Last week we hosted a Fireside Chat with Heather Foeh, one of the most experienced voices in customer marketing and advocacy. The conversation was hosted alongside CMAWeekly, and led by Gianna Scorsone, COO of Champion. What made it special wasn't the prepared talking points, but the questions that came in live from the audience that pushed us past the usual playbooks and into the messier, more honest work of building advocacy programs that survive past year one.

If you missed it, check out the highlights and recording below.

1. The "virtual handshake" beats the perfect system

Heather's most repeated piece of advice: don't wait for the org chart, the budget, or the perfect tech stack to be in place before you start. Stand up a simple intake form (she calls it a "virtual handshake") that captures the basics like geo, role, and topics someone is willing to talk about. Start building your data pool. You'll learn what to fix as you go.

The tendency to overcomplicate is one of the biggest reasons programs stall before they get going. As Gianna put it during the session, "We overestimate what actually needs to get done to say that we're doing something." The fastest way to get traction is to launch a lightweight version, learn what's working, and iterate.

2. Tie everything to what leadership actually talks about

There's no universal definition of advocacy program success. It depends on company stage, business priorities, and where leadership is feeling pain. The job of the customer marketer is to listen at all-hands meetings, learn what the CEO and CFO are saying, and align the program's narrative to those priorities. That might be NRR. It might be ARR influence on new business. It might be churn reduction or expansion into a new region.

Heather's framing was clear: programs that get funded and scaled are the ones that show up in revenue conversations, not the ones that exist alongside them. Or as Gianna said in the session, "Now you are metric-driven and speaking the same language of the CEO, CFO, and the business leaders."

3. Executive advocacy needs a different playbook

A common audience question: how do you run advocacy with executives who won't fill out a form, attend a webinar, or join a community?

Heather's approach is to source executive advocates through CS intel and short briefing calls, then run exec-to-exec outreach with tight, specific asks. Equip your own executives with talk tracks and a one-page brief. Start with a small cohort, earn the right to expand, and resist the urge to scale before the relationships are real. Executive advocacy is bespoke by design.

4. Quality over quantity, every single time

One of the biggest mistakes Heather sees is heavy-handed tiering (gold, silver, platinum) that confuses advocates and turns them off. Better: a smaller, active pool you actually nurture.

She's a fan of the annual refresh model, inspired by programs like Salesforce MVP. Every year, advocates re-up. People appreciate being chosen, and you're forced to keep your roster honest. The result is a program that feels exclusive, focused, and genuinely energizing for the people in it, not a long list of contacts you're afraid to email.

5. What separates the programs that thrive in year three

When we asked Heather what differentiates programs that are still going strong years in, her answer was almost anti-climactic. It's the unglamorous work. Daily relationship management. Consistent internal enablement and roadshows tailored to each function. Onboarding hooks for sales and CS so new hires don't forget the program exists. A steady cadence of opportunities for advocates to engage.

Programs don't die from bad strategy. They die from inconsistent execution and the slow erosion of internal awareness. The teams that thrive are the ones that treat advocacy like a relationship business, because that's what it is.

6. Where AI will help, and where it absolutely won't

Both Heather and Gianna landed in the same place on this one. AI is going to accelerate the rote, time-consuming work of advocacy: discovery, matching the right advocate to the right opportunity, aggregating signals across CS, product, and marketing, and helping you prep faster.

What AI won't do is replace the human relationship that turns a customer into a true advocate. As trust in marketing erodes, authentic VOC in customers' own words becomes more valuable, not less. The future isn't AI instead of relationships. It's AI that gives customer marketers more time to invest in the relationships that actually move the business.

A few audience favorites

Some of the strongest moments came from questions the audience brought into the chat. A few we want to call out:

• On educating executives internally: frame asks from the exec's point of view ("if NetSuite asked you to do this, what would you need?"), keep asks frictionless and concise, and tie them to company initiatives leadership is already invested in.
• On figuring out what actually influences B2B buyers when you're new to a company: befriend your win/loss owner, run five to ten quick customer interviews for directional insight, and validate which evidence (reviews, case studies, references) is actually moving deals.
• On tracking advocate health: combine signals across sentiment tools (like Gong), CS engagement (like Gainsight), product usage context, marketing and community attendance, and social interactions. The repeat engagers across multiple signals are usually your best advocates.

Thank you

A huge thank you to Heather Foeh for sharing the kind of hard-won perspective you only get from doing this work for years, and to Mary Green for leading such an engaged community of CMA pros. The conversation wouldn't have been the same without the questions and energy our audience brought, so thank you to everyone who showed up.

If you'd like to put any of this into practice, our playbooks walk through intake, executive pathways, and the cross-functional relationships that turn advocacy from a side project into a strategic function. And if you'd like to see how Champion supports the kind of work Heather described, just reach out.