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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] Rodrigo Souto: Have programs that are really closely tied to revenue within the lens of customer marketing. So don’t just put out nice logos, those are important, but make sure you have a reference program and you track those reference calls. Again, embed the proof right into the demand and channels. But there’s specific programs. I think references are sometimes the clearest and easiest way to show revenue impact really clearly. So if you’re not leaning into those elements of customer marketing and advocacy that are already inherently more revenue forward, start
[00:00:32] Jeff Reekers: Welcome to Customer Champions where we explore how the best marketers turn customers into their biggest growth engine. Alright, hello everybody and welcome back to the Customer Champions podcast. Super excited for the conversation today and for today’s guest, we’re going to dive into all things demand gen, customer marketing and how this all comes together. And to talk us through this is Rodrigo Souto, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Zappi, and he’s also a 10 year veteran of HubSpot where he helped build and scale one of the most influential go-to-market engines that we all know in SaaS today. Rodrigo’s career journey has really touched every corner of marketing. Super excited to dive into this from launching international programs and expansion at HubSpot, customer advocacy, customer marketing and proof programs, and now really in leading global demand gen for a really fast growing exciting organization. And I think what makes this story so unique for all those listening who’ve tuned in the past is really that merging between customer marketing and demand generation and that revenue impact. So really excited to unpack this, dive into it all and we’ll really be focusing on how all these things kind of come together here. So anyways, I’ll stop there. Rodrigo, super excited to have you on the podcast here today.
[00:01:44] Rodrigo Souto: Thank you Jeff. Equally excited to be here, love the topics you just went through and I’m excited to deep dive into some of them and share my own experience. Early caveat that of course everything is from my own lens and my own perspective, but primarily thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:01:59] Jeff Reekers: Well, cool. Let’s dive in. I’d love to first dive into that HubSpot experience — 10 years at HubSpot through some of the most formidable stages of an incredible marketing engine. Just tell us a little bit about that arc, what stands out most from that incredible journey that you had there?
[00:02:12] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, thank you Jeff. I had a whole decade at HubSpot, which feels wild to say and it makes me feel a little bit old, but it was a great decade. I think key to why it was so impactful for me in my career and some of the lessons that I’ve taken into other roles is that time period that I was there for — you call that out. So I joined in late 2014 pre-IPO, don’t have exact numbers here, but the company was roughly 500 folks at the time. I was there through 2024. And so that period included reaching 10,000 customers for the first time, launching new international markets where now HubSpot is a leader in the market, and lots of milestones along the way in terms of growth, in terms of maturing the go-to-market there, going from being a marketing tool. Initially when I first started at HubSpot, we’d love to joke, this is the most meta job ever because we’re marketers doing marketing to marketers about marketing to buy a marketing tool. And that eventually grew, right?
[00:03:14] Rodrigo Souto: We brought on the sales functionality, yes, CS, data, et cetera, et cetera, really became a full front-end platform. So seeing the evolution of that go-to-market and that growth and all those new motions and how they come together, the way you have to scale a marketing team and other teams as well and observing that — being a part of those decisions sometimes, but primarily observing — a lot of it was observing. That’s probably my single biggest takeaway as to why my time at HubSpot in that specific time was so valuable to me. And I think still is there, but that time period specifically because it was a 10-year-long crash course on how to scale a business, not just marketing but sort of across the go-to-market and other things. So an example is employer branding and sort of ways to recruit and get the best talent.
[00:04:08] Rodrigo Souto: I observed that, I was a part of that at times at HubSpot, and now in this new company I can bring some of those lessons even though they’re not core to my role here. And so I really feel like I got a 10-year MBA program on steroids in the best way possible while I was still doing my core role. And we’ll get into that in a sec here, but the biggest takeaway was just being able to learn a ton and that was intentional. HubSpot did that intentionally as part of the culture that’s still there. I still have a lot of friends that work there, so I still get to keep up with some of the things going on. And so the ability to learn and learn deeply and learn outside of your core focus area were the highlights of my career at HubSpot by far. Jeff, would it be helpful if I got in a little bit to my specific roles within and just a quick overview there?
[00:04:54] Jeff Reekers: Let’s actually dovetail into your experience leading Demand Gen now at Zappi and how all this kind of came together. So you had that international marketing experience. We’ve gone through customer marketing, customer proof, we’re really deep in there at HubSpot — now leading Demand Gen and a team of demand gen folks and broader team at Zappi itself. How have all those things and different roles shifted your perspective now that you’re leading Demand Gen for a fast-growing organization? So let’s just unpack what does that role look like and what’s that unique perspective that you’re able to bring into it now?
[00:05:28] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s a great question. I spent my first five years at HubSpot running sort of LATAM and Brazil marketing, so really focused on international expansion, working with the broader international team. I should mention 10 years prior to that I was at a company — a B2C company — also working in international. So a good solid 15 years of my career have been focused on international expansion, how to do international marketing. But then I pivoted into customer marketing and proof roles, ran those programs at HubSpot for about three years from sort of our marquee advocacy program, the really high-touch advocacy down to the gamified — we had thousands of active advocates — and I spent some time in revenue marketing at HubSpot as well. My time during the Brazil and international piece there was especially informative because I had to wear a lot of different hats and so it gave me exposure into lots of different parts of marketing, but really focused on international.
[00:06:21] Rodrigo Souto: And probably the number one takeaway I still carry with me from all those years working on international is that you need to adapt and be local, be really focused on not just translating, but really adapting your content. So you have the same core persona globally, the same core jobs need to be done whether you’re in Brazil or America or Japan. But there’s a sub-layer to that where the motivations are slightly different. The culture, of course, the way people communicate — and you need to always be adapting to not just the core persona but sort of the sub-personas underneath that. I spent some time at HubSpot focused on product-led growth as well. Two years of that LATAM experience was really spearheading HubSpot’s first low-touch PLG motion, which included some changes to our go-to-market, discounts, et cetera, that then were applied to different sort of emerging go-to-markets at HubSpot, but really focused on PLG and driving free user signups for the free CRM at the time.
[00:07:25] Rodrigo Souto: That period was incredibly impactful because it taught me a really important lesson, which maybe I should have learned earlier, which is removing friction. And then I moved into customer marketing, which is a core thing we’re here to chat about, but the main lesson there was proof and authenticity wins out every time. You can make all the claims you want to make as an organization, both in terms of outcomes from your product or service as well as how you see the market evolving and thought leadership. And I think it’s actually equally important on both fronts to have customers and have real humans validate that vision. “I am seeing these results from this product. I am following this kind of go-to-market methodology you’re proposing and having real results for my business and for myself as a professional.” So bringing that proof on home through that customer lens was an incredibly valuable lesson. All of that led to this role in demand gen, which I know we’ll get even deeper on, but sort of bringing those unique lessons, tying it all together into a holistic view of how you connect the more transactional demand gen with the more relationship-building customer marketing and other functions. Yeah, that’s probably the strength of those varied experiences I have coming together into a demand gen role.
[00:08:40] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, I love it. Excited to dive deeper into that. I will just earmark one thing that stood out to me though it’s not directly related to the customer marketing side — as you know, I was at Aircall along with Champion co-founder Gianna. I don’t want to diminish the broader strategies at all, but one of those core strategies of course was: where’s HubSpot selling? And let’s go over there. We had a close integration with y’all and that point on friction and removing the friction. It’s funny, I never really thought of it that way, but essentially it was one in the same. We were trying to remove friction for the customer in the end — our customers were putting Aircall on top of HubSpot. If we can be where they’re at geographically, make an easy smooth integration… and it was a PLG experience as well. Like that all married up together.
[00:09:23] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, no, I love that Jeff. And remove some friction for yourself as well, right? If they chart a path that’s already a little bit clear for you — and sometimes you want to lead the way, but sometimes you want to kind of follow along. And I didn’t get to touch on this, but one of my favorite things about my time at HubSpot was working with partners and really starting up a partner program at HubSpot, which in Brazil was early. And so you had agencies that were just kind of starting to bite into the inbound marketing methodology and content marketing. And 12 years later now I’m still connected to those folks and they’re leading big agencies, they are part of HubSpot’s council for customers and partners, and their profile has grown so much and their businesses have grown and they happen to be wonderful people as well. So the impact you can have on partners, on integration partners, on agency partners when you are a big player like HubSpot is wonderful. And I think it left a little bit of a legacy for lots of folks who were in that ecosystem that’s still proving some value today, which is awesome.
[00:10:24] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, incredible. Take us through the demand gen at Zappi in your role today. And specifically I would be curious, what does your team look like and how do you think — specifically on the customer marketing front — is that part of your org structure within demand gen? Have you brought that in directly into Zappi? We’d be kind of curious to unpack that then your lens now from customer marketing through that demand gen lens is how you’re approaching it holistically.
[00:10:49] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, absolutely. And I am leading customer marketing here under demand gen. It’s the first time I’ve led customer marketing under a couple different orgs — product marketing, community slash customer marketing broadly speaking, which include community, demand, pieces of customer marketing — but it’s my first time doing it from a demand gen team specifically. And so lots of interesting insights there, I think. But let me just give a little background on Zappi. I think it might help folks and differentiate from HubSpot as well. Zappi is a consumer insights platform and so we help a lot of the world’s top CPG companies. I think an interesting stat is half of the Fortune 500 CPG companies are customers, and they use Zappi to test their product concepts, their advertising with consumers in an iterative way where that consumer data is helping inform their next campaign, their next product innovation, their next advertising with the consumer preferences embedded into those decisions.
[00:11:48] Rodrigo Souto: So it’s a market research tool fundamentally, but really focused on consumer insights specifically. And within here I’m a Senior Director on the demand gen team. We’re a small team and so that’s been a change from — right? In my early days of HubSpot — but by the time I left there the marketing team was quite large. Here we’re a much smaller, more nimble team. And so Senior Director of Demand Gen, but that includes customer marketing, that includes paid marketing. So I sort of own that paid channel, nurturing, and some kind of conversion rate optimization type of work is underneath my team as well. So it’s the core demand gen, but it does include these other areas that may otherwise sit somewhere else. But the fact that they sit in demand gen here has been a great benefit because you can be thinking about your paid acquisition campaign for net new logo, net new business with customer proof embedded in mind already and it doesn’t require that collaboration that otherwise would be required but can be hard to come by.
[00:12:50] Rodrigo Souto: And so we get to infuse customer proof and advocacy right into everything we do on the demand gen perspective — not just paid media, but all the sort of campaigns we run for our sales team already have proof infused. And at Zappi we need to spin up a greater proof engine. That’s part of my mission here and we’re making some strides there, we have a lot more to go, but just in the first few months of getting a proof program really going here, I’m already seeing the connection to demand just be a lot easier to come by in part because me and my team are running both those functions to a degree and I sit in a demand gen team which has a VP of Demand Gen. So let me not exaggerate and say I’m running the whole demand gen team, but really core parts of it — paid is a key channel here, for example. And so the ability to have that customer proof embedded, customer knowledge as well — so customer proof is a great output, but I need to develop that customer knowledge first and really speak to customers. So as I’m thinking about a campaign to acquire a net new customer, I already know what those objections are from existing customers and I can address that proactively.
[00:14:01] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, yeah, totally. I love that alignment. I think a consistent challenge that I hear among the customer marketing community as a whole — and Megan Bowen over at Refine Labs talks about this quite a bit — is how that budget allocation happens between different functions and various functions. And I feel like customer marketing is always at the envy of a demand gen organization because of where so much of that budgeting ends up falling. And by myself, having grown up through demand gen throughout my career, there was this always direct tie into revenue and the net new business, and you can justify the budget through the efforts. You can directly attach it depending on how you’re doing attribution and all these things. But really there’s that direct attribution modeling which exists in customer marketing but may not always directly depending on how a company sort of rolls that out. I was kind of curious on how you would — any advice you’d give to customer marketers out there that are looking for justifying budget, getting more budget, showing their revenue impact more in customer marketing and just learnings that you’ve had whether it’s through customer marketing, demand gen, et cetera. So it continues to be one of the biggest challenges that I hear out there.
[00:15:14] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, that’s certainly a challenge and I think attribution is key, Jeff. I think the reason why customer marketing doesn’t always get those investments as you said is because it’s so much harder to track the impact of. I think of customer marketing sometimes like product marketing from that perspective — if you have good sales and marketing efforts, go-to-market efforts out there, they should be infused with customer marketing throughout. And of course they are infused with product marketing, value propositions — why this product is going to help you accomplish X, Y, Z. So because they’re a part of everything, it’s almost like they’re a part of nothing from an attribution perspective, because did that paid campaign drive this new logo because of the top-line messaging and positioning or was it that customer quote that was infused into the ad? It’s kind of hard to isolate those elements.
[00:16:01] Rodrigo Souto: So that is the beauty of combining those two functions more — is everything that you attribute to demand gen, which has clear attribution, has a real channel-focused mindset. That’s probably a lesson for customer marketers to learn from demand gen: be channel-focused. Don’t just think about what you’re putting out there — which is great customer proof — but how are you distributing that? How are you getting it out there and how are you measuring that? So even if you can’t measure that customer proof to the revenue, at least know the impact of that channel where it’s being distributed. And there might be revenue attribution there and you can come up with some creative ways, right? Let’s agree as a team that our customer proof is such a strong part of these campaigns that we feel confident saying that at least 30% of the attribution here goes to the customer proof. And then all of that becomes more trackable.
[00:16:48] Rodrigo Souto: If you don’t have a customer proof attribution percentage, then at least you can sort of claim influence on that whole demand gen channel where customer proof was really embedded throughout. So lean into that. I think that’s a way that customer marketing and demand gen — whether you sit on the same team or not — inherit some of that same benefit from attribution. Being a CEO, being someone who’s making these kind of budgeting decisions — CMO even — it’s understandable. You’d want to put dollars where the return is quantifiable and you can make a claim that hey, put in a dollar here, you got two dollars out. And you have clear ROI metrics for it — it’s understandable. I think the thing that customer marketers need to do is make sure they’re part of those conversations and part of those channels and customer marketing is really infused in, and that should unlock greater potential for budget for a clear revenue impact.
[00:17:39] Rodrigo Souto: One more thing there — don’t be afraid to lean into slightly innovative ways to show the revenue impact. And they don’t even have to be all that innovative, but I had a leader who really wanted to show the revenue impact of customer proof and to have it be above 50%. So for us to be able to say verifiably that customer proof is impacting more than 50% of our net new revenue. Really hard to do, especially at a company like HubSpot where revenue is large and so you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that you are claiming to impact. So you better be pretty sure about that. So what we did is we just surveyed buyers. Everyone who bought in the last year — sent them a survey — and directly asked them: Did you look at customer proof during the buying process? And did it influence your buying decision? Forty-five percent responded yes — significantly higher than anything we could track through UTMs and all the different ways — and the Highspots and Seismics of the world where you have this content embedded and your sales team is sharing those links… always you can track, but much easier to just hear it directly from the buyers. “Did proof influence you or not?” Hard for anyone to counter that. And then you can — with pretty certain data — have an actual revenue number that’s probably going to be significantly higher than you think it is.
[00:18:59] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, love that so much. One thing we’ve seen recently right on that point is just take a specific instance like the impact of customer references or something like that. Surface level one is yeah, we can attach — we understand what deals came from it or are associated with it, can give a revenue influence. But the second step behind that that we’ve seen with a lot of customers becomes to ask the customer right afterwards: Did this impact your purchase decision and how much? So all of a sudden you have this sort of number that’s interesting, but then you have a customer that X percentage of customers are telling you this was very important in their purchasing decision. I think that’s a really smart way of going about it. I don’t want to go off the rails on this, but so many — and what I’ve seen so often that happens — and I used to get this a lot in an exec role, was everyone brings in their own numbers and you almost stop believing the numbers that you get because they’re all sort of contradictory and what do you listen to in the end? But you always listen to a customer that said this was important, and if
[00:20:00] Rodrigo Souto: You can aggregate that, that is a super powerful thing to break through the noise. So double-line that because I very strongly agree with that sentiment. Absolutely. Jeff, you also mentioned something that I should — if you don’t mind — I’ll add a little bit to that answer, which is, I kind of forgot some of the basics there, which is: have programs that are really closely tied to revenue within the lens of customer marketing. So don’t just put out nice logos, those are important, but make sure you have a reference program and you track those reference calls. Referrals — again, embed the proof right into the demand and channels. But there’s specific programs. I think references are sometimes the clearest and easiest way to show revenue impact really clearly. So if you’re not leaning into those elements of customer marketing and advocacy that are already inherently more revenue forward — start. That’s my advice there if you want to get some budget: really lean into references, referrals especially.
[00:20:56] Jeff Reekers: Yeah, love it, love it. You joined us back in June for a summit up in the lovely Denver mountains with an incredible group and one thing we came out of there was this concept that customer marketing really being like the lifeblood of modern go-to-market. Curious what that statement means to you.
[00:21:14] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, well thank you for having me there, Jeff. It was a wonderful few days in the mountains of Colorado, some of the best customer marketers I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with. So it was a wonderful time. And one of the outcomes was our Customer Marketing Manifesto — check it out — that is calling customer marketing the lifeblood of modern go-to-market is a key part of that manifesto, but there are so many other good tidbits in there and would love folks to read it, co-sign it, and be part of that movement that is making this claim because it’s a true claim. And what that means to me is really that the fastest path to growth runs through your existing customers. That means a bunch of things, but primarily in my view, two things: new customer acquisition is a lot more expensive than retaining and growing your existing accounts.
[00:22:06] Rodrigo Souto: I think everyone who works in marketing in B2B SaaS and is trying to get attention knows that the last few years there’s been a real shift. It’s harder than ever to get anyone’s attention. Content is everywhere. AI SDRs are — I don’t know if you are in this boat, Jeff, and no disrespect to the AI SDR companies out there — but my goodness, I don’t even look at my LinkedIn messages anymore because it’s so many AI SDRs out there. And so yeah, really be focused on your existing customers and that authentic relationship and adding value to them so you can extract some value as well. And that’s a much better function for the core economics of the business. That’s a core part of that statement — that’s a little bit nerdy and not as fun — but I think the part that is really fun is when you can turn your happy customers, because you’ve added that value, and you can turn them into a growth engine for you.
[00:23:04] Rodrigo Souto: So that goes back to references, infusing customer proof to validate your product claims, your framework claims or go-to-market claims around your industry, your service, whatever it might be. So those two key ways — focusing on existing customer growth is cheaper, faster than net new. And then you can leverage that to also help grow your net new in a faster way. Folks don’t listen to sales folks anymore. They don’t necessarily listen to marketing claims — certainly — but they do tend to listen to other human beings in similar roles to them facing similar challenges, validating that this thing works. It sounds simple, but I’m always shocked at how many companies out there don’t take advantage of that.
[00:23:50] Jeff Reekers: Totally. Totally, a hundred percent. You mentioned all things AI — and you can’t have a podcast or you can’t have a conversation these days without talking about AI or else you’re just behind. Everyone’s behind apparently — so I read on LinkedIn every day. But how are you thinking about that? And you mentioned customer marketing and customers at the center of the go-to-market. How do you approach AI with that sort of mindset? And you mentioned the AI SDR as an example and the LinkedIn inbox infiltrated — there’s sort of this dark side of it — but then there’s also opportunity with this. So curious how you’re kind of leveraging that with a customer-centric marketing mindset.
[00:24:25] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, great question. I’m a little skeptical of the AI SDRs, but let me also say I’m a fan of AI and I’ve been able to really embrace it and primarily as just a productivity output multiplier with quality controls and everything like that. But I will say, the amount of campaigns and the amount of work I’ve been able to output in a much smaller team with less people, budget, resources wouldn’t have been possible four years ago. And that’s largely because of AI. I always caution everyone — don’t turn AI into an engine of garbage. Sorry for the language there — but there’s already a lot of that out there. Bad content that’s clearly written by a robot, not a human, doesn’t have a point of view — the AI SDRs out there. So don’t do that. But do use it to get more good content out there. Train your AI on how to write your brand voice, your own personal voice.
[00:25:22] Rodrigo Souto: We’re all writers — we all, as marketers — and our tone of voice matters as well. So stay away from that generic stuff is my top line on AI. But then when it connects to customer marketing specifically, I think it’s really exciting because it leans into the part of AI that is helpful, which is that you can scale things, you can get more out there, but it can’t replace the core part of customer marketing. Today at least — AI is moving fast, I’m not an AI futurist — in 10 years, who knows. But right now what it can’t do is have a really great relationship with that customer where after they come and speak with you at an event, you are able to talk to them, deepen that relationship, and now they’re going to be likely to do it again in a couple months or take that reference call next or work on that case study or provide you that quote that you need because the product marketer for it — two days before the release — comes and now you have your… AI can’t replicate any of that.
[00:26:18] Rodrigo Souto: So it can help us scale and do more of customer marketing and customer proof, but it can’t replace that core relationship and trust element I think is. So I think it’s a perfect place to use AI — all the good stuff with none of the bad, in my view. For now — I will caveat again. Just as an example of how we can increase output is we have vendors out there — PeerBound, others — who are leveraging things that are already happening: customer calls. Hopefully your team is on the phone with customers all the time, whether it’s a new sale, a CS call. And now we can, at scale, pull out proof from those calls in a way that manually would’ve just taken way too long. But hey, you know what it doesn’t do? It doesn’t get permission from the customer. I mean you can automate some of that, but that still comes from a human. And so I think it can greatly increase the output, but then you still need that human to kind of drive the connection and message home. So that’s kind of how I’m thinking about it — as just like an output multiplier. But do not have it replace the human touch of customers, ever. Even if AI gets really good — and this is an AI robot right here, which it’s not — but let’s imagine a world where it is and I’m talking to a customer… just don’t lean into that. Keep that human-to-human connection. Yeah.
[00:27:40] Jeff Reekers: Kind of going full circle here — we’re talking a lot on the revenue impact side of things earlier on, and I think this is so much as we gear up to 2026. We’re all going through budgeting season, lots of folks are really figuring out what their budgets are going to look like, how they’re going to get ’em through. If you have any advice for the customer marketers out there that want to start demonstrating a stronger revenue impact — they don’t really know where to start exactly. You gave some examples earlier, but any advice you’d give to folks out there that are just knee-deep in 2026 planning right now?
[00:28:14] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, I’d say really lean into those revenue-facing programs which we chatted about, and you don’t have to have a huge customer base to get started. So we might be talking about someone who’s starting customer marketing at a company that has a couple hundred customers. That’s okay — have one or two champions. Start a mini reference program and just collect some wins and then you’ll be able to kind of grow from there. Really think about how customer proof can impact expansion especially, and this can be a little bit specific. If you don’t have a big expansion motion at your company, this may not apply. Most companies do because you have existing customers and you can grow them — whether that’s a new BU, more usage, or cross-sell, however you define expansion. But really focus in there and think about scale. Take some of the lessons from — I think — demand gen that customer marketers typically are not as great at. Think about ways to scale your channels and think about things from a channel perspective. Not just like, “I’m going to create a case study,” but “How am I going to distribute that?” And I think if you’re doing more of that, it’s going to show more value and it’s going to inherently connect more to revenue.
[00:29:23] Jeff Reekers: Love it. And we’ll wrap up here with this last question before we go — and this might be one and the same as the prior answer, maybe there are some differences between it — but I think one thing, looking through your history and your career, it’s been continuously growing and taking on new challenges, and now you’re stepping into a really strong leadership role at Zappi. For those that are out there in customer marketing and want to start stepping into more leadership roles — they’re in customer marketing, they’re sort of in a manager or IC role — but they want to create that path where they’re at today and start leading teams and start growing in the marketing function. Any advice you’d have for folks out there that are really looking to take where they’re at now and trying to figure out that leadership path for them?
[00:30:04] Rodrigo Souto: Yeah, absolutely. Some of the things I really leaned into to sort of get that growth in my career are: learn the finance side of things a little bit. You don’t have to become a finance person, but have business acumen — not just in customer marketing, not just in product marketing, not just in sales if you’re a salesperson. I think this applies really broadly to everybody. But I think especially for marketers because we sometimes get pegged as the folks who put a pretty logo on things — and we do that too — but back that up with clear understanding of the unit economics of your business. Every hire I’ve ever made — during a review cycle, that would be my number one advice to them, especially if I sensed that they weren’t doing it: spend some time learning the business fundamentals here so that you can connect your work to those.
[00:30:54] Rodrigo Souto: Because I guarantee you most CEOs are out there — they think a case study’s cool, but they think a healthy LTV-to-CAC is much cooler. So if you can connect those two things, you’re going to be talking their language. Which kind of leads to the second thing: build those relationships across the go-to-market. So focus in on the go-to-market teams especially, and within that — sales. I think the number one team that any marketer, but especially a customer marketer — if you’re close to them and you have a tight feedback loop and your customer marketing is informed by what sales needs and they feel that and they validate that — you are going to rise up much quicker than someone who isolates themselves in marketing, only talks to the brand team to make sure the customer story looks beautiful, but doesn’t connect it to that core go-to-market. So become friends of sales. That’s my number one advice. Maybe that actually replaces the one before — become friends of sales is number one, I would say.
[00:31:50] Jeff Reekers: These both resonate so deeply. Two pieces of advice I got earlier in my career were just these two things. I worked for a VP of Sales who once told me really early in my career his goal was to know metrics of the business better than the CFO. And so I always remembered that because he grew so well in his career and that’s always stuck with me and it’s bringing back that memory. And the second is: if the sales org invites you out to their team function, you’re in good shape. Yeah — go. First of all, go.
[00:32:05] Rodrigo Souto: Go. Yeah.
[00:32:08] Jeff Reekers: But if they’re viewing you as part of their team, that’s a great thing whether you’re in product marketing, customer marketing, demand gen, whatever.
[00:32:28] Rodrigo Souto: Love to hear that. That resonates with you and your own experience. My third advice to folks — in customer marketing or not, but I think especially in customer marketing — is: take on projects, some work outside of your day-to-day and your core comfort areas. And they can still be connected to your core areas. So take customer marketing and extend it into something completely different. And where I’m curious for your take — and I’ve heard some contradictory feedback — is more CEOs and folks in even higher-up leadership are actually starting to value more deeper expertise versus someone who can sort of bounce around. And in my experience, having exposure to lots of different areas and volunteering and being a great team player from that sense has been really helpful for me to get into leadership roles. But I don’t know, I feel like maybe that guidance is changing a little bit. So super curious to hear your perspective on that.
[00:33:20] Jeff Reekers: One thing that I’ve always thought about is having a major and a minor. You have your major and that’s what you’re going to get your degree on and that’s your path, that’s your core responsibility. You can’t graduate without your major being done and checked off. But then you should have a passion thing that’s your minor and you should pursue that minor. And maybe those change over time, but I’ve always been a fan of having a major and a minor at any given moment. And I like that phrasing as well — I think it’s a great way to roll out your… or just to think about your career holistically and just to continue to learn so much.
[00:33:50] Rodrigo Souto: I love that. Major/minor. I’m going to borrow that — if you don’t mind, Jeff — and start using it.
[00:33:55] Jeff Reekers: Please.
[00:33:57] Rodrigo Souto: And start using it.
[00:34:00] Jeff Reekers: Well Rodrigo, amazing. Thanks so much for being on the podcast here today. Tons of great learnings, takeaways, all things demand gen, customer marketing, bringing this all together. As always, I don’t know how to end these things — what do I do with my hands? So I’ll just say thanks so much. If anybody wants to reach out to you, I’m sure they can find you on LinkedIn, connect, find more questions. But Rodrigo, thanks so much, and hopefully you have a wonderful, wonderful Halloween.
[00:34:18] Rodrigo Souto: Thank you, Jeff. Happy Halloween. I had a great time, great conversation. Hopefully folks get some value from it. And yes, please reach out, connect, find me on LinkedIn. Would love to chat with anybody, love making new network connections, and have a great weekend, Jeff. Thank you.
[00:34:32] Jeff Reekers: Alright, thanks so much. Thanks everybody. Cheers. Bye. 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.