The 100 leaders driving Customer-Led Growth in 2026.

Steve George, Sr. Manager of Customer Advocacy and Marketing at Strada, built a customer marketing framework anchored in Strada’s shared KPIs across sales, marketing, delivery, and product, turning customer marketing into a cross‑functional discipline rather than a siloed team. Learning from past setups, he developed a framework with measurable outcomes ranging from growing advocate participation and advocacy to tracking revenue influence, and famously refuses to let budget constraints slow creative program building.

Strada’s pro‑AI approach to empowering members has played a vital role in offloading repetitive tasks and freeing up strategic capacity. In nine months, he has stood up four highly engaged programs, two CABs, one CAP, and a reference program, and is now exploring a co‑creation program with the product team. His Top 100 recognition reflects an entrepreneurial operator who wins over internal colleagues through measurable results and creative partnership‑building.

Melba Miles, Global Head of Customer Success & Digital Strategy at Miro, scales CS impact without losing the human element, engaging over 70% of revenue digitally while still driving meaningful, high-quality customer dialogue. She treats Customer Success as commercially accountable, not a retention cost center: setting bold influenced-expansion targets and building programs that tied directly to business outcomes, helping her team exceed expansion goals by 47%. As her portfolio grew 88% YoY, she responded by building globally consistent, signal-driven, technology-enabled operating models, expanding support into six languages so that scale still felt regionally relevant.

She leads through clarity and focus, simplifying complexity into a few high-impact priorities that align CS, Sales, Marketing, and Operations as one team. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a rare combination of operational rigor, empathy, and commercial discipline, the exact profile Customer-Led Growth requires at global scale.

Dan Ennis, Senior Director of Customer Success at Workato, led a transformation of the Digital Customer Success organization from a reactive, manually-driven model into a proactive, AI-orchestrated one, delivering the right intervention, to the right customer, at the right moment. He led the Workato Program Team to build four interconnected AI programs: AI-Driven At-Risk Nurture (autonomous identification and outreach to at-risk customers with tailored recommendations and zero manual CS input), AI Strategy Contact Intelligence (identifies the right stakeholder and generates business-goal-grounded outreach), Critical Moment Detection (shifts the team from schedule-driven to signal-driven engagement), and a Forecast Intelligence Engine (combines usage, sentiment, and support data to surface gaps and recommend next steps). Collectively these programs influenced 1,000+ customers and drove improvements in retention, core product consumption, cost-to-serve, and forecast variance, a breadth that reflects systemic change, not marginal optimization.

His core belief: the future of CS is human judgment applied where it matters most, with AI handling everything it can reliably and at scale. His Top 100 recognition reflects productized CS delivered at a scale no human team could match.

Janie Carothers, Customer Marketing Manager at Apptio, an IBM Company, built a program that connects people, stories, and outcomes, turning customer proof into powerful market momentum. In FY25 she grew overall product reviews 25% across three platforms to 1,514 reviews and 630 ratings, lifted Gartner Peer Insights reviews 680% YoY, and earned Apptio its first-ever Gartner Voice of Customer qualification for Cloudability.

Her work delivered 69 G2 badges, #1 rankings in 11 G2 reports, and TrustRadius Buyer's Choice awards for IBM Apptio, Cloudability, and (for the first time) Targetprocess, backed by 92 G2 website referrals, 115 profile CTA clicks, 10,000+ buyer-intent signals, and three TrustRadius research reports outperforming benchmarks by 1.6x or more. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a program that amplifies customers, strengthens relationships, and proves the revenue impact customer marketing can drive.

Andressa Oliveira, Senior Customer Marketing at RD Station (a TOTVS business unit), transformed community engagement into a high-performance B2B revenue engine through Conecta, which scaled to 10,000+ monthly visits in 2025. Her strategy turned customers into co-creators, resulting in 3x higher adoption and 50% higher expansion rates among engaged users.

Expanding her impact, Andressa also launched Prime Conecta, an exclusive community designed for marketing and sales leaders in Brazil. These high-level events create strategic opportunities to deepen relationships with RD Station’s most valuable business partners.

Kelly Brenneman at 1Password designs thoughtful, data-driven customer journeys that consistently surprise and delight across the full lifecycle, from onboarding to expansion to advocacy. In partnership with CS teams, she led the development of digital customer success programs delivering personalized, 1:few onboarding at scale, and uncovered a critical insight: customers who deploy 80% of their devices within 90 days are 80% more likely to renew. Acting on that, she redesigned onboarding nurtures with highly personalized, behavior-based email journeys tied to each customer's implementation stage, paired with proactive AM outreach.

The results: retention up 30+ percentage points, 56% lift in new customer engagement within 30 days, and generation of 30–35% of closed-won pipeline YoY from existing customers. Her most recent multi-channel campaign, email drip, paid social, in-product, webinar, community, drove $261,000 in influenced revenue in a single quarter, 34% of total Q4 revenue. Her Top 100 recognition reflects sustained, measurable lifecycle excellence.

Warsan Ahmed, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at JumpCloud, applies demand gen tactics to customer events and treats them as JumpCloud's strongest expansion lever, a deliberate reframing that positions customer events as a measurable pipeline engine, not just a relationship activity. She measures impact through the KPIs that matter to Sales and Marketing leadership: meetings booked, expansion opportunities created and advanced, pipeline influenced, and customer experience signals like attendee NPS that prove events are landing with customers as well as sellers. Her role is fairly new and reporting is still being refined, but the early proof points are already strong, in Q1 2026 alone, her events generated 15+ expansion opportunities and influenced $260K in expansion pipeline across just four events.

That ratio, a measurable expansion opportunity for every quarter of a typical event, shows what's possible when customer marketing is built around demand-gen discipline from day one. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a fresh but clearly revenue-aligned approach to customer events as a scalable expansion channel.

Aviral Misra, Senior Manager Customer Marketing at Cvent, leads with a clear belief: customer marketing must drive outcomes, not just activity. He specializes in breaking down silos across the customer journey by creating unified lifecycle programs that bring onboarding, engagement, community, and advocacy into a single scalable motion, embedding AI-driven insights and data-led decision making so programs are both personalized and operationally efficient at scale. He transforms customer voice into strategic influence, elevating advocacy into a growth engine that strengthens brand trust, fuels pipeline, and drives long-term loyalty.

He measures impact across four strategic areas: Adoption & Value Realization (product adoption, TTFV, feature utilization, health score), Retention & Expansion (GRR, NRR, renewal rate, expansion pipeline, upsell/cross-sell conversion), Advocacy & Influence (advocate growth, customer-generated pipeline, peer review participation, story contribution to win rates), and forward-looking KPIs like AI-driven personalization impact and LTV growth. In 2025 his programs demonstrated a proven correlation, a 2.5% increase in account engagement drove a 1.05% lift in renewal rates, and contributed approximately $6.5M in expansion impact attributed to customer programs. His Top 100 recognition reflects a disciplined outcomes-first operator who makes customer marketing a measurable strategic growth lever.

Dallas Ramey built Bold Penguin’s Customer Success function from the ground up, starting as an individual contributor and growing active engagement from a few dozen relationships into a thriving community of 2,000+ agency partners.

Under her leadership, the team supported and contributed to a 215%+ increase in agencies’ wholesale revenue books since 2022, helping thousands of U.S. insurance agencies grow their businesses more effectively.

She architected the Customer Success Manager role with direct accountability for revenue growth, wholesale adoption, conversion performance, and retention, built around five pillars: portfolio ownership, behavioral enablement, opportunity recovery, product-led revenue adoption, and portfolio health.

A former agent herself, Dallas brings deep industry empathy to a management style that has cultivated a high-performing 18-person team widely recognized for collaboration and results. Her Top 100 recognition reflects her rare ability to build a CS function from zero into a measurable revenue engine that supports thousands of small businesses.

Sarah Carro, Partner Experience Specialist at SUSE, brought a unique path to customer and partner marketing, transitioning from Secondary Education (Student Welfare Manager) into the tech partner ecosystem and turning transferable skills in empathy, cultural sensitivity, and complex stakeholder management into a genuine competitive advantage. Today she manages the SUSE Partner Loyalty Platform (SPLP), designing diverse advocacy engagement pathways gamified across technical education, certifications, social media amplification, and peer discussions so every partner feels valued for their contribution. Her standout 2025 innovation, a Unified Amplification social model, moved away from fragmented individual partner posts to partners engaging directly with SUSE's corporate posts, driving engagement rates nearly triple their usual average and satisfying professional social media algorithms to dramatically lift organic reach.

She also elevates SUSE's ethical initiatives within the partner community (e.g., the SUSE + Child Rescue Coalition collaboration) and maintains platform integrity through Code of Conduct governance and sustainable reward redemption. Her Top 100 recognition reflects her approach to advocacy: building a genuine, supportive community rather than just a promotional tool.

Gina Miller, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing and Advocacy at Picus Security, believes social proof should be a revenue lever, not a vanity metric, and built the infrastructure to prove it. Within seven months she executed a structured, cross-functional review acceleration program that grew G2 reviews from 8 to 218 and GPI reviews from 129 to 224, securing Leader designation in two G2 quarterly reports and the GPI Customers' Choice Award for Adversarial Exposure Validation. To amplify social proof internally, she launched 'Testimonial Thursdays,' where employees read customer reviews tied to their functions and reflect on their contribution to customer outcomes, aligning directly with the VP of People & Culture's employee-driven culture goals.

The program strengthened sales enablement with fresh third-party validation, elevated leadership badges in outbound, and embedded customer voice across Marketing, Sales, Product, and People teams. Her Top 100 recognition reflects operationalizing customer voice into a sustained growth and culture engine.

Sneha Iyer, Lead Business Value Consultant at Observe.AI, doesn't run customer marketing, she built the upstream value infrastructure that makes it possible. Recognizing that advocacy fails when teams restart discovery on every account and ROI cases are too generic to defend, she built First Mile Intelligence (turning 300+ past deployments into reusable context, KPI logic, and data-readiness briefs) and a Value Modeling Engine (a financial proof system that maps every scenario, objection, and agent behavior into CFO-credible projections). She also leads Impact Series, a monthly thought-leadership forum, and CxI, a customer-experience index scoring 100% of interactions.

The outcomes are remarkable, 40% faster time-to-value, 50% faster CS ramp, ROI models built in 20 minutes instead of 6–8 analyst hours, $20M+ influenced revenue, 73% upsell win rate, 80%+ renewal rates on Value-Modeling-backed deals, and 35%+ customer advocacy participation. Her Top 100 recognition honors a rare insight: advocacy is downstream; value architecture is upstream.

Lauren Maddock, Digital Customer Success Director at Seismic, transformed the community from a support-driven forum into a core pillar of Seismic's digital CS strategy, a scalable engagement engine powered by product webinars, practitioner-led Power Plays, peer-driven Brain Dates, and partner sessions. What makes her work stand out is the combination of customer-led design and data-driven execution across ~1,800 accounts: she's established that 60% of renewed ARR comes from engaged accounts while 82% of churn comes from non-engaged accounts, positioning engagement as a predictive indicator of retention, not just a success metric. 43% of customers now actively participate in digital programs, 65% of ARR is influenced by digital engagement, and 69% of the top 150 accounts are engaged.

Her programs returned 40,000+ hours to CSMs by reducing reliance on 1:1 interactions, freeing teams for strategic work. Her Top 100 recognition reflects the future of CS: scalable, connected, and community-powered.

Nate Alcorn, Manager of CX Operations at ZoomInfo, approaches Customer Marketing through systems design, believing Customer-Led Growth begins with how customers are onboarded and empowered, not with campaigns. Rather than defaulting to manual, high-touch onboarding for all customers, he designed autonomous, self-paced, personalized journeys for downmarket segments, combining guided workflows, behavioral signals, and targeted human intervention at key inflection points. His philosophy, 'Simple first.

Durable always. Mature over time.', produces measurable lift across time-to-first-value, milestone completion, weekly active usage, 30–60 day core feature activation, and post-activation expansion-ready account volume.

He's reducing variance, eliminating heroics, and building the durable operating systems that let Digital CX scale without losing intention. His Top 100 recognition reflects a rarer-than-it-sounds capability: turning customer experience into a true Customer-Led Growth engine through operational discipline.

Kara Bankhead, Director of Customer Advocacy at NiCE, led a fundamental shift in how NiCE tells customer stories, moving from product-brochure case studies where NiCE 'saved the day' to narratives that put customers at the center as visionary leaders in their own right. Two pivotal shifts drove the change: first, customers became the heroes (NiCE is barely mentioned, the customer's innovation and client impact take center stage); second, stories leaned into the human 'why' behind the work, how customers improve lives, impact communities, and motivate teams. The business impact has been significant, over 30 new customer case studies and 15 video testimonials delivered (fully hitting targets), record-breaking social engagement, all-time high video views, and the CEO selecting these videos as the centerpiece of the Sales Kickoff all-hands.

Leadership across the business now actively requests more customer-led content, and the shift has reinforced a company-wide customer-first mindset. Her Top 100 recognition reflects redefining the narrative so that when customers win and inspire, NiCE grows with them.

Shira Bar-Joseph, Project Manager at AppsFlyer, has owned the company's digital customer engagement platform (EverAfter / now Base) for over two years, and when she took it on, the data was honest: 3,300 accounts had access, but 70% of users entered the hub once and never returned. She turned that baseline into a mission, designing a comprehensive improvement roadmap that re-engaged enterprise clients post-onboarding, redesigned the client UX, added product discovery journeys that generate CSQLs through platform engagement, and built a feature adoption stage focused on mastery beyond initial onboarding. Beyond content and design, she built the full operational backbone, authoring internal technical documentation for Business Applications, Business Data, and Analytics teams; defining journey segmentation logic across 20+ Salesforce fields; integrating Cerby to fully automate user onboarding/offboarding; and building Journeys that re-engage inactive SMB and longtail accounts without individual CSM effort.

The results: 150,000+ cumulative onboarding kit views, ~30% monthly active rate benchmark in APAC and EMEA, and CSQL generation as a net-new capability lifted from zero. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building the entire system, not just the customer-facing layer, that makes Customer-Led Growth possible.

Yoselyn Rea, Senior Customer Advocacy Specialist at AuditBoard, bridges high-level strategy with gritty tactical execution, building scalable ecosystems that treat advocacy as a revenue driver rather than a cost center. She built AuditBoard's first formal Reference Program from scratch, proving ROI so clearly that it secured executive buy-in for a dedicated platform and new headcount. The program nearly doubled revenue influence from $1.7M to $3M YoY, grew reference requests 12% to 120, and lifted fill rate from 47% to 60%.

She also built a custom AI 'Customer Proof Engine' using Gemini that saves ~65 hours/year of Customer Marketing time and returns ~30 minutes/day per Sales and CS rep. She launched AuditBoard's inaugural Customer Awards program, earning 300K daily NASDAQ Tower impressions, 6 top-tier advocacy engagements, 17 video testimonials, and 583 G2/Gartner reviews at the annual conference. Her Top 100 recognition reflects grassroots program building that successfully transforms into permanent business infrastructure.

Heather Klinger, Senior Customer Loyalty Manager at Phenom, has made strategic innovation a core component of her success, using AI and intelligent analytics to turn customer engagement into a predictive growth engine. She leverages AI to scale personalized messaging and accelerate program execution without sacrificing quality, and uses engagement dashboards and behavioral trend analysis to proactively surface emerging advocates and identify high-impact accounts before opportunities are formally requested. Those insights don't stay siloed, they flow directly into marketing campaigns, sales reference strategy, executive visibility initiatives, and product feedback loops.

By connecting systems, teams, and customer signals, she's repositioned advocacy as a cross-functional growth driver rather than a standalone initiative, making customer loyalty something the whole business operationalizes, not something one team executes on. Her Top 100 recognition reflects pushing customer loyalty into its most modern form: AI-enabled, signal-driven, and integrated across the revenue engine.

Erica Messenger, Director at Constant Contact, led a complete reinvention of the community strategy, transforming it from a reactive support hub into a peer-to-peer learning resource and Customer-Led Growth engine. She launched Constant Contact's first true tiered advocacy program on Base.ai, activated Marketing Services Provider affiliates with dedicated community pages that boosted their own SEO and credibility, built the opt-in 'Champions' program for the broader base, and launched the Small Business Marketplace so customers could be seen and discovered by each other. The outcomes are extraordinary: 108% YoY engagement-rate lift (to 68.5%), 114% growth in page views (2.4M in H2), 34% YoY growth in active members (68,000), CSAT leaping from 55% to 80%, 2,000% growth in Marketplace listings in one month, and 15,000+ support tickets deflected saving $153,000.

Engaged customers have a 35% higher health score, 22% higher LTV, and bring $247 more revenue per user. Her Top 100 recognition reflects advocacy that ties directly to LTV, retention, and real ecosystem value.

Bugs Subramaniam, Global Marketing Manager for Lenovo's Customer Reference COE, connects authentic customer storytelling directly to revenue impact across the full buyer journey. She owns end-to-end strategy for customer content, planning, creation, governance, activation, and measurement, embedding proof into RFPs, acquisition decks, campaigns, and ABM pursuits, while managing the customer marketing budget with strict alliance governance. Her results span all four of her success pillars: awareness, quality, usage, and efficiency.

Additionally, adoption of AI-powered solutions for content generation, translation and sales engagement has resulted in considerably cost and time savings for the program. The program has earned Webby, Telly, and Shorty recognition, validating both creative excellence and commercial impact. Her Top 100 selection reflects a rare combination of structure, cross-functional alignment, financial discipline, and enterprise storytelling at scale.

Kristen Howard, Director of Customer and Community Marketing at Drata, brings a distinct advantage to customer marketing, a product marketing background that gives her deep fluency in the pre-sale journey, the 'why' behind every product, and how messaging translates into customer value. She applies that expertise post-sale by bridging Sales, Product, and Customer Success so customers continue experiencing value long after the deal closes, while sellers, PMs, and CSMs get a seamless, aligned customer experience. Her empathy across functions lets her craft strategies that simultaneously engage customers and drive organizational impact, building community, fostering advocacy, and connecting customer value to business outcomes.

She measures Customer Marketing through a tight outcomes framework: Net Revenue Retention and expansion revenue, ongoing customer engagement (community participation, content interactions, event attendance), NPS for sentiment and advocacy, and influenced revenue from advocacy, case studies, and community programs that accelerate pipeline and deal closure. Her Top 100 recognition reflects the rare ability to connect the full go-to-market motion around the customer.

Nicole Saunders, Senior Director of Customer Strategy at Higher Logic, has been innovating around AI to turn customer signals from community and other channels into a proactive advocate-identification engine — scaling customer marketing motion without losing the authenticity that makes advocacy work. She uses AI to read engagement signals, surface emerging advocates, and identify interesting customer stories before they get lost in the noise. In parallel, she invests significant time in 1:1 conversations with customers to build organic, authentic relationships and glean insights that inform every aspect of strategy — from product roadmap to marketing to customer success. Her primary success metric is the number of opportunities influenced by customer marketing and advocacy activities, ensuring the function is measured on commercial impact. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a rare combination: AI-enabled signal detection paired with deeply human relationship-building, delivering scalable, authentic advocacy at the Director level.

Jeff Livingston, Director of Client Advocacy for MAS and Canada at ADP, transformed advocacy from an afterthought into an executive-level strategic priority, leading one of North America's largest B2B advocacy communities, 8,500 Ambassadors growing 20% YoY. His innovation is in the infrastructure: he launched a 1,950-quote UserEvidence database, a remote video testimonial platform that quadrupled testimonial output at half the cost, a top-5% HR podcast (Insights@Work, 49 episodes), and an Executive Client Advisory Board that shapes ADP's product roadmap.

The numbers prove the thesis, $55.5M in influenced revenue, 6,200+ client references, 251 reference conversations per month, a 1.74-day average turnaround, and a 2024 ADP CEO Award for rebooting the program. What sets Jeff apart is his philosophy: when HR and payroll leaders grow their own credibility through advocacy, ADP grows with them, and that people-first model is now a movement, not a program.

Jeff Benanto, Head of Customer Marketing & Advocacy at Extreme Networks, has spent 12+ years in customer marketing, and translated his passion for customer collaboration into a repeatable '3 E's' framework: Engagement, Elevation, and Evangelism. He and his team of 3 CMs operate a structured process where regular Engagement (newsletters, surveys, customer success meetings, CAB) is paired with intentional Elevation (ensuring every customer activity portrays the customer's story as theirs, not Extreme's), and only then is Evangelism (testimonials, reviews, references) invited. The result is customers who remain loyal, grow in revenue, and share work together rather than recoil at the ask.

For GTM and Revenue, he tracks customer advocate/reference involvement in 60%+ of growth and new business deals per quarter, a bar the team has consistently hit. He also measures the prevalence of case studies and references in internal AI enablement tools, product marketing collateral, and AI search presence. His Top 100 recognition reflects a disciplined framework that keeps advocacy authentic while driving measurable commercial results.

Nicole Zuccaro, Sr. Manager, Customer Marketing at Zimperium, stands up customer marketing functions where none exist and converts engagement into measurable commercial impact through lifecycle marketing across global programming in APJ, EMEA, and the US. In FY'26 at Zimperium, in under a year, she built the Customer Marketing function from scratch, tripled company participation at the inaugural user conference, strengthened analyst-facing review performance, and influenced $15M in ACV across expansion, renewal, cross-sell, and new revenue.

Earlier in her career, she lifted Trustpilot's star rating by 21% in under three months, grew service reviews 134%, and cut negative sentiment by 30% for a leading POS platform; at a cybersecurity company she generated $5M expansion pipeline, $312K closed-won, $1.3M new revenue, $4.9M influenced pipeline, drove a 10% YoY increase in customer retention, and built a customer community engaging 40% of the customer base while increasing Academy course completions by 55%. She evaluates Customer Marketing across Engagement, Sentiment, Market Impact, and Revenue Contribution, producing review velocity growth of +1900%, rating movement from 4.0 to 4.6, and competitive grid lifts from #5 to #3. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a disciplined, outcomes-oriented operator who treats customer engagement as a commercial discipline.

Xenia Patron, Senior Customer Experience Program Manager at Salesloft, scales impact while staying deeply customer-centric, building repeatable processes, creating clarity around priorities, and aligning cross-functional stakeholders around measurable customer value. She takes the time to understand each customer's business goals, constraints, and success metrics, while proactively reducing friction for internal teams through automation and 'vibe coding' that streamlines workflows and surfaces insights, saving developer time so they can focus on high-impact work. Her north-star metric is customer engagement with the Hub: unique accounts visiting (once, 2–4 times, or 5+), Hub ARR coverage, and adoption of Success Plans (accounts utilizing at least one completed task).

At her core she's outcome-driven, measuring success by customer adoption and value realization, solving real problems, driving meaningful engagement, and delivering scalable solutions that benefit both customers and the business. Her Top 100 recognition reflects blending empathy with operational rigor to turn Digital CX into a real Customer-Led Growth engine.

Radhika Narayanan, Customer Marketing Lead at Freshworks, architected a flagship AI Adoption & Retention motion, transforming AI from a sold feature into a scalable growth engine. Recognizing that strong sales momentum was being undermined by low post-purchase activation (under-configured licenses, inconsistent agent activation, plateauing adoption, rising churn risk), she built a dual-layer lifecycle framework: a 21-Day Onboarding Journey for time-to-first-value and a 45-Day Adoption Journey for low-adopter reactivation, with cohort-based governance, entry/suppression rules, and re-entry logic. She synchronized the motion across email, in-app nudges, masterclass webinars, Freshworks University certifications, community pathways, and white-glove CSM touches, then governed the whole system via a cross-functional Adoption Steering Committee.

Within six weeks the program delivered 74.7% cohort engagement, 11x configuration lift, 9x activation lift, 133 new AI m licenses expanded, and a 3.5-point NDR delta (107.1% engaged vs 103.6% non-engaged) quarter-over-quarter. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a textbook example of lifecycle marketing converted directly into AI revenue.

As Sr. Director of Customer Learning & Adoption at UserTesting, Gina Frazee leads Digital Customer Experience, Learning, and Adoption with a belief that digital customer success should be a revenue lever, not just an engagement function.

She has built a connected digital journey that turns learning, in-product guidance, self-service, advocacy, and customer insight into a scalable engine for adoption and growth. Her leadership has driven structured certification programs, persona-based learning paths, milestone-based customer anniversary programs, stronger customer voice platform, and expanded self-service through the Knowledge Base and chatbot.

The results show the power of that strategy: 24,281 Knowledge Base users in one month, a 14:1 self-service-to-support ratio, 58% chatbot resolution without escalation, and 61.5% of 378 new creators launching a test in 30 days after engaging with in-app tours. She also improved learner engagement and quality metrics, with completion rates rising to 60%, CSAT reaching 98%, returning learners more than quadrupling, and certifications increasing as learners progressed further through their journey Her Top CLG recognition reflects a proven ability to operationalize customer-led growth through digital experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen retention, and create momentum for expansion.

Kristyn Boll, a Customer Advocacy Manager, bridges authentic customer voices and measurable business impact, treating advocacy as a strategic sales function, rather than a content activity. In the last year, she secured high-profile customer speakers for the 2025 user conference from major global brands across the hospitality, entertainment, and retail sectors, engaging millions of dollars in open pipeline, and managed large-scale industry show floor activations alongside a major entertainment technology platform, and a global leader in professional sports entertainment - engaging millions more in open pipeline. She took on the stretch project of running a major peer-review program and drove a 467% increase in reviews at the user conference.

Building on the marketing operations foundation she brought with her, she tracks sophisticated KPIs, pipeline engagement metrics, unique accounts and opportunities in the room, form fills, MCP, UVMs, and peer-review competitive ranking. Into 2026, she is continuing momentum with a diverse portfolio of industry-leading organizations across technology, telecommunications, food service, gaming, and travel. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a sales-driven advocacy mindset that consistently turns customer voice into pipeline influence.

Molly (Callahan) McDevitt, Channel Partnerships Manager at Filevine, leads strategic partner programs working with MSPs, consultants, and customers across the legal industry. Her focus is on growing Filevine's partner ecosystem by enabling partners to confidently recommend the right solutions and equipping them with resources to succeed, creating new revenue opportunities, strengthening go-to-market alignment, and delivering measurable value to law firms. With a background spanning partnerships, marketing, events, and strategic account management, she specializes in partner recruitment, lifecycle enablement, and white-glove partner experiences.

In 2025 she achieved 133% of her partner-driven pipeline goal through strong enablement and GTM alignment, hitting Sales Accepted Lead and ARR targets while growing active referrals. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a disciplined partnership operator who turns ecosystems into measurable pipeline.

Matthew Ruderman, Senior Manager of Customer Success at Prove Identity, transformed CS from a traditional support function into a high-octane revenue engine, a textbook Customer-Led Growth turnaround. Overseeing a mid 8-figure business portfolio in 2025, he shifted the team toward a value-first methodology that delivered a record 127% NRR, 95% logo retention, and a record NPS of +65.

His innovations are both strategic and operational: he implemented the SPICED methodology org-wide to unify the language of value across Sales, CS, and Product, launched a Splunk training program to empower non-technical CSMs to diagnose issues in real time, and leads the Weekly Live Revenue meeting that bridges customer health and executive forecasting. His Top 100 recognition reflects what happens when CS is built as a strategic partnership function rather than reactive support, every renewal is treated as a revenue event, not a defensive motion.

Reno Samuel at Infor led the successful integration of the Base reference tool into Infor's Salesforce environment, replacing a legacy in-house tool while delivering two streamlined access points: a native Salesforce experience for sellers and the Base app for marketers. The initiative expanded and scaled the Ambassador Program by giving the References Team the infrastructure to grow the pool of reference customers, fulfill global requests efficiently, and strategically manage ambassador accounts and rewards. It also improved sales effectiveness by increasing visibility of reference customers matched to Salesforce opportunities, enabling sellers to secure relevant references earlier in the cycle and improve win rates.

Sales and marketing users can now search for customer references, browse and share customer evidence, submit requests, and track fulfillment in a single unified experience. His Top 100 recognition reflects operational excellence in delivering the foundational infrastructure that modern Customer-Led Growth requires.

Nick Venturella, Customer Marketing Manager at Watermark, is the company's first-ever dedicated customer marketer, and has produced remarkable results since joining in February 2025. He's focused on driving retention and expansion revenue across the full customer lifecycle by accelerating time-to-value during onboarding, increasing product adoption, and creating meaningful engagement that leads to renewals, upsell, and cross-sell. His first year has delivered nearly 500 marketing-sourced opportunities influenced by Customer Marketing campaigns, renewal bookings at 120% of target, overall pipeline generation at 98% of target, and customer-focused newsletters with an average 23% open/engagement rate that influenced 155 opportunities.

What sets him apart is blending analytical rigor with strong execution, designing targeted, multi-channel programs that deepen relationships while leveraging storytelling and customer psychology to convert satisfied customers into active advocates. His Top 100 recognition reflects proving, in a single year, that one dedicated customer marketer can measurably shift retention and expansion outcomes for the entire business.

Bailey Popp, Sr. Customer Advocacy Manager at Netskope, joined two years ago with a blank canvas and a mandate to build a global public advocacy engine from the ground up, and turned it into a culture of customer advocacy embedded across the organization. She's led the acquisition of high-impact customer stories across video, case studies, podcasts, and executive speaking at AWS re:Invent, RSA, and Black Hat, partnering with brands like Colgate-Palmolive, Citizens Bank, LPL Financial, Prologis, and ManTech, while co-hosting the company podcast to embed customer voice even more deeply.

She operationalized stories and advocates into sales enablement and reference workflows, influencing tens of millions in pipeline per quarter, and built a regional video program that elevated local customer voices globally so advocacy became more inclusive, scalable, and revenue-aligned. During Netskope's S-1 and IPO readiness journey, she mobilized customers (Tyson Foods, Bayer, ASICS, Qualcomm) as champions, securing name mentions, testimonials, roadshow videos, and investor call participation that strengthened investor confidence through authentic enterprise validation. She then built the business case for and just launched a world-class Executive Sponsor Program, shifting executive touchpoints from transactional to trust-based CIO-level relationships across CABs, events, and EBCs.

At the most recent Sales Kickoff, Netskope's CIO, CISO, and CEO spotlighted the advocacy program in front of 1,000+ sellers, cementing advocacy as a strategic growth lever. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a builder who combines passion, creativity, and operational rigor, and really loves making customers shine.

James Scutt, Head of Community, Customer Learning and Advocacy at Qualtrics, has spent 30+ years in CX transforming customer experiences, advocacy and customer learning from tactical programmes into strategic growth engines. At Qualtrics he's built an integrated ecosystem spanning customer education and advocacy that collectively serves thousands of customers globally, and is now leading a migration to a modern advocacy management platform that will double the advocate base while improving regional diversity across EMEA, APAC, and Americas.

His frameworks connect every customer touchpoint to measurable business outcomes, enabling advocacy to scale authentically while aligning Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Product. Target outcomes include quadrupling automated request-fulfilment capacity, doubling active advocate participation, lifting reference-to-deal attribution, and accelerating pipeline through in-person community events.

An international keynote speaker and trustee for Citizens Advice, he applies customer-centric principles beyond commercial contexts. His Top 100 recognition reflects treating customers as strategic partners and architecting systems that turn relationships into predictable revenue.

Kelsie Kleven, Senior Manager, Global Reference Manager at BMC Software, focuses on making customer advocacy actually useful to the business, not something that sounds good on paper. She grew BMC's advocate base by 100+ year over year by working closely with Sales and Customer Success to identify the right customers, then built infrastructure that made those advocates easy to use for reference calls, event speakers, webinar hosts, and customer stories. She launched the Win Announcement Program (capturing sales wins and communicating them company-wide) and a Go Live Program (highlighting customer milestones), creating simple, repeatable ways to surface customer success.

To prevent advocacy from living in a silo she owned reporting and enablement across All Hands, forecast calls, and 1:1s so teams knew how to tap into her programs. Her cross-functional impact earned a 'Power Team' award from BMC's CRO and CMO. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a disciplined builder mindset, programs people actually use and need.

Katrina Desrosiers supports the Broadcom Customer Advocacy & Loyalty Program, a multi-channel initiative that guides customers from transactional buyers to loyal evangelists through blended loyalty-building, advocacy development, and personalized in-person and online engagement. Since 2022, the small-but-mighty team Broadcom Customer Marketing team has transformed the scope, scale, and quality of customer advocacy and loyalty activities. When the Broadcom–VMware acquisition closed in November 2023, the team seized the moment to reimagine the program itself, successfully integrating advocacy, community, and loyalty into one cohesive program despite significant transition uncertainty.

The results are remarkable: 30+ customer stories published globally since November 2024 (with 15+ in production) that drove 64% more page views when amplified via Broadcom Rewards; the Broadcom Rewards membership target of 5,000 hit in just six months (Feb–July 2025); an 85% average challenge completion rate against a 75% target; a 'Refer a Colleague' campaign generated 315 sign-ups; and internal partnership footprint expanded from three to seven+ product divisions. Her Top 100 recognition reflects turning a complex post-acquisition integration into one of the most cohesive, measurable advocacy and loyalty engines in enterprise tech.

Taylor Page Hendricks, Director of Customer & Growth Marketing at Kong, has spent the past four years building the foundation of Kong's Customer Marketing and Growth function, often as a small (sometimes team-of-one) operator in a rapidly growing company, and is now seeing that foundational work pay off. Her function is built on three pillars: turn customers into Kong's best salespeople, increase customer stickiness through adoption, and grow footprint in every account.

In the past year the team exceeded all goals, delivering millions of dollars in expansion pipeline, driven by both digital cross-sell lifecycle campaigns and field events like roundtables and CABs. Roundtables run in the second half alone drove over $1.4M in closed-won cross-sell revenue, with a laser focus on expanding AI offering adoption.

She also hit her target of 90% of net-new business opportunities mentioning a customer story in the win report, proof that advocacy is both broad and deeply leveraged. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building a scalable, process-forward customer marketing function that grows with the company.

Amanda builds repeatable, high-impact customer advocacy programs that transform credible customer stories into measurable market validation and real revenue impact. Blending strong executive presence with cross-functional orchestration and a deeply customer-first mindset, she has scaled advocacy across events, product launches, analyst relations, and content—systematically influencing buying behavior at every stage of the funnel. As the lead for the .conf25 customer advocacy program, she unified PR, AR, Events, Web, Product, and Field teams to elevate customer voices into product keynotes and leadership sessions, launched onsite review sourcing, and amplified advocacy across owned and earned channels—shifting the function from one-off wins to a durable, lifecycle storytelling engine. The results were substantial: her programs engaged over $500M in pipeline across flagship events, drove tens of millions more through regional forums and webinars, and delivered high-performing content generating thousands of engagements and meaningful marketing contribution to pipeline. She scaled speaker participation across global stages, strengthened analyst validation through dozens of briefings and industry recognition, and deepened CXO-level advocacy across top accounts—turning customers into multi-act champions. Looking ahead, she is focused on embedding advocacy directly into GTM workflows, leveraging AI-driven matching and automation to reduce manual effort by up to 90%, and prioritizing top-tier accounts and launches to systematically convert advocacy into repeatable pipeline growth and improved win rates.

Meaghan Sullivan, Google Workspace Customer Programs Lead at Google, is the collaborative bridge-builder who transforms ambiguity into scalable infrastructure, known by peers as a 'powerhouse' and 'consummate collaborator.' When she joined, Workspace user advocacy lacked strategic focus; she bridged the gap by launching foundational program docs (CP Handbook, nomination guides, support guides) and replaced manual tracking with user-friendly AppSheets and AI-powered NotebookLM tools. Her 'superpower' was on full display in Project Cleansweep, where the team retagged 2,000+ reference assets to ensure discoverability against modern business themes. As a master storyteller she translates technical complexity into human-centric stories, driving a 129% YoY increase in featured organizations at Google Cloud Next, launching the User Love video series and 'New Way Now' initiative, and growing the Gen AI reference library to nearly 300 references all-time.

She also leads Women of Workspace, mentors apprentices, and manages sensitive executive and marquee customer relationships. Her Top 100 recognition reflects being the connective tissue that turns customer voice into Google Workspace's strategic narrative.

Elizabeth Blass, Chief Customer Officer at Karbon, leads a global customer organization spanning Customer Success, Implementation, Support, and Customer Education, serving 4K+ customers and supporting a company scaling quickly. Her guiding belief is that Customer-Led Growth isn't a function, it's an operating system and she's spent her tenure translating philosophy into execution at scale. She developed the Next Best Action (NBA) Framework that enables CSMs to identify the highest-impact action at any moment across the customer journey, shifting the organization from activity-based engagement to decision-based engagement - driving more intentional conversations, earlier risk identification, and stronger expansion outcomes.

This has translated into rapid growth of Net Customer ARR (through both expansion and improved retention quality), increasing expansion win rates over a multi-quarter period, earlier identification and recovery of at-risk customers, and consistent renewal readiness driven by proactive planning. She's also embedded AI-driven insights (sentiment, objections, knowledge gaps) into customer workflows and beyond and strengthened cross-functional alignment so customer feedback directly informs product and GTM strategy.

She also mentors CS operators, leads workshops on the NBA Framework, and co-authored The Customer Success Talent Playbook. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building Customer-Led Growth as a true scalable operating system - one that develops world-class customer leaders alongside measurable revenue outcomes.

Alyssa Lowe, Customer Success Manager at Tricentis, centers her work on one of the company's core values, serve our customers and our communities, and has turned it into a discipline for simplifying a complex, technically challenging customer journey into something customers can actually navigate. She works directly with customers and synthesizes insights from advisory boards and other forums to ensure every program is designed around real customer needs, not internal assumptions. That clarity of purpose has made the design and engineering of a market-differentiating digital experience feel natural, because everything ladders back to a clear question: will this help customers effectively use our software and realize tangible business value?

Her digital program is rapidly developing to support critical customer activities across onboarding, adoption recommendations and tracking, business value estimations, services delivery management, and renewals. She measures success through time-to-onboard, time-to-first-value, customer effort score, feature adoption, rep efficiencies, and forecasting accuracy. Her Top 100 recognition reflects an authentically customer-first approach translated into a scalable digital operating model.

Tracie Zamiska, VP of Customer Success at HRlogics, believes Customer-Led Growth starts with operational clarity and human trust, and builds structured, repeatable systems that turn customer outcomes into revenue expansion. She recently redesigned multi-product onboarding and implementation processes to reduce time-to-go-live by 45% and lift milestone completion rates from 25% to 42%, while centralizing customer communications through a unified support model that created clearer ownership and better visibility into customer health. In prior roles she led strategic enterprise accounts through complex organizational changes, aligning stakeholders across divisions and leveraging tailored impact reporting to expand footprint into new business units, generating six-figure incremental revenue.

She's also mentored 6 CS professionals, with 2 advancing into expanded roles, and contributes thought leadership to the broader CS community. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building not just retention and expansion outcomes, but the systems and leaders that sustain growth long after the initial win.

Dan Fennell, Senior Director of Product & Customer Marketing at ZoomInfo, reframed customer marketing from a storytelling function into an AI-enabled intelligence and influence engine. His team uses Voice of the Customer to shape product positioning, builds behaviorally triggered lifecycle programs, and integrates AI across the customer ecosystem to identify and recruit high-impact champions, predict expansion intent, generate targeted content, and equip sellers with account-specific proof. As buyer research shifted toward AI-driven discovery, he launched an AI Optimization initiative to influence the third-party sources large language models cite, in four months lifting ZoomInfo's AI search share of voice from 2.3% to 9.5%, a 300%+ relative increase.

Core KPIs include customer- and partner-influenced pipeline, win-rate lift in competitive deals, expansion impact, and AI citation presence. His Top 100 recognition reflects pioneering work on how modern customer marketing must shape not just buyers, but the AI platforms that buyers consult.

Laura Sawyer, Customer Advocacy Manager at Verint, architects advocacy programs that give customers a real platform, not just a testimonial form. Her work on the Elevate community, user groups, and Customer Advisory Board strategy is rooted in a belief that advocacy only scales when customers feel belonging and influence over the roadmap. In 2025 alone she grew Elevate to 387 registered members and 207 actively engaged advocates, drove 8,971 completed advocacy activities, 830 customer-led social shares, and 653 peer replies in discussions.

She also launched a dedicated CAB community space and newsletter to extend collaboration between meetings, and grew the user group ecosystem by 25% through a new signup process and centralized promotion. Her Top 100 recognition reflects an unusually human approach at enterprise scale, intentional, energizing, and built to sustain long-term Customer-Led Growth.

Sharon Levin, Customer Marketing Manager at Radware, has turned community-building into a measurable growth engine. She believes trust, not marketing, is the real currency of customer relationships, and she's engineered Radware's Linkers program to prove it, correlating community engagement directly with retention and expansion. Her advocacy strategy propelled Radware to #1 rankings on G2 and Gartner peer-review platforms, turning customer satisfaction into a visible competitive edge and a lead-generation flywheel.

A lifelong writer, Sharon developed a "Story-Insight-Question" methodology that translates dense cybersecurity topics into human narratives, cutting buzzwords and building intimacy with technical buyers. The proof shows up in peer reviews, case studies, page views, and, most tellingly, lower churn and stronger ARR among program-active customers. That's why Sharon Levin is among the Top 100 Customer-Led Growth leaders of 2026.

Michelle Heimerl, Manager of Customer Advocacy and Team Lead at Smartsheet, leads with a customer-centric lens that prioritizes high-caliber, professional storytelling serving partners, stakeholders, and brand alike. Her philosophy moves beyond features to center on the human and organizational impact of a solution, ensuring every customer voice remains authentic and honored, producing assets advocates are genuinely proud to champion, which in turn strengthens brand equity. That relationship-first approach has proven to be a powerful growth lever: Smartsheet doesn't just acquire new logos, it builds long-term relationships that help customers grow professionally while expanding the product footprint within their organizations.

The numbers back it up, external story views at smartsheet.com/customers grew 85% YoY and nearly 300% over three years, reference desk support contributed deals with over $1.5M in new ARR and totaled over $9.5M in potential new contracts ARR across FY25 & FY26, and account ARR increased over $4M within a year of story creation as customers amplified Smartsheet's value to their teams and peers. Her Top 100 recognition reflects disciplined, customer-centric storytelling translated into measurable brand and revenue impact.

Christopher Irwin-Dudek, Vice President of Corporate Communications at NiCE, reimagined customer marketing from a content publishing model into a dynamic, AI-powered intelligence engine, moving the function from outputs (case studies, reference calls) to outcomes (revenue, retention, trust). He redesigned the entire lifecycle of customer stories: every case study, executive interview, CAB session, and NPS comment is captured in a structured format, automatically tagged by industry/persona/use case/solution, and served through a custom GPT-based system trained on NiCE's full customer corpus. Sellers preparing for a healthcare CIO conversation can now surface vertical-specific proof, executive quotes, and outcome metrics in seconds; CS leaders can pull expansion proof by product module.

Within the first year: sales content utilization +45%, time-to-surface relevant proof −60%, win rate +12% on AI-recommended content deals, sales cycle −8%, advocacy participation +25%, manual tagging/research time −30%. Every team member owns at least one AI-driven KPI. His Top 100 recognition reflects turning customer truth into the most activated growth asset in the business.

Chris Stallone, Manager of Community & Social Care at Constant Contact, is a community management leader with 9+ years of experience transforming online communities across B2C, B2B, and B2G into measurable business drivers. At Constant Contact, he and his team reimagined a traditional support-centric forum as a high-performance Customer-Led Growth engine by forging a direct link between community engagement and the sales funnel, driving a 42% YoY increase in community activity (3,534 → 5,029 interactions), expanding reach to 1.18M unique visitors (+23%), and generating 466 new trials YTD at a 17.38% trial-to-paid conversion rate, and peer-provided solutions averaging 300,000 monthly views, a true scale-multiplier for Support.

Chris has built a career out of turning business and technology needs into engagement results. He tracks performance across three pillars, Business Impact, Community Health, and Self-Service Efficiency, and has proven that community is the most scalable way to drive customer success and revenue simultaneously. Known for inspiring teams, partnering fluidly across technical and executive leadership, and executing within real-world constraints, his top 100 recognition reflects that customer-first, data-driven discipline in action.

Mariah Urueta, Scaled Customer Success Manager at Asana, noticed in her first month that customer calls surfaced the same handful of workflow, reporting, and validation questions again and again, and asked a sharper question: how do we solve this once, well, at scale for thousands of customers? That scrappy-builder-meets-systems-thinker philosophy led her to launch virtual Office Hours, build repeatable educational resources, and partner cross-functionally to align customer-health signals with engagement strategy.

Every initiative starts as a hypothesis, launches fast, measures real behavior, then formalizes what works into infrastructure. She measures success by impact vs. effort, tracking customer touchpoint consolidation, and the shift from 1:1 reactive work to 1:many scaled engagement. Her Top 100 recognition reflects the rare ability to operationalize scalable customer outcomes without adding CS overhead, exactly what scaled CSM requires.

Yair Bortinger, Head of CS Ops at ControlUp, turns a highly complex, multi-domain technical platform into clear, actionable, and scalable customer journeys, believing success shouldn't depend on account size but on the quality of the digital ecosystem built around each customer. He's spearheaded four flagship digital programs: a structured Digital Onboarding Program that accelerates First Time to Value by breaking complex implementation into guided milestones; Product Usage & Academy Dashboards that replace guesswork with data so customers can self-measure and account teams can have evidence-based conversations; a Use Case Library that drives deeper adoption through a self-serve repository of best practices; and Platform Health Alerts that proactively catch configuration gaps and engagement drops before they become churn risks. The impact is tangible, an average of 200 unique customers log in and actively rely on these programs every single month, enabling ControlUp to scale CS without sacrificing quality across segments.

He measures success across Hub engagement and stickiness (monthly active accounts, depth of interaction, click-through rates, task completion), digital and low-touch implementation velocity (time to healthy usage, license utilization, feature adoption), and commercial impact, especially first-time renewal rate in the critical first year. His Top 100 recognition reflects engineering a digital ecosystem that turns product complexity into seamless adoption.

Antu Buck, Senior Director of Customer Marketing & Community at Gigamon, drove a transformative approach to customer engagement by unifying onboarding, community, advocacy, executive programs, and content into a cohesive lifecycle strategy. This integrated model elevated the customer experience and earned her team Customer Marketing Team of the Year recognition.

Under her leadership, the organization scaled customer programs, deepened relationships with strategic accounts, and significantly expanded community adoption and engagement. Her team also strengthened how customer stories are activated across the business, making them more impactful for sales, marketing, and brand growth.

In 2026, Antu was recognized by FOURCORNERS for Marketing Leadership, delivered the keynote launching the Customer Marketing & Community track at Cybersecurity Marketing Con, and was named a CMA Ambassador, cementing her Top 100 status as both a builder and a profession-shaper.

Colleen Reidy, Director of Customer Advocacy at SentinelOne, has built customer advocacy programs from scratch at Telerik, Progress Software, Veracode, and DataRobot, now taking everything she's learned to fuel SentinelOne's Customer-Led Growth to the next level. Her programs have influenced $100M in closed revenue in a single year and delivered a 45x ROI on advocacy investment, while collectively earning Gartner Customers' Choice distinction 20+ times across markets and roles. Her work has also secured PeerSpot #1 category placement, Users Choice and Tech Leader recognition, plus TrustRadius Top Rated, Best Relationship, Best Value, and Best Feature Set honors.

A CMA Top 100 honoree, Veracode Way Customer Award winner, and recent Customer Marketing Alliance 'Ones to Watch in Customer Marketing 2025' recipient, she's also a dedicated mentor, speaker, and lifelong learner. Her Top 100 recognition reflects one of the most consistent, repeatable track records in enterprise customer advocacy.

Kristen Hallen, Customer Marketing Manager at Filevine, defines her success by turning 'user data' into 'human stories' that drive revenue, sitting at the intersection of Marketing, Product, and Sales Enablement as the connector for how Filevine communicates value to its existing base. What sets her apart is her focus on advocacy as a growth lever: by taking ownership of the third-party review ecosystem (G2, TrustRadius, Capterra, etc.), she's transformed Filevine's reputation into a measurable sales asset and shifted strategy from reactive communication to proactive lifecycle-based GTM. She works hand-in-hand with Product to ensure feature launches aren't just announcements but are framed as solutions to specific workflow pains, speaking Product, Sales, and Customer fluently so every team moves in alignment.

She measures success through third-party review velocity and rating, feature adoption rates in Pendo, and enablement asset utilization that drives expansion conversations. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building the infrastructure that turns customer success into Filevine's most powerful marketing channel.

Ciana Abdollahian, Senior Director, Customer Marketing & Community at Snyk, transformed customer marketing from a single-person operation into a strategic seven-person function covering onboarding, adoption, advocacy, and community, growing budget from $0 to $600,000 and influencing $49M in pipeline and $7M in closed revenue last year through advocacy activities alone. She launched Snyk's global customer advocacy program with 66 enterprise members in 2023, orchestrated the largest virtual community event in Snyk history (DevSecCon with 7,000+ registrants driving $1M+ pipeline), and secured 9 enterprise executives for co-marketing initiatives. Her programs earned GPI Customers' Choice distinction three years in a row and delivered a 41% product configuration rate for the latest at-risk onboarding cohort.

She tracks sophisticated outcomes, net-new Forbes 2000 logos influenced, multi-threaded accounts through advocacy, NPS deltas in advocate segments, proving advocacy's role in both retention and expansion. Her Top 100 recognition reflects building a data-driven, cross-functional engine that aligns customer experience with measurable business objectives.

Preston Lam, Customer Marketing Lead at Sisense, fell in love with customer marketing as a 2016 Influitive intern, struck by the idea that this was a job where 'you only work with our happiest customers,' a genuine win/win scenario. Since then his entire career has been spent experimenting with ways to capture more advocacy and shape the customer lifecycle from onboarding through renewal. He anchors his success to three things: a strong marketing ops background that lets him move quickly and automate mundane tasks, genuine customer connections built on offering real win/win scenarios every time, and internal buy-in that reframes customer marketing asks as 'the secret sauce' rather than a chore, so the more customers get involved in Preston's programs, the better the customer relationship gets.

He deliberately joins companies that believe in customer marketing and builds out what he knows works, and he's grateful to the broader CM community for continuing to push the function forward. He measures success through acts of advocacy, referenceable customers, % of accounts with at least one person in the community, quotes per use case/product line, logos per industry served, % of renewals from engaged accounts, and webinar performance. His Top 100 recognition reflects nearly a decade of repeatable, relationship-first customer marketing practice.

Sonia Starova, Customer Advocacy Manager at Temenos, has spent eight years building a customer advocacy function that treats authentic customer voice as an operational asset, not a marketing afterthought. Her 2025 work focused on scaling the Ambassador program with strategic depth: deepening relationships with 30%+ of the community, hosting 200+ Ambassadors at the annual event, and running in-depth interviews that produced 20+ success stories and 12 video testimonials, seeing a 350% increase in SaaS and AI case studies.

She drove measurable business impact by supporting high-volume customer advocacy efforts, influencing millions in revenue, and an 81.8% rise in Base Portal ASKs YoY. She earned the Top 100 because her programs consistently turn customer trust into pipeline, credibility, and internal alignment - Customer Success Stories now ranks among Temenos' top 23 company pages globally through organic growth alone.

Pablo Kern, Senior Director of Customer Success at Spryker Systems GmbH, leads with empathy and emotional intelligence, reaching the right balance between people and goals to consistently drive excellence in high-stakes enterprise CS. His philosophy centers on satisfaction, purpose, and happiness as the upstream drivers of traditional CS metrics like VoC, CSAT, GRR, NRR, and TTFT, a deliberate choice that treats human experience as the leading indicator rather than a lagging one. In environments where retention and expansion depend highly on customer trust and team engagement, he believes the fastest path to commercial outcomes is through the people delivering them, and not around them.

That framing allows his team to build durable customer relationships that compound into multi-year success rather than simply transactional renewals. His Top 100 recognition reflects a leader who trusts that when the human fundamentals are right, satisfaction, purpose, happiness, the revenue metrics follow.

Brittany Mullen, Sr. Director at BMC Software, joined three years ago as part of a team tasked with building a net-new customer advocacy program. Since then, she has played a central role in transforming and scaling key initiatives, including revitalizing the customer stories and video program, launching the BMC Collective advocacy community from the ground up, and developing a streamlined customer reference process alongside a self-service asset library for global go-to-market teams.

She also helped lay the foundation for a structured peer review program. Brittany consistently emphasizes that these achievements are the result of strong team.

Most recently, she has led the evolution of the Executive Sponsor Program, from a transactional, one-off activity into an always-on, strategic platform focused on delivering meaningful, thought-leadership-driven engagement with senior executives. The impact has been significant: in its first year, the program established relationships with more than 130 new executive contacts and was recognized by sales leadership as “the most impactful event in FY26 in creating new C-level relationships and introductions into new areas of our customers.” Her Top 100 recognition reflects her ability to turn vision into scalable programs, elevate executive engagement, and drive measurable business impact through innovative customer advocacy.

Sydney Araya, Senior Customer Marketing and Advocacy Manager at WalkMe, views every customer interaction as a high-impact relationship-building opportunity. Rather than treating advocacy as a series of transactions, she aligns every request with the customer’s personal career goals, ensuring their participation feels like a genuine professional milestone rather than a corporate obligation.

By focusing on the "person behind the point of contact," Sydney maintain a steady channel for high-value assets and opportunities within the company's advocacy programs. She excels at maximizing the value of every recognition moment through a strategic, relationship-first approach that scales across the enterprise.

Sydney believes the truest measure of success is maintaining a community of advocates who are ready and eager to engage, the result of a long-term investment in their success. Her Top 100 recognition reflects relationship-first advocacy at enterprise scale.

Cameron Olshansky, Head of Customer Marketing at Twindo (Canvas), has spent nearly a decade proving that existing customers are a company's most powerful growth channel, and that trust is built through time and genuine relationships, not email sequences. At Toast she saw firsthand that customers who expanded were the ones who saw themselves in another customer's success story, an insight that has shaped everything since. At Thoropass he built a formal advocacy and referral engine from scratch that doubled referral revenue YoY from 2024 to 2025, expanded the customer story library into a structured system mapped to vertical/framework/size/persona for sales, and led Thoropass Connect, a customer-centric in-person event that put customers on the main stage.

Now two months into Canvas, she's already launched the first-ever customer webinar series with 200+ registrants, a 50%+ show rate, and revenue attribution baked in from day one. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a decade of treating advocacy as a strategic relationship-driven growth engine, not a content deliverable.

Melanie Hitchcock, Customer Advocacy & Engagement Program Manager at Cornerstone, operates from a deeply human belief: the customers we surround ourselves with are real people with real stories, and treating them that way is what makes customer advocacy work at scale. Her philosophy is to make customers feel cared about by helping them recognize their own value, celebrating their wins, and creating value for them so they can shine in their industry. She organizes her work around three trust questions customers need answered: Can I trust you?

Are you good at what you do? Do you care about me? Her primary metric is engagement, because without willing, returning customers, a program has nothing, while still tracking stories, NPS improvement, third-party reviews, speakers, video testimonials, and social visibility.

She's built a network of customers (including many in the real estate industry from a prior role) who continue to support her career 5+ years after she left their company, a rare testament to the relationships she cultivates. Her Top 100 recognition reflects customer marketing grounded in genuine human connection.

Mark Koh, Head of Global Customer Marketing at Broadcom, pivoted a loyalty program from a secondary engagement hub into a primary driver of Broadcom's strategic business objectives, managing the transition with a small, mighty team across three continents through the disruptive VMware acquisition. His modernized advocacy engine builds technical authorities who drive market conversation (not just static references), unifies regional marketers across seven product divisions, and introduces a four-tier membership structure that rewards deep technical contribution like vExpert or Broadcom Knight status.

The outcomes are significant: the program is the primary driver of verified peer reviews contributing to a 4.3-star VCF rating on Gartner Peer Insights, 1,500 qualified members added in six months, 972 members advanced to Champion status, 31+ speakers deployed, 85% challenge completion rate, 400+ duplicate profiles resolved for data hygiene, and 30+ original assets delivered monthly. His Top 100 recognition reflects Agile Advocacy, adaptability as a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving IT landscape.

Kevin Dunn, Director of Digital Programs & CX at Airtable, has a clear mandate: turn customers into builders, builders into advocates, and advocacy into durable growth. He leads an AI-first, customer-led ecosystem spanning Airtable Academy, Airtable Community, the AI Incubator bootcamp, AI Masterclass workshops, certifications, and the Airtable MVPs advocacy program, shifting the motion from content distribution to measurable behavior change. His team built programs that move customers along an AI maturity curve from curiosity to implementation to internal evangelism, and the most engaged cohorts deploy AI workflows in production faster, are more active and productive in their bases, and show stronger retention signals than matched control groups.

Strategically, he breaks silos between Product, Marketing, and Customer Success, embedding product teams into community programs and using structured data + AI to identify high-potential builders and activate them as advocates. He tracks MAU growth, NDR within engaged segments, certifications issued, course completion, pipeline influence, and AI-returned team capacity. His Top 100 recognition reflects designing scalable systems where customers build real solutions and advocacy compounds over time.

Katya Kazantceva, Customer Advocacy Manager at Mews, has built and led programs that put customers at the center of Mews' growth strategy, combining creativity, operational rigor, and measurable impact as part of a lean two-person team. She designed and implemented a Reference Program in Salesforce from scratch that completed 248 reference requests from the global sales team in 2025, with 95 directly contributing to closed-won deals. She launched the Mews Inner Circle (April 2025) with zero investment, scaling it to 470+ members and 550+ advocacy activities in its first year, 119 reference calls, 42 knowledge exchanges, 77 product reviews, 32 speaking engagements, 25 case studies/testimonials, 24 social posts, and its performance secured a dedicated 2026 budget.

She also runs the Unfold Awards (32→52 written submissions, 30 video submissions in 2026) and has led the HTR Awards three consecutive years, securing Best PMS 2024, Best PMS 2025, and Best PMS + Best POS 2026. Her Top 100 recognition reflects turning advocacy into a strategic growth lever at remarkable operational efficiency.

Carrie Lewis-Kemper, Director Global Customer Marketing at SAP, is an exceptional customer marketer driven by curiosity and data – most notably leading the development of the Propensity-to-Buy tool, an AI-powered innovation using predictive analytics and machine learning to match the right solutions to the right customers, influencing, and accelerating business decisions. The global impact was measurable – 371% increase in customer-led growth and 34% average email open rate on campaigns it powered, plus improvements in customer satisfaction as well as winning a SAP Marketing award.

Her Top 100 recognition reflects the rare ability to turn deep data insights into next-logical product pathways that deliver highly visible business results.

Lauren Irvin, Senior Manager of Customer Advocacy at Verint Systems, has spent 12+ years turning the Elevate advocacy hub into a measurable engine for brand awareness, adoption, and revenue influence. Her strategy combines creativity (personalized advocate journeys, peer-led enablement, customer spotlights) with discipline (scalable frameworks that turn 1:1 moments into 1:many storytelling). In FYE26 her team delivered 387 registered advocates, 207 actively engaged, 8,971 advocacy activities, 102 fulfilled references, 36 influenced deals, and $13M in influenced ACV ($26M TCV), plus 3 analyst reports, 5 speaking engagements, and 3 customer award wins.

She also led Engage25's customer-led programming (14 award winners, 35 breakout speakers, 17 filmed stories, VIP experiences) setting a new standard for Customer-Led Growth at Verint. Her Top 100 selection reflects her ability to make advocacy feel both emotionally resonant and operationally rigorous, a rare combination.

Sil Cleary, Sr Program Manager, Community Experts at Adobe, has spent nearly 10 years in Community, Program, and Advocacy Management across King (Activision Blizzard), YouTube (Google), Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Adobe, building programs from scratch in newly created departments. In 2022 she fully revamped Adobe's Community Experts Program, building an Influitive Hub that now has the highest retention and engagement of any Hub at Adobe and surpasses industry standards. She's now consolidating all of Adobe's Customer Advocacy Programs across the Digital Media market into one 'Adobe Community Program' umbrella spanning 4 organisations and 7 teams.

The impact is tangible: membership grew from 245 to over 600 worldwide, NPS jumped from 44 to 83, member retention climbed from 75% to 98%, and gender diversity moved from 89% male to 73% male with 7x more young creatives (18–30). Her Top 100 recognition reflects a philosophy that defines modern advocacy: 'It's all about the people', and the measurable results that follow when you believe it.

Kristi Faltorusso, CEO & Principal Advisor of KRISTI FALTORUSSO, brought Silicon Valley-grade AI tooling into frontline Customer Success. She designed a custom GPT that ingests call transcripts, listens for competitive signals and value-messaging patterns, and scores each deal on competitive risk, then serves CSMs a tailored playbook based on the identified competitor and the customer's lifecycle stage. Instead of losing deals to late-breaking competitive threats, teams get ahead of them with pre-built response plays.

The result: an 18% increase in retention for competitive deals inside the critical 180-day renewal window. Her Top 100 selection reflects how she turned a common CS blind spot into a measurable, AI-powered retention lift, a template others in the industry are now following.

Anna Whiting at Avalara brings a simple, grounded philosophy to customer marketing: she loves working with customers and figuring out ways to improve their satisfaction and happiness. That genuine orientation is the foundation of every program she builds, and it's what makes advocacy feel authentic to the customers she works with. She measures success through a tight set of impact-driven indicators: retention, account growth, advocacy program CSAT, and, importantly, customers' willingness to do more (the truest test of whether advocacy is earned, not extracted).

That last metric is a clarifying one in an industry that too often measures outputs; willingness to do more tracks whether the customer relationship is genuinely strengthening over time. Her Top 100 recognition reflects customer marketing grounded in the human basics: care deeply, improve relentlessly, and measure what matters.

Jennifer Lovejoy, Director of Customer Marketing at HUMAN Security, has spent 10+ years building customer marketing and advocacy programs from scratch at HUMAN, SentinelOne, iboss, and IBM Security, always bringing enthusiasm, high standards, and a belief that the customer is the hero of every story. At HUMAN, as a team of one, she created the first customer marketing & advocacy program, leading G2 campaigns that put HUMAN on G2's Top 50 Best Security Products list for 2026, driving 65+ Gartner Peer Insights reviews that earned HUMAN inclusion in the Voice of the Customer report (one of only five of 130 offerings), producing 10+ case studies, and launching a UserEvidence survey that generated 125 customer responses and assets for GTM campaigns.

Across her career she's influenced $38M+ in won revenue at SentinelOne (300+ reference requests), driven 2,800+ Gartner reviews exceeding goal by 285%, grown iboss reference advocates 515%, and led the IBM Security Champions program. Her Top 100 recognition reflects one of the most consistent track records in the industry of amplifying customer voice in the notoriously tough cybersecurity space.

Majhon Phillips, Head of Services and Success, Americas at UpSlide, took on a challenge most CS leaders only talk about: turning Customer Success from a retention-led cost center into a true Customer-Led Growth engine. Rather than bolting expansion onto existing workflows, she designed an integrated lifecycle model that weaves CSM-sourced expansion plays, Scale CSM motions, Solutions Spotlight cross-sell campaigns, and an executive community program called 'The Slide Show' into a single connected journey.

The impact was transformative, expansion pipeline grew 585% ($292K to $2M), NRR climbed from 109% to 114%, churn was cut from 6% to 2.5%, and her team drove 75+ strategic product pitches with a 52% executive event attendance rate. What earned her the Top 100 spot is that this wasn't a program, it was a repeatable operating model, piloted in the US and now scaling globally as UpSlide's blueprint for revenue-orchestrating Customer Success.

Lauren Rappold, Sr Manager of Global Customer Marketing Apptio at IBM, leads a global team of some of the most talented customer marketers, CSMs, and sellers in tech, recognizing that customer marketing doesn't succeed in a silo and success comes from strong cross-functional alignment across Marketing, CS, and Sales. She evaluates program success through a clear outcomes-driven KPI framework that ties activity directly to business impact, pipeline influence, and measurable growth. At Apptio's annual flagship event in November 2025, advocacy performance included 4 customer speakers at Analyst Day, 3 influencer interviews, 1 Gartner interview, 1 video testimonial, 1 case study, 169 customer product reviews collected, and 20 top-of-funnel inquiries from booth engagement.

Her product review program grew 13.6% QoQ in Q4 2025, with gated peer-review form-fill conversions 3.6x higher than content resource center benchmarks. She's deeply committed to Apptio's core value of making customers wildly successful. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a leader who elevates both customer outcomes and company growth through disciplined measurement and team-first leadership.

Danish Muti, Digital CS & AI Programs Manager at Vidyard, reframed Customer Success programs as productized, data-instrumented journeys, not one-off touchpoints. He redesigned onboarding and QBRs as insight-driven hubs, introduced AI-enabled workflows for pricing analysis and renewal decisioning, and built feedback loops with RevOps, Product, Support, and Marketing so customer insight directly informs the roadmap. What makes his work stand out is how he treats customers as collaborators, inviting live feedback, walking through experiences in real time, and refining based on actual usage.

His measurable impact spans onboarding completion rates, 5/5 satisfaction scores, faster quote turnaround, reduced early-churn signals, improved feature adoption after QBRs, and higher self-serve renewal confirmations. His Top 100 nod recognizes a discipline that's rarer than it sounds: making growth feel like a natural outcome of delivering consistent, measurable customer value.

Kate Reyes, Senior Customer Marketing Manager for Apptio at IBM, drives retention and Customer-Led Growth across three flagship programs, customer user groups, speaker opportunities, and post-sale nurtures. Her proudest accomplishment is building Apptio's customer user group program entirely from scratch into a thriving global community spanning North America, South America, and Europe, creating high-value peer spaces that accelerate adoption and elevate advocacy. She also manages Apptio's customer speaker pipeline, partnering across Product Marketing, AR, Field Marketing, and Demand Gen to fulfill numerous speaker requests for webinars, analyst engagements, and events.

Her targeted nurture streams, built in close alignment with Sales, CS, and Product, are designed to unlock more value from Apptio investments and tie directly to gross retention rate and expansion targets. Her Top 100 recognition reflects consistent excellence in connecting cross-functional partners, scaling customer programs globally, and championing the customer voice at every step.

Bridget Heaton, Head of Customer Marketing at Slack, has been in the customer marketing and advocacy space since 2014, bringing extraordinary diversity of experience across industries, personas, company stages, and both practitioner and leadership roles. Early in her career at Schoology, she grew the advocacy community from 18 early advocates in year one to 150 high-touch advocates in year two to ~4,000 scaled advocates, built the company's first lifecycle marketing program, and became its first customer marketer. At Collibra she applied the same playbook in big data, scaling to ~4,000 advocates in just two years.

She joined Slack the week after its Salesforce acquisition and over 3.5 years has built both a high-touch advocacy motion serving hundreds of the world's biggest brands annually and, more recently, a PLG-focused scaled program for SMB. Now managing the team, she's trained them on the high-touch playbook and is expanding her remit to share experience with the broader customer marketing community. Her Top 100 recognition reflects dedication, resilience, and a deeply earned expertise across every permutation of the discipline.

Julie Fox, Director of Digital and Scaled Customer Success at Hyland, inherited a rapidly growing customer base where the customer voice was underutilized, incredible stories weren't being captured, shared, or turned into momentum. Rather than running more campaigns, she rebuilt the approach around a simple philosophy: customers don't want to be marketed to, they want to be part of something. She launched advocacy and storytelling motions that were easy for customers to say yes to, partnered deeply with Customer Success, Customer and Product Marketing, Product, and Sales to align engagements to retention/adoption/expansion outcomes, and built scalable programs that didn't rely on one-off heroics.

The results show up as stronger relationships, higher engagement, sharper product feedback loops, a clearer market narrative, and direct impact on pipeline, expansion, and retention. She measures advocate participation, reviews/references/stories produced, event and community engagement, win-rate lift with customer proof, and expansion/retention tied to engagement. Her Top 100 recognition reflects blending empathy and strategy into a measurable business engine.

Damian Szczerba, Senior Reference Manager at Planful, doesn't just run a reference program, he's re-engineered it into a smarter, faster, more scalable revenue engine. He grew the customer reference program by more than 60% in under a year, contributing $5.5M in ARR for 2024, and cut the time to set up a reference call from 6 days to 2, accelerating deal velocity at a stage where every day matters. The program has since doubled in size, with 3x more advocates than when he inherited it, driving significant growth in Planful’s presence across G2, TrustRadius, Gartner, and other review platforms, where review volume has more than doubled year over year.

Recognizing that not every deal needs a live reference, he expanded the repository of customer stories and testimonials so sales has multiple ways to showcase proof without overusing the same advocates. He layered in automation, built reference protocol into sales onboarding (when to ask, how to match, when to push back), and sourced customer reviews across Magic Quadrants, G2, and TrustRadius to boost market credibility. His Top 100 recognition reflects the rare ability to balance operational efficiency with the human side of advocacy, respecting customers' time while giving sales exactly what they need to close.

Lydia Raven, Senior Customer Advocacy Manager, EMEA at Samsara, has spent a decade shifting the industry away from transactional references toward a methodology built on deep, personal trust, believing that advocacy is a human-to-human endeavor before it's ever a B2B one. Her approach is to align customer advocacy with the customer's own career growth, capture stories in their own words (highlighting human-level narratives like men's mental health), and amplify them seamlessly through a capture-to-amplify loop. Her results are proof: she has driven the addition of hundreds of new customer assets, which have influenced $4M in ACV and 163 opportunities.

She has secured over 130 pieces of customer media coverage, produced dozens of videos, and placed hundreds of customer speakers across major industry events, including Dreamforce, World Tour, Oktane, and Samsara Beyond. Her methodology positions joint marketing as a chance to spotlight the individual behind the change, proving customer advocacy is a core business driver, not a cost line.

Steven Esposito, Director of Customer Success at Beamery, led the end-to-end design and implementation of Beamery's Digital Customer Success tier, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all high-touch model wasn't sustainable as the customer base scaled. He segmented accounts by annual spend, mapped the full customer journey, and partnered across teams to deliver automated touchpoints, automated business reviews that clearly demonstrated ROI, and strategically timed CSM-led strategy sessions. By automating QBR creation he cut CSM prep time 200%, kept the model consultative rather than transactional, and enabled the first successful upsell of a newly launched module within the Digital tier.

The results: a 10% tier expansion in 12 months without added headcount, 15% YoY retention improvement in the Digital base, and validated proof that digital success can drive retention, efficiency, and growth simultaneously. His Top 100 recognition reflects a thoughtful balance of scale and customer value, the blueprint for modern Digital CS.

Dawn DeVirgilio, Head of Global Customer Marketing at ServiceNow has spent 20 years at the intersection of digital marketing, customer storytelling, and GTM strategy, and built a career around a single belief: the best proof any company has lives in its customers. Customer Marketing's job is making sure that proof is findable, credible, and ready when a deal is on the line. She's spent her career building storytelling infrastructure and programs with real governance, a clear pipeline to Sales, and customer relationships strong enough to support co-marketing, speaking, and references at scale.

Her global teams and centers of excellence have influenced billions in pipeline through reference programs, and she tracks success through open pipeline supported by references, closed ACV attributed, referenceable coverage by product and industry, story production velocity, and time from customer win to first referenceable activity. Her Top 100 recognition reflects decades of building the systems that let great stories actually reach the people who need them.

Amber Monroe, SVP of Customer Experience at Paradigm, leads multiple customer-facing functions, Account Management, Customer Support, Provider Coaching, and Enterprise Partnerships, serving Home Care Agency owners who care for vulnerable populations, which means the impact of her work extends far beyond business metrics to directly affect clients' access to care. She's built scalable customer success operating models across thousands of customers, implemented segmentation strategies that align service levels with growth potential and risk, launched structured onboarding, retention, and expansion frameworks tied to revenue performance, and developed customer growth programs that directly influence expansion revenue. Her leadership philosophy combines operational discipline with deep empathy for the customer journey, believing customer marketing and advocacy are strongest when grounded in real outcomes, not engagement metrics alone.

She measures success across customer experience and health (NPS, CSAT, health scores, support SLAs), retention and expansion (GRR, NRR, churn ARR impact, cross-sell), Customer-Led Growth impact (customer-sourced pipeline, advocacy participation, EBR completion and value realization), and operational effectiveness (at-risk pipeline identification, engagement with growth programs). Beyond her organization she mentors emerging CX leaders and contributes industry frameworks. Her Top 100 recognition reflects translating customer trust into sustainable growth where the stakes, access to care, are genuinely meaningful.

Jon Ashley, Director of Customer Advocacy and Programs (formerly Elastic, Cisco, Sage), has spent 20+ years operating as a practitioner-educator, sharing what works, what doesn't, and why, while quietly building advocacy programs at enterprise scale. At Elastic, he built the EMEA advocacy program from scratch, recruiting 200+ advocates in Q1 and delivering $100M in influenced pipeline by end of FY24, exceeding customer content targets by 154% in FY24 and 126% in FY25, and driving 175+ Gartner Peer Insights reviews that contributed to Elastic's 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary recognition for SIEM. He designed an NPS-triggered advocacy targeting framework that used NPS, ARR, installed-base, and sales intelligence to auto-recruit the right customers, removing the manual bottleneck and scaling personalized recruitment without scaling headcount.

At Sage, he built a 6,000-member advocacy community from zero with segment-specific engagement tracks. He's also mentored the next generation, Sophie Robinson, Farisha Vadera, Lauren Turner, Huw Wigley, Claire Taylor, Alexis Kalmar, Eva Valdera. His Top 100 recognition reflects treating advocates as partners with genuine mutual value, and fighting for advocacy's seat at the revenue table.

Kimberly Lock, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing at Responsive, anchors her work in making sure customers, especially bid and proposal teams often overlooked by their own businesses, feel seen and recognized as revenue leaders. She built Responsive's first global Customer Reference Program from scratch, and in FY25 it drove $7M in sales call impact and $8.2M in event coverage, lifted closed-won rate 46% higher when references were involved, and sourced content for 25 customer speaking slots. She also established the framework that made Responsive a G2 Leader for 26 consecutive quarters and led the rollout of UserEvidence and TrustRadius platforms, directly impacting SEO, GEO, and sales capabilities.

Internally she's earned the trust of BU leaders by aligning CS, Professional Services, Product, and Sales around voice-of-customer, with clear reporting that proves Customer Marketing's revenue impact. Her Top 100 selection reflects both measurable pipeline influence and cultural leadership.

Jacqueline Gu, Senior Manager of Customer Marketing & Advocacy at Fastly, turns customer relationships into strategic, revenue-impacting advocacy by building trust quickly and authentically, especially on camera. She operates strategically by identifying gaps across verticals, regions, and competitive positioning, then proactively building a pipeline to fill them, expanding into new markets, activating net-new advocates, and matching a major competitor's case study volume with a much leaner team.

Her results speak for themselves: 60+ customers engaged (1+ per week), 6–10 speakers secured per major event, 136 total case studies, 100+ five-star Gartner Peer Insights reviews, a seventh consecutive Gartner Customers' Choice recognition, 12+ stories queued for Q1 publication, and direct seller feedback citing her content as deal accelerators. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a focus on strategic coverage, seller adoption, and measurable business impact, not output volume alone.

Pankaj Bhardwaj, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Support at Saviynt, led a bold transformation from reactive support to a proactive, AI-driven operating model, replacing a fragmented regional structure with a Global Unified Model powered by a Multi-Agent AI Ecosystem and the Japanese philosophy of Omotenashi (anticipatory hospitality). The team's Predictive Triage eliminated the 4-day back-and-forth delay standard, reducing Average Resolution Time 40% and liquidating 50.8% of 90+ day aged cases. An AI Co-Pilot lifted engineer daily case closures 15.9%, AI-powered chat now autonomously resolves 41% of incoming interactions, and a Knowledge Agent drove 24.9% case deflection (a 267% increase).

The commercial impact: CSAT leapt from 4.12 to a best-in-class 4.71, customer retention hit 98%, and Diamond Success package adoption surged 169%, generating $7.7M in incremental revenue. Employee morale followed with an eNPS of 89+. His Top 100 recognition reflects rejecting brute-force scaling and proving AI + Omotenashi deliver seismic, measurable CX impact.

Amanda Peacock, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Harness, defines her job simply: bring customers into rooms where they weren't before. Instead of only thinking about customers when the team is building a case study or planning a CAB, she treats every brand campaign, demand gen webinar, and speaking roster as a customer marketing opportunity, asking whether there's a customer who'd be a good fit, how they'd react, and whether they can tell the story instead.

In practice she manages the full range (case studies written and video, CAB program, G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, speaking engagements, virtual events, roadshows, customer quotes) and works at the intersection of every internal team that wants something from a customer and the customers themselves, applying judgment about who's overextended, who'd shine on a panel, and when to say 'not yet.' She's scaled that judgment by building custom GPTs and Claude-based skills to template and accelerate customer storytelling, and uses AI to identify which customers are the right fit for which activities so the program doesn't default to the same handful every time. She also intentionally makes sure women and underrepresented voices consistently show up in stories and on stages.

In her first 10 months she's already worked with 150+ customers from 125+ different companies, proof the program is healthy, not just busy. Her Top 100 recognition reflects breadth, creativity, and the kind of cross-functional instinct that turns every marketing moment into a customer marketing moment.

Lily Borges, Senior Manager Customer Advocacy at KnowBe4, is driven by a deep passion for putting customers at the forefront of everything KnowBe4 does, sharing success stories of how the organization helps customers reduce human and AI risk. In an environment where cyber threats evolve daily, she believes it's essential to equip customers with the right tools and then tell their stories so others in the security community can learn from their wins. Under her leadership, KnowBe4 has maintained a leading position across review sites for more than six consecutive years, a remarkable streak of consistent customer feedback.

She's also built a video testimonial library from zero into a diverse set of use cases that showcase real customer successes, giving sales and marketing always-fresh proof points. Her Top 100 recognition reflects long-standing excellence in cybersecurity customer advocacy, a notoriously difficult space in which to activate authentic customer voice.

Kara Manfredi is Senior Manager of the Sales Customer Reference Program at Sage Intacct, with over 25 years of experience building and scaling customer reference programs that drive measurable business impact. At Sage Intacct, she leads an enterprise‑scale reference operation, working closely with a dedicated reference team to support sales execution while protecting customer trust. Under Kara’s leadership, the program influenced $5.1M in FY23, $8.6M in FY24, and $11.5M in FY25, with an additional $4.4M influenced year‑to‑date in FY26. During this period, annual reference activity scaled from 479 to 864 to 1,104 engagements, with 1,276 engagements year‑to‑date, and now influences approximately 23% of overall deal outcomes, reflecting deep integration into the sales lifecycle and strong, repeatable execution by the team.

In close partnership with Simon Le Fevre, Kara has built what industry peers have dubbed a “Wonder Twins” operating model, embedding customer references seamlessly into sales and marketing workflows while establishing clear operational guardrails. Supported by a trusted Reference Team focused on execution, enablement, and continuous improvement, this work earned Customer Marketing Team of the Year (2024) recognition from the Customer Marketing Alliance and led to speaking engagements at CMA Summits in San Francisco, New York City, and London. Kara is also a frequent speaker and mentor within the customer‑led growth community. At the 2026 CMA Summit in New York City, she co‑presented with Rita Floyd on building scalable, trust‑centric customer reference programs, sharing how AI, operational rigor, and cross‑functional alignment can drive revenue impact without compromising customer relationships.

Beyond her role at Sage Intacct, Kara is the Founder and Leader of the Worldwide Customer Marketing Networking Group, a global community of 500+ customer marketing leaders from organizations including Cisco, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Dell, IBM, and VMware. She is a Customer Marketing Alliance CAB Honoree (2024) and was shortlisted for Customer Marketer of the Year (2025). Her Top 100 CLG recognition reflects a human‑centered, team‑driven approach that balances speed, trust, and long‑term customer value.

Sheryn Anthes, Sr. Director of Customer Advocacy & Marketing at Vimeo, brings a rare asset to customer marketing, genuine peer credibility. That trust became an advocacy engine with real commercial impact: she's directly influenced $750K in revenue and $2M in active pipeline, tracking advocacy velocity through high opt-in rates and rapid program enrollment to prove that community functions as a primary sales tool.

She also drove a breakout year for market authority, earning Vimeo three category #1 G2 rankings, two of them a first in company history, strengthening both brand visibility and LLM positioning as AI-driven buyer research accelerates. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a distinctive operator-practitioner blend: she speaks her customers' language because she's lived it, and she converts that trust into measurable business equity.

As Sr. Director of Customer Learning & Adoption at UserTesting, Gina Frazee leads Digital Customer Experience, Learning, and Adoption with a belief that digital customer success should be a revenue lever, not just an engagement function.

She has built a connected digital journey that turns learning, in-product guidance, self-service, advocacy, and customer insight into a scalable engine for adoption and growth. Her leadership has driven structured certification programs, persona-based learning paths, milestone-based customer anniversary programs, stronger customer voice platform, and expanded self-service through the Knowledge Base and chatbot.

The results show the power of that strategy: 24,281 Knowledge Base users in one month, a 14:1 self-service-to-support ratio, 58% chatbot resolution without escalation, and 61.5% of 378 new creators launching a test in 30 days after engaging with in-app tours. She also improved learner engagement and quality metrics, with completion rates rising to 60%, CSAT reaching 98%, returning learners more than quadrupling, and certifications increasing as learners progressed further through their journey Her Top CLG recognition reflects a proven ability to operationalize customer-led growth through digital experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen retention, and create momentum for expansion.

Angela Wells, Senior Director of Customer Advocacy & Executive Programs at Splunk (a Cisco Company), is one of the most respected and well-known thought leaders in customer marketing and advocacy, with 27+ years of marketing and market research experience and the past 13 years focused on packaging and amplifying stories from many of the world's largest brands. At Splunk she leads both the Customer Advocacy and Executive Customer Experience teams, combining the two to build relationships with senior executives at marquee accounts. That approach lets her open doors with communications and PR teams to secure approvals for advocacy activities that might otherwise stall, a subtle but powerful unlock for enterprise advocacy.

She has expanded her team, authored several blog posts, and spoke at multiple conferences including Customer Obsession Con. Her team was recognized with a Customer-Led Growth Pioneer award for their work with C-level executive customer advocates. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a career built on relationships, not just references, and continued investment in the next generation of advocacy leaders.

Dave Hansen, Senior Global Customer Advocacy Program Manager at Siemens, has spent 20 years proving that authentic customer voice, empathy, and diversity of thought are the foundation of every winning advocacy program. At Siemens, he launched the Path Makers, a first-of-its-kind engagement program focused not on a product or industry but on a shared problem, digital transformation, giving customers a cross-industry forum for inspiration and novel solutions. In its first year, the program hit its membership goal in three quarters, saw 90% meaningful participation, and secured mainstage and breakout speaker roles at Realize Live (their user conference) for a majority of its members.

The commercial impact is already outsized, as well, with significant wins being recorded in conjunction with the program. His Top 100 nod reflects not only two past award-winning programs and his CMA Advocacy MVP recognition, but his ongoing mentorship of the next generation of advocacy leaders.

Marco Carrubba, Head of CS at LinkedIn, leads with a simple belief: customers don't want to be managed, they want to be understood, empowered, and celebrated. He combines human insight with AI-driven intelligence to create CS programs that feel personal at scale, using AI to surface emerging needs, identify advocates at the right moment, and detect sentiment shifts before they impact relationships. The real magic, in his framing, happens when AI meets empathy, AI removes friction, accelerates insight, and personalizes engagement, while human connection builds the trust that turns customers into collaborators, collaborators into advocates, and advocates into growth engines.

He measures success across the full lifecycle: time-to-value for activation, GRR and outcome improvement for retention, and NRR plus advocacy metrics for expansion. His Top 100 recognition reflects his ability to design customer experiences that are both intelligent and deeply human, the kind of Customer-Led Growth that lasts.

Amber Frye, Director of Member Success at Alloy Labs, brought an outsider's advantage to financial services, having entered from high school social studies, and used that fresh perspective to rebuild Member Success around innovation maturity rather than balance sheet size. Segmenting community banks into Traditionalists, Explorers, and Leaders, she shows up at the right time with the right value for each, matches specific bankers to specific opportunities based on real conversations, and actively seeks out critical feedback instead of comfortable affirmations. She lifted retention from 86% to 96% while increasing program participation 70%, because retention alone can be a ticking time bomb; participation proves customers are actually getting value.

She also reduced her strategy-session prep time 40% with a custom AI assistant that simultaneously increased personalization. Her Top 100 recognition reflects a rare philosophy: she measures vanity and value, tracks cross-pollination between members, and builds ecosystems where banks actively participate because they see tangible value.

Cate Vanasse, Director of Customer Marketing at Talkdesk, believes successful customer marketing sits at the intersection of curiosity, business impact, and genuine human connection, and she stays relentlessly curious about what drives renewal, expansion, and each next iteration that makes a program 10% better than the last. Her creativity isn't flashy campaigns; it's designing high-touch, high-trust programs, building Customer Advisory Boards from the ground up, relaunching community platforms, orchestrating review and advocacy motions, that turn customers into advocates and measurable growth engines. She measures success through revenue alignment: influenced pipeline and opps from CAB/Advocacy/Webinar programs, closed-won revenue tied to references and customer storytelling, reference-backed vs. non-referenced win rates, CAB/advocacy-driven expansion and retention lift, and advocacy penetration into her annual 'Top 100' strategic account list.

She also cares deeply about customers' own career growth, helping them get promoted, recognized, and win more budget. Her Top 100 recognition reflects proving that empathy and revenue growth are powerful partners, not opposites.

Jillian Colon, Sr. Customer Digital Lifecycle Manager at Conductor, combined lifecycle marketing instincts with her UX certification to build Conductor's entire customer email journey infrastructure from scratch. Seeing retention and adoption named as top priorities but no structured journeys in place, she designed a comprehensive onboarding journey, a triggered new-user journey, and Workflow Wednesday, a bi-monthly educational cadence focused on real pain points and how Conductor's features connect to solve them.

Workflow Wednesday averages a 24% open rate and 12% click-to-open, with 62.8% of openers converting to a platform login and 8% of clickers activating the highlighted feature in-product. The program has touched 235 qualified opportunities, influenced 25 closed-won deals, and contributed $10.7M in revenue. She's now evolving the program with Gong AI insights from real customer conversations to make content planning real-time, and her Top 100 recognition reflects the rare ability to turn lifecycle marketing into a measurable growth engine.

Chad Horenfeldt, Head of CS at Avoca, built his career on a core belief: Customer relationships are built on value and trust. At Siena AI he re-engineered CS into a value-led growth engine with three moves, shifting from 'check-ins' to ROI-driven conversations, operationalizing expansion signals with AI analysis of product usage and support data, and building a segmented system (Strategic / Growth / SMB) with clear ownership and repeatable plays. The results speak for themselves: GRR improved by 43%, NRR grew to over 110% through multi-product adoption, and he built a scalable expansion engine that didn't rely on individual CSM heroics.

He also uses AI to surface advocates and customer stories across recorded calls and support tickets, turning unstructured data into retention intelligence. His Top 100 recognition reflects a clear, data-backed philosophy: expansion should be driven by customer outcomes, not sales pressure.

Serena Schlaile, Head of Customer Marketing at Netradyne, brings 12+ years of experience across Salesforce, WeWork, Samsara, Celonis, Qualified, and Netradyne, building Customer-Led Growth programs rooted in trust, not incentives.

She owns the end-to-end advocacy engine, spanning references, CABs, executive engagement, and storytelling that turns complex products into credible, customer-led proof. Her programs operationalize advocacy as a growth lever, driving pipeline influence, accelerating deals, and supporting expansion.

Her 2025 Customer Obsession Tour exemplifies this: a 10,000-mile, 10-city initiative engaging 40+ customers via a branded, tech-enabled RV, generating high-impact content and deepening relationships at scale. 🎥 See the tour here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32RokpAIZ8&list=PLEn3hf_2wJ4jFkth7A4YP_a_TtE0IsUi_&index=1

She measures success across CSAT, engagement, and downstream advocacy impact on pipeline and revenue, using AI insights to prioritize and personalize at scale.

Her Top 100 recognition reflects an ability to turn trust into a repeatable, measurable competitive advantage!

Scott Wilder, Global Head of Digital Self‑Serve and Scale at LastPass, leads with a clear growth conviction: post‑sales momentum is built when customers can easily discover value, trust the information they find, and see themselves reflected in the brand. At LastPass, where digital self‑service supports millions of customers and companies globally, he brought structure and rigor to the post‑sales customer journey by grounding strategy in real customer insight and data. He connects community, content, and AI‑era discovery through his “3 Cs” framework (Content, Community, Citations), improving how customers find trusted answers across LLMs and Google AI Overviews.

As AI increasingly mediates customer discovery, Scott is building a content intelligence layer that aggregates customer knowledge, scores it for quality and relevance, and determines optimal usage across internal and external channels. His KPI framework is deliberately commercial, ensuring customer marketing drives reduced friction, faster time‑to‑value, stronger trust, and durable customer‑led growth