A new chapter for Customer-Led Growth.

For seven years, the CMA 100 was our love letter to customer marketing - a list of the operators who fought, year after year, to be recognized as a strategic function instead of a content factory. They earned every line of credit. They built the foundation we're standing on.

This year, we're doing something we have never done before. The TOP 100 CLG '26 is the first edition of the awards dedicated to Customer-Led Growth as a whole - not customer marketing alone.

We changed the awards because the work changed.

The strongest customer-facing leaders in 2026 don't live inside a single function anymore. They run lifecycle motions - advocacy, community, customer success, expansion, CX, and Voice of Customer wired together as one engine, measured against revenue, and increasingly powered by AI. A category has earned its own name: Customer-Led Growth. Honoring it under the old name would have meant honoring half the work.

That category is the one we've been building at Base since the beginning, and it's why we acquired EverAfter - to build the Engagement OS for Customer-Led Growth. One platform for the entire post-sale motion. The 100+ winners we're announcing today are the early proof of what that future looks like in practice.

This list is about more than recognition. It's the moment a movement became a category.

Why we expanded the awards.

The original CMA 100 was built around a question: who is doing the most ambitious customer marketing work this year? That question still matters - but it stopped capturing the actual job.

Look at this year's nominations and the change is unmistakable. The same operator now owns: an advocacy program, a community, a digital CS motion, a referral engine, an expansion play, a Voice of Customer loop, and an AI strategy that ties all of those together. Customer marketing didn't shrink - it expanded into a full Customer-Led Growth function, and the people running it deserve to be recognized for the full scope of the work.

That is the simplest answer to "why CLG, why now": the field outgrew the old name. So we changed the name. And we widened the lens.

What unified CX actually looks like in 2026.

For years, the post-sale stack was a patchwork. Onboarding lived in one tool, advocacy in another, QBRs in slides, success plans in spreadsheets, value realization in a dashboard nobody opened. The result was the same in every B2B SaaS company: customers got handed off between teams that couldn't see each other's work.

Customer-Led Growth — and the technology underneath it — collapses that. A single, connected experience across the journey:

• Onboarding that ramps customers to first value with shared milestones, not email checklists.
• Success plans built around the customer's outcome, not the vendor's checkboxes.
• QBRs that show the value already delivered and the value still on the table.
• Value realization loops where usage signals trigger upsell, expansion, or renewal motions automatically.
• Advocacy activated in the moments customers are most likely to say yes — not on a schedule.
• Knowledge and self-service with AI-powered answers, in-app help in context, and content that travels with the customer.

That's the unified journey. It's how the strongest customer-facing teams operate now, and it's exactly what the Engagement OS is designed to deliver.

AI is rewriting the operating manual.

Every year of these awards reflects the work happening in the field. This year, AI showed up in the work — not as a future bet, but as the production layer underneath the best programs. (It's also why we built Base AI — because the operators on this list shouldn't have to stitch six tools together to do this work.)

A few moments that stood out from the 2026 winner stories:

• Kristi Faltorusso built a custom GPT that ingests call transcripts, listens for competitive signals and value-messaging patterns, and serves CSMs a tailored playbook the moment a deal is at risk. AI-powered retention, as a measurable lift.
• Pankaj Bhardwaj at Saviynt rolled out a Multi-Agent AI Ecosystem — an AI Co-Pilot, an AI chat layer that autonomously resolves 41% of interactions, and a Knowledge Agent that drove a 267% increase in case deflection.
• Dan Ennis at Workato built four interconnected AI programs that hand the right intervention to the right customer at the right moment — converting a manual Digital CS function into a proactive, AI-orchestrated one.
• Radhika Narayanan at Freshworks designed a dual-layer AI Adoption & Retention motion that lifted activation 9x and configuration 11x — turning AI from a feature sold into a growth engine deployed.
• Christopher Irwin-Dudek at NiCE rebuilt the entire customer-story lifecycle around a custom GPT trained on NiCE's library — every case study, CAB session, and NPS comment auto-tagged and served on demand.
• Carrie Lewis-Kemper at SAP shipped the Propensity-to-Buy tool - predictive analytics and machine learning matching the right solutions to the right customers at the right moment.

These aren't experiments. They're AI in production, tied to NRR. And across all 100+ winner stories, the pattern is the same: AI is removing the friction that used to slow CLG down, and the operators who figured that out first are quietly running the most efficient growth motions in B2B SaaS.

Why this matters for the category.

Boards are no longer asking customer-facing teams about activity - they're asking about NRR. They're asking which customers will renew, which will expand, and which will become the next case study. Customer-Led Growth is the answer to that question, and unified CX is how the answer gets delivered.

That's the work we've been building toward at Base, and the reason we brought EverAfter into the family - so customer marketing, customer success, advocacy, and CX would stop running parallel tracks. One motion. One platform. One growth flywheel.

Thank you to the judges.

A list this size only works because senior leaders from across the CLG ecosystem read every nomination and brought their judgment to the final ranking. Thank you to:

• DeMario Bell — Senior Community Manager, North America, Marketing Developer Experience, AWS
• Gillian Farquhar — VP, Global Customer Marketing & Community, Infor
• Heather Truettner — Director, Digital Success at Scale, CyberArk
• Maria Sturgeon — Head of Customer Reference Program, Stripe
• Mary Iapicca — VP, Customer Experience, ZoomInfo
• Tara Myles — Director of Customer Success, Zendesk

You read hundreds of stories. You graded with care. You set the bar. Thank you for the hours, the candor, and the standard you held the work to.

This is only the beginning.

The 100+ winners on this list are not the destination. They're the early cohort — the operators showing the rest of the field what unified CX, AI-augmented, customer-led growth actually looks like in practice. The first edition of the TOP 100 CLG is a milestone, not a finish line.

The category is just getting started. So is the work. And so are we.

See the full list at base.ai/top100-clg-2026. Then come tag your favorites — we tried to tag every one of them, and LinkedIn told us no.

— Adi, Director of Marketing, Base