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Obsession 2025 was full of the kind of conversations customer marketing teams do not get to have often enough.
Not just “how do we get more customer stories?” Not just “how do we keep references warm?” Not just “how do we prove advocacy matters?”
The conversations went deeper.
How do you build customer programs that executives actually want to be part of? How do you scale advocacy without burning out a small team? How do you use AI without losing the human trust that makes customer marketing work in the first place? How do you turn customer love into measurable business outcomes across pipeline, retention, expansion, references, and executive alignment?
That is what made Obsession 2025 memorable.
The event brought together customer marketing, advocacy, lifecycle, and revenue leaders from across B2B SaaS. The best sessions did not feel like theory. They felt like field notes from teams doing the work inside complex, global, high-growth companies.
Three talks stayed with us.
Chloe Ryan of Zendesk shared how her team is using AI as a catalyst for customer marketing, not as a replacement for the human work. Kara Bankhead of NICE walked through the real operating model behind an Executive Customer Advisory Board that C-suite leaders actually value. Sonia Starova of Temenos showed how a two-person team scaled a global ambassador program from zero to more than 1,000 advocates.
Different companies. Different motions. Different stages of maturity.
But together, they told a clear story about where customer marketing is going.
The next era of customer marketing will belong to teams that can turn customer engagement into infrastructure: repeatable, measurable, personal, and connected to revenue. That shift is what we call customer-led growth.
Below are three Obsession 2025 memories worth revisiting, and three plays worth stealing.
Chloe Ryan leads a five-person customer marketing team at Zendesk, supporting more than 1,000 sellers and over 400 marketers.
That ratio alone makes the session worth watching.
Most customer marketing teams know this pressure well. Sales needs references. Marketing needs proof points. Product needs customer voice. Leadership wants evidence of retention, expansion, and momentum. Customers want recognition, but they do not want to be overused.
And the team in the middle is often small.
Chloe’s talk stood out because she did not position AI as a generic productivity hack. She positioned it as an operating philosophy. The goal is not simply to do more work faster. The goal is to free customer marketers to spend more time on the parts of the job that require judgment, empathy, trust, and relationship-building.
That distinction matters. AI can help summarize, route, draft, match, and accelerate. But customer advocacy still depends on context. It depends on knowing when to ask, who to ask, how to ask, and what kind of story will actually serve both the customer and the business.
At Zendesk, AI is being used to compress the distance between a customer moment and usable customer evidence. Chloe shared that her team is producing customer stories 75% faster. For customer marketing leaders, that is not just a content metric. It changes the rhythm of the entire function.
When customer evidence moves faster, sales can use it while the opportunity is still active. Marketing can support campaigns with fresher proof. Customer success can spotlight wins while relationships are still warm. Executives can see customer momentum in real time rather than waiting for a quarterly recap. That is the strategic value of AI in customer marketing: not speed for speed’s sake, but speed in service of relevance. See the AI Engagement OS in action →
The strongest part of Chloe’s session was the mindset shift. She framed AI as a career enhancer for her team, not a threat. That framing is essential. Customer marketing is relationship-heavy work. If AI is introduced as a way to automate people out of the process, teams will resist it. If it is introduced as a way to remove repetitive friction so people can do higher-value work, adoption becomes much easier.
Zendesk’s use case also showed what practical AI adoption looks like inside a real go-to-market organization. One example was a custom GPT bot for sales references. Instead of relying on manual Slack requests, spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, or repeated asks to the same few customers, sellers can self-serve better-fit references with more context.
That matters because reference programs usually break in predictable ways. The same customers get overused. The wrong references get matched to the wrong opportunities. Customer marketers become bottlenecks. Sales loses trust in the process. Customers feel like they are being asked for favors rather than invited into meaningful advocacy.
AI can help solve that, but only if it sits on top of a strong system of record. Chloe’s team runs Luminaries, Zendesk’s customer champions program, on Base. That gives the team one operating layer for customer evidence, references, speaking opportunities, advocacy activity, and engagement across the customer base. Book a walkthrough of the same engagement layer →
AI is powerful because the underlying customer data is organized. That is the real lesson.
Do not start with “we need AI.” Start with “where is customer marketing stuck, slow, manual, or overly dependent on one person?” Then use AI to remove friction from that motion.
For SaaS leaders, this is the move: use AI to make customer proof more current, more findable, and more usable across the revenue organization. The biggest opportunity is not replacing customer marketers. It is helping a small team serve a large GTM organization without diluting the quality of customer relationships.
Customer marketing leaders should ask:
Chloe’s session was a reminder that AI in customer marketing should not make the work feel less human. Done well, it should make room for more human work. For more on this thesis, see our take on why your post-sale AI is only as smart as the context behind it.
Kara Bankhead, Director of Customer Advocacy at NICE, spent 18 months building an Executive Customer Advisory Board from scratch.
Her session felt like the kind of playbook customer marketing leaders usually have to build through trial and error.
Executive Customer Advisory Boards sound simple from the outside. Invite strategic customers. Bring them together. Ask for feedback. Build relationships. Create executive engagement.
But anyone who has actually tried to run one knows the hard part is not the meeting. The hard part is making the board valuable enough that senior executives want to keep showing up.
Executives do not attend because of swag. They do not attend because they want another vendor meeting. They do not attend because a company wants “customer voice.” They attend when the experience gives them business value and personal value.
Kara’s session was strong because she focused on the structure beneath the experience. Before building the invite list, NICE defined the purpose of the board. That is where many ECABs go wrong. They start with names. They start with logos. They start with who the company wants in the room.
But the better question is: what is this board for? Is it meant to shape product strategy? Strengthen executive relationships? Improve retention among strategic accounts? Create market insight? Develop thought leadership? Support expansion? Increase customer influence inside the business?
The purpose determines the member criteria. The member criteria determine the invite list. The invite list determines the quality of the conversation. That sequencing is what makes the program strategic.
Kara’s most important point was that the right mix matters more than the right number. An ECAB is not stronger because it is bigger. It is stronger when the room has the right representation across segments, industries, personas, maturity levels, and strategic priorities.
That is especially important in B2B SaaS, where one executive customer can represent a highly specific use case, market pressure, or transformation journey. If the board is skewed too heavily toward one segment or persona, the feedback gets narrower. If the board is too broad, the conversation becomes generic. The balance is the strategy.
Kara also emphasized that an ECAB cannot be treated as a once-a-year event. The annual meeting may be the peak moment, but the monthly cadence is the program. That includes thoughtful touchpoints, one-on-one calls, follow-up loops, member engagement, internal alignment, and ongoing communication. The in-person experience only works when the relationship has been nurtured before the room comes together.
One of the most useful details from Kara’s talk was the “before-you-go” packet for in-person meetings. It is a small operational detail, but it says a lot about the standard of the program. A strong ECAB experience does not leave executives guessing.
That is the difference between a board executives tolerate and one they look forward to.
Kara’s team tracks the board in Base, including engagement, attendance, and impact. That tracking matters because ECAB value needs to be communicated in both directions. Members need to see that their participation has influence. Internal leaders need to see that the program is driving business outcomes. Without that visibility, the board can become performative. With it, the board becomes an executive engagement engine. See how Base runs executive engagement →
For SaaS leaders, the ECAB lesson is clear: executive advocacy requires executive-grade value.
A strong advisory board can influence retention, expansion, product direction, market positioning, and strategic account relationships. But only if it is designed as a business program, not an event series.
Customer marketing leaders should ask:
Kara’s session was a reminder that executive customers are not an audience to be managed. They are a community to be respected. When the board creates value for them, it creates value for the business. For the operating layer that runs underneath programs like Kara’s, see When CS and customer marketing operate as one system.
Sonia Starova and her two-person team at Temenos built a global ambassador program from scratch. Today, the program includes more than 1,000 advocates across 150 countries. It has influenced more than $140M in pipeline. It includes 80% C-level participation, and 85% of ambassadors complete at least one activity each cycle.
Those numbers are impressive. But the most useful part of Sonia’s session was not the scale. It was how the team got there.
They did not start with a massive launch. They did not start with a complicated global rollout. They did not start by trying to activate every possible customer.
They started with five happy customers.
That is one of the most important lessons for any customer advocacy program. The first phase is not about volume. It is about finding the customers who already believe, understanding why they believe, and building the early program around real energy.
Advocacy programs often fail when they are launched as campaigns. Sonia’s approach showed the opposite. Start small. Learn the pattern. Build the internal trust. Then scale.
Sonia spent the first three months selling the program internally before launching externally. That detail is easy to miss, but it may be the reason the program scaled.
Customer advocacy never belongs only to customer marketing. It depends on sales, customer success, product, marketing, regional teams, and executive sponsors. If those teams do not understand the program, they will not route the right customers into it. They will not protect advocate relationships. They will not use the outputs. They will not help scale the motion.
Internal alignment is the foundation of external advocacy.
Sonia’s program is built around a repeatable loop: activate, recognize, reward. That loop matters because advocacy is not a one-time transaction. A customer does not become an advocate because they completed one reference call or joined one webinar. Advocacy strengthens when customers are invited into meaningful activities, recognized for their contribution, and rewarded in ways that reinforce their identity as champions. That is how programs create repeat participation.
Sonia also shared a four-phase maturity model: Foundation. Pilot. Launch. Optimization. Each phase has its own success criteria. This is useful because many advocacy programs plateau when they try to scale before the foundation is ready.
The maturity model gives teams a way to diagnose where they actually are.
Sonia’s next focus is AI-powered advocate matching and a tiered recognition model. That is exactly the kind of layer that becomes possible once the underlying program infrastructure is strong. AI matching is not the starting point. It is the next layer on top of a system that already knows who the advocates are, what they care about, what they have done, where they are located, what industries they represent, and how they prefer to participate.
That is why the program can scale with a two-person team. The system does the routing. The team protects the relationships. See the AI-powered engagement layer →
For SaaS leaders, Sonia’s session is a reminder that advocacy scale does not come from more asks. It comes from a better operating model.
The best ambassador programs make participation feel clear, valuable, and worth repeating.
Customer marketing leaders should ask:
The headline number from Temenos is more than $140M in influenced pipeline. The structural lesson is that the program got there with two people because the motion was built to repeat.
Looking back at these three sessions, the pattern is hard to miss.
Zendesk, NICE, and Temenos are not running customer marketing as a collection of campaigns. They are running it as infrastructure. That is the shift B2B SaaS leaders should pay attention to.
Customer marketing is no longer only about creating stories after success happens. It is becoming the system that identifies customer momentum, activates the right people, protects customer relationships, feeds the revenue organization, and proves business impact.
Three themes came through clearly.
Zendesk has a five-person customer marketing team supporting more than 1,000 sellers and 400 marketers. NICE built an Executive Customer Advisory Board with a focused advocacy function and a clear operating model. Temenos scaled to more than 1,000 advocates with a two-person team.
None of these teams scaled by simply hiring more people. They scaled by building systems.
That is an important message for customer marketing leaders who are being asked to do more without a larger team. The answer is not always more headcount. Sometimes the answer is a better operating layer, clearer program design, stronger routing, smarter AI, and better internal adoption.
The strongest programs at Obsession 2025 were not waiting until the end of the year to prove value. They were tracking the work as it happened.
Customer story velocity. Reference quality. Engagement. Attendance. Advocate activity. Pipeline influence. Executive participation. Repeat engagement. Program maturity.
This matters because customer marketing needs to speak the language of the business. Brand love is important, but leadership needs to understand how that love turns into NRR, expansion, pipeline, trust, and market credibility.
The best customer marketing teams are not choosing between relationship-building and measurement. They are designing programs where the relationship creates measurable business outcomes.
A recurring theme across the sessions was executive value. Kara’s ECAB gives customer executives a reason to participate. Sonia’s ambassador program includes significant C-level participation. Chloe’s AI-powered customer evidence helps revenue teams bring stronger proof into customer and prospect conversations.
This is where customer marketing becomes strategic. Executives do not need more vendor noise. They need peer insight, visibility, strategic context, and evidence they can use. When customer marketing can create that kind of value, it becomes a trusted bridge between customers and the business.
AI appeared in all three stories, but it was never the whole story. At Zendesk, AI helps compress production and improve reference access. At NICE, stronger tracking helps the team understand engagement and impact. At Temenos, AI-powered matching is the next layer on top of a mature advocacy foundation.
The pattern is consistent: AI works best when it supports a clear customer motion. It should not sit above the program as a shiny feature. It should sit underneath the program as a force multiplier.
That means the question is not “how do we add AI to customer marketing?” The better question is “which customer marketing motion deserves to be faster, smarter, more personalized, or easier to scale?” For our deeper take on this, see the AI Engagement OS webinar, or book a live walkthrough.
The best part of Obsession 2025 was that the sessions were not abstract. Each one had a practical starting point.
Look at your current customer marketing workflows and identify where the team is spending too much time on manual, repetitive, or routing-heavy work.
Start with one motion:
Then ask: what could AI help us accelerate without weakening the customer relationship?
Before building or refreshing an Executive Customer Advisory Board, write the purpose in one sentence.
Not the agenda. Not the invite list. Not the annual meeting plan.
The purpose.
Once that is clear, define the member criteria, the value proposition, the engagement cadence, and the internal measurement model. That one step can prevent months of drift.
If your advocacy program is early, do not start with scale.
Start with five customers who already love you. Interview them. Understand what they value. Learn how they want to participate. Build the first version of the program around real customer motivation, not internal assumptions.
If your program already exists but has plateaued, use Sonia’s maturity model as a diagnostic. Are you truly ready to optimize, or are there gaps in the foundation, pilot, or launch motion?
Customer marketing is under more pressure than ever.
B2B SaaS companies need efficient growth. They need stronger retention. They need expansion. They need credible proof in competitive deals. They need executive relationships that survive renewal cycles. They need customer stories that are fresh, specific, and connected to business value.
That makes customer marketing one of the most important leverage points in the business. But only if the function is built to scale.
The teams that stood out at Obsession 2025 are showing what that looks like. They are not relying on heroic manual effort. They are not treating advocacy as a favor bank. They are not measuring success only by content output. They are not using AI as a shortcut around relationships.
They are building customer engagement systems that compound. See what that engagement layer looks like at Base →
That is the real memory from Obsession 2025.
The future of customer marketing is not more scattered asks. It is more intentional infrastructure. Programs customers want to join. Systems revenue teams trust. Evidence executives can use. Motions small teams can actually run.
Zendesk, NICE, and Temenos gave us three versions of that future.
Now the opportunity is to steal the plays and make them your own.
If you want the operating model underneath these programs, download The CLG Playbook. It breaks down how customer-led growth teams identify advocates, activate customer engagement, connect advocacy to revenue, and scale customer programs without losing the relationships that make them work.
And if you want to see how Base runs the engagement layer behind customer evidence, references, executive programs, and advocacy, book a walkthrough.
See how Base helps you build advocacy programs that drive growth.
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