Featured Guest: Shannon Howard
On this episode of The CustomerX Files, Alison is joined by Shannon Howard, the Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum for a thoughtful conversation about the art and science of building strategic goals in Customer Marketing and Advocacy (CMA). Whether you’re launching your first strategic plan or refining an existing one, this discussion explores not just what goals should look like — but why they matter and how to make them truly impactful across your organization.
From the outset, Shannon and Alison dive into what makes strategic goals more than just words on a page. They tackle common questions customer marketers face: How do you create goals that align with organizational priorities? How do you ensure your goals resonate with cross-functional partners? And how do you avoid crafting goals that sound good but have little influence on outcomes? Their conversation moves beyond abstraction and into practical, experience-based insight that you can apply immediately to your planning cycle.
A major theme of the episode is the importance of clarity and alignment. Shannon explains how thoughtful goal setting begins with understanding both your organization’s strategic direction and the customer experience itself. Rather than working in isolation, CMA practitioners must ensure their goals complement broader business objectives — whether that’s revenue growth, customer retention, product adoption, or deeper community engagement. When customer marketing goals are aligned with strategic priorities, they become far more powerful tools for influencing decision-makers and gaining organizational support.
Shannon also highlights how to identify gaps both between where your organization is and where it wants to be, and between what your team can deliver and what stakeholders expect. She and Alison discuss how customer experience data, customer feedback, and cross-functional insights can reveal opportunity areas that strategic goals can then target. This process not only strengthens your strategic planning but also ensures your goals are rooted in real customer needs and business realities.
Another key takeaway is how to make goals meaningful and actionable. Shannon shares advice on structuring goals with specificity, measurable outcomes, and clear timelines and why it matters to avoid vague or overly broad goals that are impossible to evaluate. She emphasizes that goals should not only guide action but also serve as a basis for shared accountability, progress measurement, and continuous learning.
Throughout the episode, listeners will gain valuable perspectives on topics including:
Whether you’re a customer marketing leader, advocacy practitioner, or part of a cross-functional growth team, this episode offers both strategic frameworks and real stories you can use to build better goals, influence broader organizational strategy, and deliver measurable value.
Listen now to discover how intentional goal setting can bring clarity, alignment, and momentum to your customer marketing and advocacy efforts — and help you drive meaningful impact within your organization.
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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