Most customer marketers are asked to do an impossible amount with very little.

One person. Dozens of programs. Constant pressure to prove revenue impact. Taylor Page has lived that reality, and she's built a framework for thriving in it.

Taylor is the Director of Customer and Growth Marketing at Kong, where she leads lifecycle marketing, advocacy programs, and growth initiatives. Her career spans customer success, sales, business development, product marketing, and growth, a background that gives her a uniquely cross-functional lens on what it actually takes to make customer marketing work.

In this episode of Customer Champions, she breaks down her philosophy of full-stack customer marketing, how to align with sales without losing your credibility, and what separates a great customer advisory board from a glorified product pitch.

What Is Full-Stack Customer Marketing?

Taylor's philosophy is built around three interconnected functions: communication, advocacy, and engagement.

Communication is lifecycle marketing, campaigns, and the ongoing dialogue with your customer base. It's how you influence retention, upsell, and cross-sell through consistent, relevant touchpoints.

Advocacy is getting customers to become a megaphone for you. Are they telling their stories? Are they willing to speak at events, appear in case studies, or take reference calls? Advocacy is the most visible output of a healthy customer marketing program.

Engagement is the programs that deepen relationships over time, customer advisory boards, roundtables, community, and events. This is where the intangible value of customer marketing compounds.

When all three work together, the impact multiplies. 

Communication programs surface the right advocates at the right time. 

Advocacy content feeds back into lifecycle campaigns. 

Engagement programs deepen the relationships that make advocacy possible in the first place.

How to Align with Sales Without Losing Your Credibility

Alignment with sales is one of the most persistent challenges in customer marketing. Taylor's approach comes from a simple but often overlooked advantage: she's been on the other side of the table.

"Make sure that you're speaking a language that people understand. When you have asks of your sales team, you've got to package it in a very specific way. You have to make it easy and digestible. They've got a lot of competing priorities. If you can really outline the benefits of working with you, you'll get a lot farther."

Having spent years as an account executive and in BDR leadership, Taylor understands the sales motion from the inside. When she approaches her sales counterparts now, she's not pitching programs, she's solving problems they already have.

Her practical framework for cross-functional alignment:

Translate, don't just communicate. Sales teams care about pipeline, quota, and velocity. Frame your asks and your outputs in those terms. Don't describe a case study, describe the deal it unblocked.

Partner with BDR and SDR leadership directly. These are the people using your customer stories every day as they prospect into new accounts. Understanding what they need makes your advocacy content dramatically more useful.

Pursue shared goals, not just shared awareness. Alignment isn't just making sure people know what you're doing. It's making sure they have a stake in the outcome.

For an in-depth training on how to better achieve this alignment, watch this video. 

Tying Customer Marketing to Revenue

Attribution in customer marketing is messy. Taylor doesn't pretend otherwise, but she has a clear philosophy for cutting through the noise.

Her approach is built on influence rather than source. In a sales-led organization, no single campaign or touchpoint wins a deal. Every piece of the puzzle contributes, and that's how she asks her stakeholders to think about customer marketing's impact.

The metrics she focuses on:

• Pipeline influenced by customer marketing programs, tied to retention and expansion
• Breadth of customer participation across lifecycle, advocacy, and engagement programs
• Volume and utilization of customer stories, how many are being created and how they're actually being used in the sales cycle
• Retention and growth rates among customers actively involved in advocacy programs versus the broader base

She's also candid that these metrics evolve. What she measures today is different from what she measured a year ago, and she expects that to keep changing as the function matures and business priorities shift.

How to Build a Customer Advisory Board That Actually Works

If Taylor has a crown jewel in her customer marketing portfolio, it's Kong's customer advisory board. She inherited a technical, product-focused CAB when she joined three years ago and has since evolved it into a program that influences product roadmap, company direction, and executive relationships across the global customer base.

The results have been striking. Customers who were once at-risk (no open opportunities, no expansion in sight) have become healthy, growing accounts after joining the CAB. Across the full cohort, the data shows a marked difference in engagement and growth potential among participants.

But Taylor is quick to point out that the revenue data only tells part of the story.

"I think there are probably plenty of folks in the company who don't know how much of what our product roadmap looks like today, or even some of our messaging… how much of that has come out of our customer advisory board meetings."

Her principles for running a CAB that delivers real value:

No salespeople allowed. Not just no selling, no salespeople in the room at all. The moment customers associate the CAB with the commercial side of the relationship, trust erodes. The CAB has to feel fundamentally different from every other vendor interaction they have.

Executive sponsors are non-negotiable. A CAB without executive buy-in is just a customer call with a fancier name. Your leadership team has to believe it's valuable, and show up accordingly.

Iterate on format constantly. Remote, in-person, hybrid… there's no single right answer. The right answer is whatever keeps customers engaged and the conversations generative.

Use it to influence direction, not validate decisions already made. The best CABs aren't a roadshow for what's already been decided. They're a genuine input into where the company is going.

The Multithreading Insight Most Teams Miss

Multithreading (building relationships across multiple contacts within a customer account) is well understood in sales. Taylor has a take on it that most teams haven't considered.

It needs to run in both directions.

Your team needs multiple relationships inside the customer's organization. But your customers also need multiple relationships inside yours. When a customer's only connection to your company is their AE and their CSM, the relationship is fragile. When they also know your customer marketing lead, your VP of Product, and a few of your executives, the relationship is resilient.

This is one of the most underappreciated benefits of a well-run CAB or advocacy program. You're not just creating brand ambassadors, you're creating genuine relationships between your customers and your company that exist independently of any single account team.

Those relationships don't just feel good. They show up in retention numbers.

What Growth Marketing Taught Her About Customer Marketing

Taylor's role at Kong is unusual… it spans both customer marketing and growth marketing. She's found the two functions have more to teach each other than most people realize.

Onboarding urgency. Customer marketers know onboarding matters. Growth marketers treat it as make-or-break. In product-led environments, a bad onboarding experience doesn't only hurt retention, it ends the relationship before it starts. Taylor thinks customer marketers in every environment can benefit from bringing that same urgency to time-to-value.

The power of iteration. Growth marketing never rests. It's built on constant testing, optimization, and improvement. Customer marketing, especially at established companies, can slip into running the same playbook year after year. The antidote is to borrow the growth mindset: every program is a hypothesis, and every cycle is an opportunity to learn.

What She Looks for When Hiring Customer Marketers

Taylor's hiring philosophy has stayed consistent regardless of the role or the market. Three qualities she always hires for:

Curiosity. The willingness and drive to learn something new, figure something out, and ask the next question. It's the foundation of everything else.

Empathy. Customer marketing is fundamentally a relationship function. You're advocating for customers internally and building trust with them externally. You can't do either well without it.

Bias toward action. Customer marketers are often one-person shops running dozens of programs at once. The people who thrive are the ones who just get things done.

She's also noticed a meaningful shift over the last five years: there are now far more people with genuine customer marketing experience than when she was building her first team. The function is maturing, and that's a reason to invest in it.

The Takeaways

Think in three layers: communication, advocacy, and engagement. When all three work together, customer marketing becomes a true growth function.

Speak sales' language. Package your asks in terms of pipeline, quota, and velocity. Make it easy for them to say yes.

Measure holistic influence, not just direct attribution. In a sales-led organization, every touchpoint contributes to the outcome.

Run your CAB like a trust-building exercise, not a sales call. No salespeople, no pitching, genuine input into company direction.

Multithread in both directions. Your customers need relationships across your company.

Borrow urgency and iteration from growth marketing. Treat every program as a hypothesis and every cycle as a chance to improve.

Lastly, advocate for yourself as hard as you advocate for your customers. Customer marketers are some of the most generous people in the business… don't forget to champion your own work.

About Champion

Champion is an AI-powered customer advocacy platform that helps B2B companies identify, activate, and mobilize their most passionate customers. Our mission is to make trust the most powerful engine for business growth, using the voices and relationships of your happiest customers to make business more human.

Ready to put Taylor's ideas into practice? Champion gives Customer Marketers one place to manage advocacy, track engagement, and prove revenue impact.

See how it works → Book a Demo

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