Advocacy as a Growth Engine | CMA Podcast

About this Episode

Featured Guest: Antu Buck

On this episode of The CustomerX Files, Alison is joined by Antu Buck from Gigamon. Antu is an accomplished and award-winning marketing leader, currently serving as the Director of Customer Marketing and Community at Gigamon. She also has over a decade of experience at McAfee and continues to demonstrate success in steering customer marketing initiatives through a unique blend of creativity and analytical expertise.

As organizations face increasingly complex buyer landscapes, the role of customer advocates has broadened far beyond traditional reference calls or testimonials. In this episode, Antu and Alison explore how advocacy when approached strategically becomes a multi-dimensional growth lever that strengthens retention, accelerates pipeline velocity, influences buying decisions, and enhances brand credibility. By blending creativity with analytical insight, Antu explains why advocacy initiatives should be central to how companies think about customer experience and go-to-market success.

Advocacy as a Growth Engine

A central theme of the conversation is the shift from viewing advocacy as a one-off activity to treating it as a repeatable, strategic engine. Antu breaks down the importance of intentional planning including frameworks like creating 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans for customer advocacy work to ensure programs move past early enthusiasm and begin delivering structured, scalable results.

Through the discussion, listeners gain a clear understanding of how advocacy contributes to growth in multiple ways:

• Driving Authentic Customer Voice: Antu emphasizes that genuine customer stories shared through references, case studies, social endorsements, and peer conversations carry more weight today than ever before. Buyers trust peers, and advocacy gives companies the tools to amplify real customer experiences in ways that resonate across the market.
• Fueling Pipeline and Revenue: Rather than operating in isolation, advocacy should be integrated with sales and marketing motions so that customer stories influence deals at key points in the funnel, reduce risk for buyers, and shorten sales cycles.
• Strengthening Retention and Expansion: Advocacy isn’t just about acquiring new customers; it’s about building deeper, enduring relationships that drive renewals and upsells by keeping customers engaged and invested in your success.
• Creating Internal Alignment: When advocacy insights are shared with product, customer success, and executive leadership teams, those insights inform strategy, highlight customer pain points, and shape future product and service enhancements.

The conversation also tackles the practical challenges many teams face when building advocacy programs  from balancing resource constraints to aligning cross-functional stakeholders around a shared vision. Antu shares real-world advice on overcoming these obstacles by focusing on clear goals, measurable outcomes, and meaningful customer engagement rather than chasing vanity metrics alone.

Customer Marketing & Advocacy Strategies

Listeners will walk away with a richer understanding of how customer advocacy can be designed to scale, measured for impact, and connected directly to growth metrics that matter to revenue leaders as well as customer marketers. Whether you’re building your first advocacy plan or evolving an existing program, this episode provides inspiration and actionable guidance to help you think bigger about the role advocacy plays in your organization.

Whether you’re a customer marketing leader, an advocacy practitioner, or part of a cross-functional go-to-market team, this episode delivers valuable perspectives on harnessing the full power of advocacy as a core component of your growth strategy.

Listen now to discover how a thoughtful, strategic advocacy program can become a true engine for business momentum.