Podcasts

Building Advocacy Programs That Actually Drive Revenue

A conversation with Brittnee Dawson, VP of Product and Customer Marketing and a Top 100 Customer Marketing Strategist for 2025. To hear the full conversation, listen here.

Customer marketing has a trust problem hiding inside a metrics problem. Chase the dollar signs too hard and you lose the relationships that make advocacy possible in the first place. Lean too far into relationships and you lose the executive buy-in that keeps the program funded. Brittnee Dawson has spent her career finding the place where both can be true at once.

In her previous role as Director of Customer Marketing at AlphaSense — and a Top 100 Customer Marketing Strategist for 2025 — she's launched advocacy programs that doubled their goals in financial services, pioneered advocacy attribution inside Salesforce, and kept human connection at the center of everything while doing it. In this episode of Customer Champions, she shares how she thinks about metrics at different stages of program maturity, what's really happening with the case study, and where customer marketing is headed over the next five years.

What Customer Marketing Is Really About

Brittnee came to customer marketing through an unusual path, via film school, product management at Thomson Reuters, and a deep love of storytelling that never went away. That background shapes how she defines the role.

"At the core, customer marketing is about connection and amplifying customers. How can we amplify voices and create connections across the journey to create really high-impact business outcomes and find those moments that truly matter?"

For Brittnee, creative instinct and strategic thinking fuel each other. The same person who can spot a story worth telling is the one who can also spot the customer worth asking. That's the through line from film school to AlphaSense: the best customer marketing is storytelling with data behind it.

Metrics at Every Stage: How to Measure While Programs Are Maturing

One of the most common mistakes in customer marketing is applying the wrong metrics to the wrong stage of a program. Brittnee has built customer marketing from scratch at multiple companies, and she's developed a clear framework for how measurement should evolve over time.

Early stage — program engagement metrics: When you're just launching, the most meaningful signal is participation: those who engaged in the program versus those who did not. Clicks, acts of advocacy, individual moments of connection. This is how you prove the program is working before the revenue data catches up.

Growth stage — pipeline influence and retention: As programs mature, you can start to see influence on pipeline, retention dollars, and renewal rates. But Brittnee is clear-eyed about the timeline: in enterprise B2B, renewals can be two or three years out. Programs need time to sit before they surface in the lagging metrics.

Advanced stage — advocacy shows up in the revenue numbers: At AlphaSense, Brittnee pushed into territory most customer marketing teams haven't reached yet. In practice, that means: when a customer engages with the advocacy program, that activity gets logged in Salesforce alongside every other signal the business uses to track pipeline and growth. So instead of advocacy living in its own separate dashboard, it sits next to the same revenue numbers leadership already trusts, meaning a CRO can eventually see, in plain dollars, what advocacy is contributing.

Doubling Advocacy Goals: What Made It Work

AlphaSense serves financial services customers, a notoriously cautious segment when it comes to public advocacy. Conventional wisdom says these customers just want to use the product quietly and not be asked to do more.

Brittnee's first advocacy program at AlphaSense doubled its goals.

The key wasn't a clever tactic or a better pitch. It was timing. Using Champion to identify when customers were most likely to be receptive, based on behavioral signals and engagement data, the team reached out at the right moments instead of blasting the whole base with a generic ask.

"We had this perception that our customers just want to use our services and products. But when they raise their hand to do something with you, you're like — hey, that's really cool. The learning is: use the data to find the right moments to connect."

The broader lesson applies beyond financial services: customers in almost every vertical are more willing to advocate than teams assume. The barrier is asking at the wrong time, in the wrong way, for the wrong thing.

Bringing Advocacy Into Salesforce: Why It's a Game Changer

Most customer marketing teams report on advocacy engagement in isolation, using a separate dashboard that shows program metrics but doesn't connect to how the business actually tracks revenue. Brittnee changed that at AlphaSense.

By connecting Champion engagement data directly into Salesforce, advocacy flows into the same attribution model the business already uses for everything else. That means executive reporting can show not just how many customers are in the advocacy program, but how advocacy activity correlates with pipeline, retention, and expansion in the same place where every other revenue metric lives.

Two things made it possible:

An early relationship with operations. Brittnee didn't wait until the end of program development to involve her ops team. She brought them in early, explained exactly what she was trying to solve for, and asked for their help designing the right data connection. The result: once the Champion-Salesforce connection was in place, her ops counterpart built the attribution model in a week.

Clarity on what the integration actually needed to prove. Before building the connection, Brittnee had to define which advocacy behaviors should be tracked, how they'd be weighted, and what business outcomes they'd be mapped against. That conceptual work had to happen before any technical work could begin.

Her advice: make operations your best friend. If you're trying to prove impact and you don't have a close relationship with the ops team, you're fighting an uphill battle.

Internal Alignment: How to Build Trust Across CS, Sales, and Product

Customer marketing sits at the intersection of almost every customer-facing team. That's its superpower and its biggest operational challenge. Getting CS, sales, product, and marketing to align around a shared customer program takes consistent, empathy-first communication.

Brittnee's approach:

Lead with their goals, not yours. Every internal conversation starts with the same question: what does this team need, and how can customer marketing help them get there? For CS, that usually means better retention and adoption. For sales, it means better stories and faster deal cycles. Show up as a resource, not a requester.

Time your asks carefully. End of quarter is not the moment to ask a CS team to review a list or validate a program. Reading the room and knowing when teams have bandwidth and when they don't is just as important as having a good idea.

Build internal advocates the same way you build external ones. Pilot programs with a small group, gather their feedback, improve the program, then use their experience to build buy-in for the full launch. The same mechanics that make external advocacy work apply internally.

Create a shared alignment meeting that spans all customer-facing leaders. At AlphaSense, Brittnee helped establish a monthly meeting that brings together all CS leaders and all teams running customer programs, ensuring that external marketing strategy stays cohesive and that internal stakeholders aren't getting contradictory messages.

The Future of the Case Study: Brittnee's Hot Take

Every go-to-market team says they need more case studies. Few of them are honest about how rarely those case studies actually get used once they're produced. Brittnee thinks the format itself is overdue for a rethink.

"Where is the right moment for case studies? I think we're never going to get away from them. But when do we create that high-value video case study with a lot of investment dollars — versus when is just a great quote from an executive and an awesome logo going to do it?

Three things are squeezing the old case-study playbook:

AI is consuming and repurposing published content instantly. The moment a case study goes live, LLMs are indexing it and potentially reframing it in ways you didn't intend. This raises questions about what "publishing" even means and how to maintain control of your customers' stories.

Production investment doesn't hold its value. A high-investment video case study can become outdated quickly as products evolve and messaging shifts. The ROI calculation on long-form content is getting harder to justify.

Customer time is increasingly scarce. Asking a customer for an hour-long recorded interview is a real ask. As advocacy becomes more competitive across vendors, the bar for earning that time goes up.

Her response: lean into user-generated content, use tools like Gong to extract stories from conversations customers are already having, and focus on authentic, diverse voices over polished production. A customer selfie on LinkedIn may drive more trust than a produced case study and costs almost nothing to create.

The static case study isn't dead, and it's not going away. But treating it as the default format for every customer story is the mistake. The customer marketers who win from here will build content programs flexible enough to match the investment to the moment. Sometimes that's a produced video, and just as often it's a sharp quote, a great logo, or a customer's own LinkedIn post.

Where Customer Marketing Is Headed: The Next 1–5 Years

Brittnee sees two major shifts coming for the customer marketing profession, and she's actively building toward both.

Community-led growth and peer influence. The one-to-one advocacy model is giving way to something more networked. Customers want to connect with each other, not just with their vendor. The customer marketers who figure out how to facilitate peer relationships at scale and backed by data will unlock a new tier of growth engine.

Quantitative and qualitative data working together. The data exists to know when a customer changes jobs, when they hit a milestone, when they're most likely to respond to an advocacy ask. But the best customer marketers will combine that quantitative signal with qualitative intelligence — what are customers actually saying? What's the emotional context behind the behavioral data? — to reach out with the right message at the right moment.

The through line is B2C personalization finally arriving in B2B. The CDPs, the behavioral signals, the AI tools — they're all pointing toward a customer marketing discipline that can treat every customer like an individual, not a segment. That's where Brittnee sees the profession going, and it's where she's building now.

Key Takeaways for Customer Marketing Leaders

Match your metrics to your program stage. Early programs need engagement metrics. Mature programs need pipeline and retention data. Advanced programs need advocacy attribution in the revenue model.

Timing is everything in advocacy. Use behavioral data to identify the right moment to ask, not the most convenient moment for your calendar.

Make operations your best friend. If you want advocacy to show up in executive reporting, build the ops relationship before you need the integration.

Lead with empathy in every internal conversation. Know what your CS, sales, and product counterparts need and show up as someone who helps them get there.

Rethink the case study. Not every story needs a full production. User-generated content, executive quotes, and AI-assisted story extraction may get you further faster.

Build for community-led growth. The future of customer marketing is peer influence at scale with the data infrastructure to know when and how to facilitate it.

Keep the human at the center. AI, data, attribution models — all of it is in service of the same goal: making a real person feel genuinely valued by the company they chose.

‍

Brittnee Dawson is the VP of Product and Customer Marketing at Service Express, the former Director of Customer Marketing at AlphaSense, and a Top 100 Customer Marketing & Advocacy Strategist for 2025.

This post is based on Brittnee's appearance on Customer Champions, the podcast from Champion that explores how the best marketers turn customers into their biggest growth engine. Visit championhq.com for more resources.

‍

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Building Advocacy Programs That Actually Drive Revenue

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A conversation with Brittnee Dawson, VP of Product and Customer Marketing and a Top 100 Customer Marketing Strategist for 2025. To hear the full conversation, listen here.

Customer marketing has a trust problem hiding inside a metrics problem. Chase the dollar signs too hard and you lose the relationships that make advocacy possible in the first place. Lean too far into relationships and you lose the executive buy-in that keeps the program funded. Brittnee Dawson has spent her career finding the place where both can be true at once.

In her previous role as Director of Customer Marketing at AlphaSense — and a Top 100 Customer Marketing Strategist for 2025 — she's launched advocacy programs that doubled their goals in financial services, pioneered advocacy attribution inside Salesforce, and kept human connection at the center of everything while doing it. In this episode of Customer Champions, she shares how she thinks about metrics at different stages of program maturity, what's really happening with the case study, and where customer marketing is headed over the next five years.

What Customer Marketing Is Really About

Brittnee came to customer marketing through an unusual path, via film school, product management at Thomson Reuters, and a deep love of storytelling that never went away. That background shapes how she defines the role.

"At the core, customer marketing is about connection and amplifying customers. How can we amplify voices and create connections across the journey to create really high-impact business outcomes and find those moments that truly matter?"

For Brittnee, creative instinct and strategic thinking fuel each other. The same person who can spot a story worth telling is the one who can also spot the customer worth asking. That's the through line from film school to AlphaSense: the best customer marketing is storytelling with data behind it.

Metrics at Every Stage: How to Measure While Programs Are Maturing

One of the most common mistakes in customer marketing is applying the wrong metrics to the wrong stage of a program. Brittnee has built customer marketing from scratch at multiple companies, and she's developed a clear framework for how measurement should evolve over time.

Early stage — program engagement metrics: When you're just launching, the most meaningful signal is participation: those who engaged in the program versus those who did not. Clicks, acts of advocacy, individual moments of connection. This is how you prove the program is working before the revenue data catches up.

Growth stage — pipeline influence and retention: As programs mature, you can start to see influence on pipeline, retention dollars, and renewal rates. But Brittnee is clear-eyed about the timeline: in enterprise B2B, renewals can be two or three years out. Programs need time to sit before they surface in the lagging metrics.

Advanced stage — advocacy shows up in the revenue numbers: At AlphaSense, Brittnee pushed into territory most customer marketing teams haven't reached yet. In practice, that means: when a customer engages with the advocacy program, that activity gets logged in Salesforce alongside every other signal the business uses to track pipeline and growth. So instead of advocacy living in its own separate dashboard, it sits next to the same revenue numbers leadership already trusts, meaning a CRO can eventually see, in plain dollars, what advocacy is contributing.

Doubling Advocacy Goals: What Made It Work

AlphaSense serves financial services customers, a notoriously cautious segment when it comes to public advocacy. Conventional wisdom says these customers just want to use the product quietly and not be asked to do more.

Brittnee's first advocacy program at AlphaSense doubled its goals.

The key wasn't a clever tactic or a better pitch. It was timing. Using Champion to identify when customers were most likely to be receptive, based on behavioral signals and engagement data, the team reached out at the right moments instead of blasting the whole base with a generic ask.

"We had this perception that our customers just want to use our services and products. But when they raise their hand to do something with you, you're like — hey, that's really cool. The learning is: use the data to find the right moments to connect."

The broader lesson applies beyond financial services: customers in almost every vertical are more willing to advocate than teams assume. The barrier is asking at the wrong time, in the wrong way, for the wrong thing.

Bringing Advocacy Into Salesforce: Why It's a Game Changer

Most customer marketing teams report on advocacy engagement in isolation, using a separate dashboard that shows program metrics but doesn't connect to how the business actually tracks revenue. Brittnee changed that at AlphaSense.

By connecting Champion engagement data directly into Salesforce, advocacy flows into the same attribution model the business already uses for everything else. That means executive reporting can show not just how many customers are in the advocacy program, but how advocacy activity correlates with pipeline, retention, and expansion in the same place where every other revenue metric lives.

Two things made it possible:

An early relationship with operations. Brittnee didn't wait until the end of program development to involve her ops team. She brought them in early, explained exactly what she was trying to solve for, and asked for their help designing the right data connection. The result: once the Champion-Salesforce connection was in place, her ops counterpart built the attribution model in a week.

Clarity on what the integration actually needed to prove. Before building the connection, Brittnee had to define which advocacy behaviors should be tracked, how they'd be weighted, and what business outcomes they'd be mapped against. That conceptual work had to happen before any technical work could begin.

Her advice: make operations your best friend. If you're trying to prove impact and you don't have a close relationship with the ops team, you're fighting an uphill battle.

Internal Alignment: How to Build Trust Across CS, Sales, and Product

Customer marketing sits at the intersection of almost every customer-facing team. That's its superpower and its biggest operational challenge. Getting CS, sales, product, and marketing to align around a shared customer program takes consistent, empathy-first communication.

Brittnee's approach:

Lead with their goals, not yours. Every internal conversation starts with the same question: what does this team need, and how can customer marketing help them get there? For CS, that usually means better retention and adoption. For sales, it means better stories and faster deal cycles. Show up as a resource, not a requester.

Time your asks carefully. End of quarter is not the moment to ask a CS team to review a list or validate a program. Reading the room and knowing when teams have bandwidth and when they don't is just as important as having a good idea.

Build internal advocates the same way you build external ones. Pilot programs with a small group, gather their feedback, improve the program, then use their experience to build buy-in for the full launch. The same mechanics that make external advocacy work apply internally.

Create a shared alignment meeting that spans all customer-facing leaders. At AlphaSense, Brittnee helped establish a monthly meeting that brings together all CS leaders and all teams running customer programs, ensuring that external marketing strategy stays cohesive and that internal stakeholders aren't getting contradictory messages.

The Future of the Case Study: Brittnee's Hot Take

Every go-to-market team says they need more case studies. Few of them are honest about how rarely those case studies actually get used once they're produced. Brittnee thinks the format itself is overdue for a rethink.

"Where is the right moment for case studies? I think we're never going to get away from them. But when do we create that high-value video case study with a lot of investment dollars — versus when is just a great quote from an executive and an awesome logo going to do it?

Three things are squeezing the old case-study playbook:

AI is consuming and repurposing published content instantly. The moment a case study goes live, LLMs are indexing it and potentially reframing it in ways you didn't intend. This raises questions about what "publishing" even means and how to maintain control of your customers' stories.

Production investment doesn't hold its value. A high-investment video case study can become outdated quickly as products evolve and messaging shifts. The ROI calculation on long-form content is getting harder to justify.

Customer time is increasingly scarce. Asking a customer for an hour-long recorded interview is a real ask. As advocacy becomes more competitive across vendors, the bar for earning that time goes up.

Her response: lean into user-generated content, use tools like Gong to extract stories from conversations customers are already having, and focus on authentic, diverse voices over polished production. A customer selfie on LinkedIn may drive more trust than a produced case study and costs almost nothing to create.

The static case study isn't dead, and it's not going away. But treating it as the default format for every customer story is the mistake. The customer marketers who win from here will build content programs flexible enough to match the investment to the moment. Sometimes that's a produced video, and just as often it's a sharp quote, a great logo, or a customer's own LinkedIn post.

Where Customer Marketing Is Headed: The Next 1–5 Years

Brittnee sees two major shifts coming for the customer marketing profession, and she's actively building toward both.

Community-led growth and peer influence. The one-to-one advocacy model is giving way to something more networked. Customers want to connect with each other, not just with their vendor. The customer marketers who figure out how to facilitate peer relationships at scale and backed by data will unlock a new tier of growth engine.

Quantitative and qualitative data working together. The data exists to know when a customer changes jobs, when they hit a milestone, when they're most likely to respond to an advocacy ask. But the best customer marketers will combine that quantitative signal with qualitative intelligence — what are customers actually saying? What's the emotional context behind the behavioral data? — to reach out with the right message at the right moment.

The through line is B2C personalization finally arriving in B2B. The CDPs, the behavioral signals, the AI tools — they're all pointing toward a customer marketing discipline that can treat every customer like an individual, not a segment. That's where Brittnee sees the profession going, and it's where she's building now.

Key Takeaways for Customer Marketing Leaders

Match your metrics to your program stage. Early programs need engagement metrics. Mature programs need pipeline and retention data. Advanced programs need advocacy attribution in the revenue model.

Timing is everything in advocacy. Use behavioral data to identify the right moment to ask, not the most convenient moment for your calendar.

Make operations your best friend. If you want advocacy to show up in executive reporting, build the ops relationship before you need the integration.

Lead with empathy in every internal conversation. Know what your CS, sales, and product counterparts need and show up as someone who helps them get there.

Rethink the case study. Not every story needs a full production. User-generated content, executive quotes, and AI-assisted story extraction may get you further faster.

Build for community-led growth. The future of customer marketing is peer influence at scale with the data infrastructure to know when and how to facilitate it.

Keep the human at the center. AI, data, attribution models — all of it is in service of the same goal: making a real person feel genuinely valued by the company they chose.

‍

Brittnee Dawson is the VP of Product and Customer Marketing at Service Express, the former Director of Customer Marketing at AlphaSense, and a Top 100 Customer Marketing & Advocacy Strategist for 2025.

This post is based on Brittnee's appearance on Customer Champions, the podcast from Champion that explores how the best marketers turn customers into their biggest growth engine. Visit championhq.com for more resources.

‍

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