almost everyone in our world was a practitioner, the people who live in the product day to day that we had a deep relationship with. The executive rooms above them were a complete blind spot. We had no real relationships with the people who actually sign the renewal, and no executive community to speak of. So we partnered with a third party organization that ran exactly these kinds of gatherings and curated ours together. I pitched it as a pilot on purpose, a small experiment to find out whether investing in executive engagement would pay off at all, because I couldn’t promise anyone that it would. The skepticism was fair. I was asking for real money on a bet nobody had proof for yet.
What the spreadsheet couldn’t tell anyone was that one of the accounts on that invite list was quietly falling apart. Not loudly, and not in any way that shows up on a renewal forecast, but the signals were everywhere if you were paying attention: support tickets that kept reopening, a tone in the reviews that had drifted from partner back to customer, the slow and specific feeling of a company that had stopped feeling valued. We’d been reading those signals for months. So the forum was doing two jobs at once. It was the test of a new idea, and it was a move on that specific account, a way to stand up an executive sponsorship program around them, put our leadership in a room with theirs, and answer what the customer had been telling us for a year.
That trip is where it turned. Their execs came. Ours showed up for them, and I mean actually showed up, not a handshake and a photo. The account that was halfway out the door stayed, we saved a deal worth more than $500,000, and the customer went from writing us off to helping us rebuild the relationship from their side. And the pilot did exactly what it was intended to do. It gave us a positive outcome: YES, keep building out the program, which is how a one-time experiment turns into a program you get funded to keep running.
What stuck with me came a quarter later, watching that story get compressed in a business review. It became a single line, that the Sardinia trip saved the account, and everything underneath it disappeared: the months of reading the signals, the bet on executive engagement that got us in the room at all, my team catching the drift early enough to act, all of it flattened into one slide about a nice trip to Italy. The save was real, but I hadn’t learned yet that saving the account and getting credit for it are two different skills, and I’d only built one of them.
I’ve sat in that hot seat more times than I’d like, defending a budget and explaining what my team actually did to people who’d already decided what they thought it did. What finally clicked for me is that it was never about the tactics. I could recite the program list in my sleep and it wouldn’t move a single person across the table. What I had to get good at was saying the same work in a different language depending on who was sitting there, the CRO, the CFO, the CEO, the CMO. That took me years to learn. So this week I tried to build it into an agent.
This is really an attribution problem before it’s a marketing problem. The work that saves or wins a deal happens upstream and quiet, the trust you build over a year, the champion who’ll go to bat for you, the signal you caught before anyone else was looking. The moment a deal closes is loud, and it belongs to whoever’s in the room when it happens. Your quiet year of work can be the whole reason that deal was winnable and still not be the story anyone tells. The version that sticks is the one spoken in the language of the number leadership already watches.
What I built
The Decoder Ring is simple to describe. You give it two things, what you did, whether that’s a metric or a program or a deal you helped save, and who you’re about to sit across from. It hands back your value in that leader’s language, pointed at the outcome they actually own, with the tactics stripped out.
Underneath, it runs the three moves I use when I walk into one of these rooms myself. Open on the goal they already care about instead of on my function. Restate what I did as a number they use to run the business. Then stretch the frame out to the second-order thing they’re measured on. It’s built on a belief I’ve earned the hard way, that you don’t win this in a meeting. You win it over cycles, by speaking their language and building the cross-functional trust in parallel, until one day someone else is telling your story for you in a room you’re not even in.
I gave it two rules that matter more than the moves. It won’t hand you one reframe to spray at everyone, because the CFO and the CRO don’t own the same outcome, so it makes you pick the room before it writes a word. And when it doesn’t have the real number, it won’t invent one, it tells you what’s missing and asks for it. A confident reframe you can’t back up is worse than saying nothing, and I’ve watched that go badly in real time in front of a CFO.
None of this is a fresh rebuild for every leader. The C-suite wants the same handful of things almost universally: be brief, be executive-ready, and speak in outcomes instead of a list of tactics. Get that right and you’re most of the way there. The per-seat tuning, the CFO’s cost-of-acquisition lens or the CRO’s expansion lens, is the last mile on top of a translation that’s already doing the universal job, turning what you did into what it meant for the business.
The honest run
I ran it cold against a real number: customer advocacy influenced $21.1M in ARR in my last full year running the practice. I pointed it at three leaders, one at a time. Two of the decodes I could have used as they were. It’s the third that stuck with me, because it didn’t just miss but showed me where the whole idea still breaks.
The CFO version I’d have walked into a boardroom with. It opened where finance always starts, on cost of acquisition, and recast the $21.1M as revenue that closed or renewed with an advocacy touch on it, a reference call, a peer review, a champion intro, all booked without paying to source it cold. Then it did the thing I’d told it to do instead of bluffing, and admitted it couldn’t give me the real efficiency number without my blended CAC and my attribution window, so it asked for both. It even landed where I would have, on the move from per-seat to consumption pricing, where every renewal has to re-earn its keep and advocacy is the cheapest proof you’ve got.
The CRO version started just as strong, leading with the give-and-get I’ve always run with revenue: I build the reference desk and the user groups that shorten your cycles and let customers do some of the selling, and you send me your champions and the deal context. Then it slipped. It called the $21.1M “mostly expansion” as if it knew the split, and it doesn’t, because I never gave it one. That’s exactly how our function loses the room, claiming the shape of a number you can’t break down the second someone asks.
Then the customer success leader, where the whole thing fell over. A CS leader already believes in you. They own the retention number, they can see the programs working, they’re a partner, not a skeptic you have to win. So everything the agent is good at backfired. Co-opting someone who’s already on your side does nothing, and anchoring in revenue just tells them what they already know. What came back was accurate and completely useless: “your customers are healthy, adopting, and expanding, which supports your net revenue retention.” It handed a partner a compliment when what they needed was a play, which account, which signal, what to do Monday morning. The Decoder Ring knows how to win over someone who doubts you, and it has no idea yet what to do with someone who’s already in your corner.
Two clean, one flat, and the flat one taught me more than the wins. I’ll explain more below.
What this means for your team
The takeaway isn’t “go build a decoder agent.” You don’t need one.
It’s this. Every piece of work you own is already three or four different sentences, depending on who’s reading it. And your good work goes uncredited in meetings less because it was weak and more because you walked in speaking marketing to a room that only hears revenue. So before your next big conversation, take your single strongest result and write it three ways: a cost-of-acquisition line for the finance brain, an expansion-and-retention line for the revenue brain, and an operational signal for the success partner who’s already rooting for you. I’d bet the version you’d have led with isn’t the one that lands.
Which raises the obvious question, the one I asked myself: what happens when they’re all in the same room and you’re the one presenting? You don’t run three translations out loud. You lead with the shared business outcome, briefly and in plain terms, because that’s what every seat at that table wants anyway. The tuned versions become your backup, the answer you reach for when the CFO or the CRO leans in with their specific question. The universal move carries the room, and the tuning is there for the follow-up.
The translation is only half of it. The other half is planting seeds. You make the case yourself, in the language each leader trusts, enough times and over enough months that eventually someone else starts making it for you in a room you’re not even in. When you’re the one saying it, leadership hears one more person defending their own budget. When the CRO says it for you, they take it as fact. You earn that by doing the translation over and over, and by building the cross-functional relationships long before a renewal is ever at risk, so that when the account gets saved, someone who isn’t you tells the room your team saw it coming. It’s slower than making a good slide, and it matters more.
And steal the agent’s one discipline while you’re at it. When you don’t have the real baseline, say so and ask for it, instead of reaching for a number you can’t defend when someone leans in. “I don’t have the CAC baseline yet, get me that and I’ll show you the efficiency” beats a confident guess that falls apart the one time it counts.
What’s next
Next week I’m building the ally mode this run exposed, the version that equips a partner who’s already on your side with a play instead of a pitch, which is exactly the move the customer success decode was missing.
This week’s free starter: the C-suite decode
The free starter is a scoped slice of the Decoder Ring, the C-suite decode on its own. Feed it one result and it hands you the CFO or CEO version, anchored in cost of acquisition, with that same rule that it asks for a missing number instead of inventing one. It’s the fastest way I know to see how much you leave on the table every time you carry marketing language into a revenue room.
Drop it in a fresh Claude Project, paste in your strongest result, and read the decode next to how you’d have said it yourself. That gap is the point.
For paid subscribers
The free starter decodes for one audience. Your kit decodes for all of them.
