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Most B2B companies overlook their biggest growth opportunity: investing in the customers they already have. Yet, customer marketing leaders struggle to secure budget, prove ROI, and drive growth.
In a world obsessed with more (more leads, more deals, more revenue), how do you make customer advocacy a non-negotiable growth strategy?
This show is for marketers who want to turn customer advocacy into a strategic growth engine. Each episode features customer marketing pioneers, revenue leaders, and industry experts sharing actionable strategies to engage, retain, and expand your client base. And not just through content, but through meaningful connection.
Because customers become champions when you make them feel valued first.
[00:00:00] Danielle Beeken: Stop asking what campaign we’re running and start asking what signals are we seeing this week. Kind of start there and set time aside to really understand what are those signals and start doing this by looking at the signals across product behavior, CSM insight, customer engagement, and then deciding on a small number of intentional actions.
[00:00:26] Jeff Reekers: Welcome to Customer Champions, where we explore how the best marketers turn customers into their biggest growth engine.
[00:00:35] Jeff Reekers: Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Customer Champions Podcast. This week, I’m joined by Danielle Beeken. Super thrilled to have Danielle joining us here today. Danielle’s a customer marketing and community leader who spent her career building programs that drive adoption, advocacy, retention, and most importantly, growth. And I’ve done all this in a extremely measurable and impactful way. She’s led community and advocacy work across major SaaS companies and we’ll really be able to dive into that as Danielle introduces herself here. And she brings a real practical lens on how teams can use signals, which is what will be a topic that we dive into here today in customer moments to create trust, momentum, and real business outcomes. So Danielle, super excited to have you joining us today.
[00:01:15] Danielle Beeken: Thank you, Jeff. I’m super excited to be with you today. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:20] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, maybe we just kick off. Just walk us through your background a little bit, maybe some of the roles that you’ve played across customer marketing, advocacy, community. Let’s just kind of dive into a little bit of background here.
[00:01:30] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, great. So at the core of my career has always been storytelling. Even as a kid, I loved figuring out how to connect ideas to emotion. And that actually even followed me into college. I won a best storyteller award. And it became a big part of how I really thought about communication and influence and connection. And then I started my career in sales actually at Apple Computer and Oracle, which really gave me a good kind of deep respect for what it takes to earn attention and trust. And from there, I moved into demand generation, integrated marketing at PeopleSoft, and that really helped me kind of learn how to scale messaging and campaigns across large audiences. And then after the Oracle acquisition, I transitioned into product marketing and solutions marketing. So I’ve kind of run the whole full scale of marketing. And that was where I started to see a real shift happening.
[00:02:26] Danielle Beeken: This was when SaaS became a dominant model and revenue move to subscriptions. And suddenly marketing couldn’t just stop at the sale. We couldn’t just lead with the features and functions, and we had to really kind of prove value. And so this is when I started partnering with customers to surface adoption stories, support what was happening with renewals, with outcome-based proof, and really aligning messages to how customers were actually using and succeeding with the products. And then from there, I moved to SuccessFactors. That was in 2011, and this was really kind of a turning point because I built their first community and really starting to use customers as visible participants in everything. And then I scaled that further at SAP where I focused on connecting customer marketing and advocacy to community and then building systems that really help customers tell their stories. And then most recently at Culture Amp where I kind of brought everything all together, leading customer marketing across adoption, advocacy, community, and expansion.
[00:03:31] Jeff Reekers: It’s amazing. So the first thing that really stood out to me there is just that storytelling arc and background. And I don’t know who I was having a conversation with recently on this, but there’s so many roles that we can play in marketing, but at the center of it all is about great storytelling.
[00:03:46] Danielle Beeken: Absolutely.
[00:03:47] Jeff Reekers: So it’s amazing that that’s kind of been the centerpiece between all these different roles that you’ve had over time.
[00:03:52] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely something that I think is really important in the role.
[00:03:57] Jeff Reekers: Amazing. And as we kind of dive into the customer marketing end, we talked a lot as leading into this session here today around the concept of signals. When you think about your experiences and understanding customer health, the potential for advocates and advocacy potential, dashboards often are behind the ball in these sorts of things. So what sort of signals do you pay attention to that help you see what’s coming before the fact? What are these signals that are identifying potential advocates that you can start engaging with in your programs?
[00:04:28] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. That’s really good point because dashboards show outcomes and signals really show that intent that we’re looking for. So most teams rely on metrics. They’re looking at the NPS, the CSAT, renewal risk, expansion pipeline, the ARR, right? They’re critical, but they’re largely kind of confirm those outcomes rather than predicting them. So by the time those numbers really move, something has already maybe changed with the customer. The question really here is what do you pay attention to before it shows up in those numbers? And the key singles I typically are looking for are based on customer behavior, intent and confidence.
[00:05:11] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Interesting. Some of the scale that you’ve seen, SuccessFactors, I’m sure is a great example here. And you have many, many customers that make contact within those customers and there’s relationships that develop over time and things get complex and there’s lots of data. So how do you bring all that together to move beyond a one size fits all program and to really develop one-to-one or thoughtful customer-specific plays, interactions and just relationships?
[00:05:37] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so the different kinds of signals, I guess first are the behavior signals. And some of the things that you’re looking for there is, are they expanding their usage across teams? Are they exploring new use cases with the product? When is usage becoming broader and more embedded is another thing. And those are kind of early signs of renewal confidence. And then you can get into relationship signals. How are the customers investing their time? Are they being more responsive all of a sudden? Are they bringing other people from the organization into the conversation? Are they giving feedback without being asked is another thing. And that’s kind of a signal that it’s leaning towards more, stronger towards trust. They have more trust in what they’re doing with the products. And then there’s advocacy readiness signals that you can look for. So moments when customers really start helping other customers, that peer engagement, are they sharing use cases, asking peers how to do things.
[00:06:35] Danielle Beeken: And then there’s a fourth one, which is storytelling signals, but we can kind of stop there and go into any one of these in a little bit more detail.
[00:06:43] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. I’d love to talk through the peer-to-peer component a little bit because that also kind of gets into the community involvement. Kind of curious how you’ve seen those two things come together across community, across customers connecting with customers. Does it just happen organically? Do you really have to force that momentum early on? We’re thinking about a lot of s a champion right now, so I would love to actually dive into that selfishly as well.
[00:07:03] Danielle Beeken: Yeah. I mean, that happens. It can happen organically, but sometimes you have to bring the horse to water. Let them see the value in what is this opportunity that community can bring to you. And once they kind of get it and they get in there, it’s just endless because they have the opportunity to really hear from their peers instead of hearing about the brand or the core messaging that the company wants you to know about and really hear how it’s being used. What is the success we gain from it? And there’s always something new in that information that you didn’t think about originally. So it’s those new ideas. And then you can bring gamification into it, which helps with that engagement, the thought leadership, the ability for them to really kind of build their own brand, which is really exciting.
[00:07:49] Jeff Reekers: And you kind of develop that part of things because curious on how you might bucket these folks because some advocates, they really do want to build their careers and you sort of provide them resources to be able to do that. Maybe that doesn’t fit other profiles in the customer base in the same way. Maybe gamification, some customers are more apt to sort of follow that path down and maybe are less concerned about building their careers, but incentivized by that gamification. How do you kind of break that down and create more targeted experiences across those different types of personas?
[00:08:21] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, so true. And that’s kind of the cool thing about community too, because there could be a group of customers or even prospects. You have this whole ecosystem where everybody comes together, could be partners, it could be your competitors, right? So it’s this whole ecosystem that comes together. They all come there for a different reason, but why they stay and engaged becomes the exciting part of community. You could come there initially for support and you’re trying to really understand or even ask a question, but then you find a recorded webcast in there or you find a case study or somebody who replies to that question that you asked says something that you really kind of catch onto. And then you make these connections that help carry on the power of community and that connection.
[00:09:10] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Amazing. How do you work internally to build those bridges as well? Because if you’re in the community and you’re seeing this, and this might be a customer in someone’s book of business over on the customer success side, there’s probably incredibly valuable product insights here as well. There’s obviously advocacy components and advocacy triggers. I just think it’s fascinating. There’s so much that’s just happening here, but then there’s all these other elements in the business that it kind of connects. Just how do you think about connecting other teams internally around this? Yep. And even from maybe even a metrics measurement standpoint, like really architecting, it feels so clear what the impact is from just a feeling sense, but how do you build those bridges between other teams there?
[00:09:51] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a key part is consistently having fresh content and having those blogging opportunities, thought leadership opportunities that are coming from internally. A hard thing to do is always kind of engaging with the company internally. And so that’s kind of a whole science in itself, but there’s other great things with integrations, like being able to integrate from a CS platform into your community so that you have those connections using AI and chat to almost answer questions before customers even have them. So there’s all these cool ways to kind of keep things integrated, creating missions and challenges internally where you’re fueling adoption and bringing them directly to the path for how they can be successful. And that can be connected across the entire customer journey to create a complete seamless customer experience. I’ve even seen this in RFPs where they want to know exactly how are you going to support me after I become a customer?
[00:10:53] Danielle Beeken: How am I truly going to become a partner? How am I going to influence the roadmap? And the answer for a lot of these things is community. This is how you truly become not just a customer, but a partner.
[00:11:04] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. I love that perspective. And it’s something we talk a lot about internally as well, of giving customers a feel of what the life looks like after the purchase, after you become a customer and giving as much visibility on that as possible. It should never be a surprise as you hears horror stories about someone becomes a customer and then buy buy, you never hear from them again. And leveraging that community to really give just the feeling of an understanding with existing customers, those connections. They really understand the support they’re going to get post-purchase. Absolutely. It’s a fantastic way of thinking about it.
[00:11:38] Danielle Beeken: Absolutely. Everyone always wants to talk about the advocacy and what is the customer going to do for me, but what are you doing to help make them successful so they can get to that point?
[00:11:47] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, I love it. Kind of on this concept of just really customer-centric experiences, a lot of customer marketing today still relies heavily on campaign-based marketing, a big review push or whatever we need to get G2 crowd up reviews up by however percentage and you just launch a big campaign or whatever it might be and email blast all your customers and have to offer a gift card or something like this or sort of like broader advocacy asks. Maybe they have their place, of course, but what do you think are the downsides of too heavily relying on these sort of fashion blasts, campaign-based engagements and setup, really responding to those individual customer signals that you’re seeing, those more one-to-one human-driven moments?
[00:12:33] Danielle Beeken: Yeah. So campaigns are great for creating awareness and structure, especially a really solid, strong lifecycle campaign. They give teams predictable flow and a way to operate at scale, but they could fall short when they become the primary way to engage customers, especially for things like advocacy reviews, work timing and context really matter. So the downside of that is relying too heavily on the campaigns is that if you end up asking the right thing at the wrong moment, some customers get asked too early before they feel confident and others get asked too late. So then the energy has really passed by that point. So that’s when engagement starts to feel kind of too transactional with the campaign. So I think the key thing here is kind of looking at the signals before the expansion or that deeper engagement comes up, but being more moment driven rather than doing the campaigns, right?
[00:13:30] Danielle Beeken: So that kind of one-to-one engagement fills the gap. So signals can help tell you when a customer just had an aha moment or they handed usage or they successfully told the value of the story internally, those are the moments when advocacy and the growth conversation really can actually land well. Yeah,
[00:13:51] Jeff Reekers: Love it. And I’d love to actually, gosh, I hate using the word double click, but I’m going to use the word double click. Double click on the expansion point as well, because it feels like in a really positive way, customer marketing teams are being tasked more and more and more with trying to drive direct revenue impact or maybe demonstrate, maybe it’s a better word for saying it, direct revenue impact. And one of the most clear ways to do that is through the expansion, through the retention, expansion, growth of existing accounts. And in your experience, using that sort of signals framework, are there any key signals that you’ve seen in customer marketing or community work where there’s sort of a readiness to expand where you can really team up with customer success teams to really leverage these sort of insights that you have?
[00:14:41] Danielle Beeken: Yeah. Where customer marketing can really level up is like acting on those signals sooner. Measurement is kind of one of the biggest ones, like reinforcing value, surfacing peer proof and helping customers articulate impact before sales is even kind of talking about this. And then when that happens, expansion really feels like a natural next step and not like the sale. A lot of this is kind of having the right attribution model too to figure out how is this influencing? I know the revenue kind of keeps coming up over and over and how these expansion signals really attribute to that revenue. And so having some sort of model where you know where that influence is coming from is also really important in connecting back to the revenue.
[00:15:27] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Are you typically looking at things like diving into product data and product usage? Are those some of the main things that you’re looking at when it comes to understanding expansion? Is it kind of like breadth of adoption internally in a customer account? Or is it more like conversations or so many great conversational intelligence tools out there today? So maybe it’s a mixture of all those things, but curious if there’s any key ones that you’ve really seen as, this is where my eyes are really going.
[00:15:54] Danielle Beeken: Yep, absolutely. And even those conversations that you might not hear about, right? They’re happening with the CSM, they’re happening in a coaching session, they’re hearing where success is happening, or they’re hearing where things are falling short, or a champion is leaving the company, a leader. There’s all of these things kind of happening behind the scenes too, where that insight really can make a difference.
[00:16:19] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. The champion leaving is everyone knows it’s a challenge and a problem yet I see so many companies that don’t sort of have enough relationships internally to kind of make up for those champion job changes. And I see so many accounts or so many companies just focus on maybe one contact in an account and then layoffs happen, the person leaves, whatever it might be. How do you think about identifying just like multiple people in an account and multiple roles, multiple functions and kind of bringing that together to help drive those expansion cases, help drive better adoption, help drive better relationships with your customers? Is that something you really thought about in the past or is it-
[00:16:59] Danielle Beeken: Absolutely. Yeah. Let’s be honest, we all have super fan customers, like the ones that love the product, they show up for everything, they give great quotes and they make our jobs easier. But the risk with that is relying on a single champion is that people, they change roles, priority shifts, budget moves, and suddenly all of that momentum disappears. So really important to kind of make sure that you’re building out multiple champions. And the way I’ve kind of approached this is using those signals once again to kind of deliberately widen that circle and taking the guesswork out of it by connecting the signals across different data sources. So again, this is the product usage, expanding into new teams, looking at reports more broadly, listening to the CSM insights again. And then kind of from there, customer marketing can engage beyond the original champion in very intentional ways.
[00:17:53] Danielle Beeken: Inviting new stakeholders into role specific stories, sharing peer proof that matters to their function or recognizing the broader team instead of just that single voice.
[00:18:04] Jeff Reekers: Yeah. Are there any consistent roles or programmatic ways that you think about this, like executive level connections and different programs that you might be inviting them to or engaging them with more like your end users, your decision makers. I don’t know who they are exactly across across the board, but imagine there’s sort of different frameworks. And how do you map that out? Do you sit down with the CSM to really strategize what that looks like? You’ll have different programs for different levels. I’d be curious any of your insights there.
[00:18:33] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, there’s lots of internal strategy that goes into that. You have to be careful too because you don’t want to step on any toes, but there’s customer advisory board for those executive group, which is sharing those ideas, which is really valuable right now with AI and having company confidence in this. How are these other executives managing these things with inside their companies? So it can even go beyond what you’re trying to do with your product, but bringing value from an industry perspective. And then also that driving of the product roadmap. Who needs to be engaged there? Who are those users that you want to be as part of your EAP programs? Could be specific global programs where you’re really trying to get into new markets regionally or even industries, right? So you can have those special interest groups that are really driving things and programs around those.
[00:19:27] Danielle Beeken: There could be executive dinners, different things like that, inviting them to specific or private areas of community where specific things are happening to their interests. So I think there’s lots of different ways that that can happen.
[00:19:42] Jeff Reekers: Great insights there. And it really makes me think of, I think, I don’t know, the give and get holistically and wonder how many teams really underestimate just the learnings and education that come out of those types of programs as well. And you’re making me think back to product council groups, a lot of the advisory board sessions that we’ve done and that I’ve been a part of in the past, just like the learnings that come out of these things for helping driving your business forward as well are, I guess you can call them an added benefit to this all, but I think that even gets lost in the shuffle a little bit of all things that customer marketing is doing. And one of them is really helping drive the company forward in the end through all these great insights that you’re getting from your customers. So it’s a great reminder to really focus on those elements as well and how many insights you can get from your customers all across the board and how interested they are to give back on that as well because they want you to succeed.
[00:20:37] Danielle Beeken: Absolutely. And they love connection more than ever right now. That sort of connection is so important.
[00:20:43] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, 100%. Do you have any kind of specific examples where we’re talking a lot about signals and how do we be picking this up for customer marketing programs, for expansion use cases, any examples of where those right signals or maybe even the opposite, like missing them, just made a meaningful difference in rolling out your programs, driving expansion, building advocacy, retaining customers, love any sort of stories, experiences that you can share with us.
[00:21:13] Danielle Beeken: Yeah. One example that really shaped how I think about Signals was about confidence and timing. I had a customer who hadn’t really expanded yet and wasn’t formally in our advocacy program, but some signals started to show up and I could hear it in conversations and emails. The language really shifted from tactical questions like, how do we use this two narrative ones? How do we talk about this internally? CSMs had mentioned that results were being shared with leadership inside the company, new stakeholders were being copied on some of the threads and the customers started asking, how are other customers positioning the outcomes for this? And so those queues really told me that they weren’t just using the product, that they were confident enough to represent the value. And connecting that qualitative insight with engagement and advocacy readiness signals, it was clear that this was kind of a moment of transition for them.
[00:22:09] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, it’s fantastic. Kind of closing up here, and for all those joining in, just some practical takeaways for folks. If there’s anything that you would advise for listeners, customer marketers out there, like one practical shift that they could make this quarter, this month in the near term here to start bringing these types of insights into their programs, their advocacy motions more intentionally to engage their customers more thoughtfully. What would those be and what kind of advice would you give to the listeners out there?
[00:22:39] Danielle Beeken: Yeah. If I had to pick one practical shift, I’d probably go back to the signal of stop asking what campaign we’re running and start asking what signals are we seeing this week? Kind of start there and set time aside to really understand what are those signals and start doing this by looking at the signals across product behavior, CSM insight, customer engagement, and then deciding on a small number of intentional actions. Not like one big problem, just a few well-timed moments. And this is really where tools like Champion really could help. They give customer marketing a way to see advocacy readiness, confidence, and momentum in a single place. So you’re not really relying on gut feel or chasing down specific context and removing that guesswork of when they’re ready to engage, but you can actually act when the signals are actually there.
[00:23:40] Jeff Reekers: Amazing. We did not ask for that plug, but we’ll gladly take it. Thank you, Danielle.
[00:23:47] Danielle Beeken: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really where the shift changes everything, right? You’re moving from those campaigns to movements and from guessing on timing to responding with intent and from hoping the customers are actually getting engaged to meeting them exactly where they are.
[00:24:03] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, fantastic. Danielle, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s fantastic diving in with you here. All things signal-based readiness to drive better advocacy, customer marketing, community programs. Thank you for sharing all your wisdom with us. And for all those listening, thank you for joining. Thank you for listening in on this one. Stay tuned. We’ll come out with the next episode fairly rapidly here. Thanks all. Have a great day, weekend, at night, whenever you might be listening here.
[00:24:30] Jeff Reekers: If you’re ready to turn customer advocacy into your biggest growth engine, make sure to subscribe to Customer Champions wherever you listen to podcasts. And for even more insights, go to championhq.com because the best way to grow isn’t just by winning customers, it’s by championing them.