Evan Huck

#8-references - September 09, 2025 at 06:41 PM

@Deja Darrington do they want multiple references just to makes sure they get one good one, or b/c the prospect plans to talk to several references?

I think it's fine to reach out to advocates to confirm their willingness but give some context that "we'd of course want to make sure the prospect is serious and understand more what they want to learn via the reference call so we can match them appropriately - so we may not need you - but just wanted to check to see if you'd be willing."

that way you can have a small bench but not necessarily use a full "ask"

Also if the prospects wants to talk to multiple i'd (meaning sales) definitely do some qualification/validation w/ the prospect ("these two reference go well, i just want to make sure next step is signing the contract so we protect our customers time") and I usually do go sequentially just b/c i want to what questions/concerns remain so the 2nd reference can be more valuable rather than just giving them 2 people to check their box. and it's gotta be a pretty big/important deal to give them more than 2 references.

Note this is for more formal references (eg like late stage RFP type scenario) - not to say I wouldn't recommend they talk to our customers more informally much earlier in the sales process.

And of course use content/proof/evidence liberally and early/often to bring in that voice of customer well before a formal reference call

#jobs - September 04, 2025 at 07:11 PM

Great opp and team!

#general - September 04, 2025 at 07:09 PM

welcome!

#8-references - September 02, 2025 at 02:43 PM

yea we have some customers that sell IT to hospitals the named rate is definitely lower more towards security. and yea agree condense that 2-stage reference flow to a single reference/advocacy question.

On the not willing to be named piece - while frustrating, the good news from our most recent study of b2b buyers - blinded/anon data isn't much less credible than named content. But - it is important to have some sort of 3rd-party verification/validation layer (e.g. analyst like KLAS/Gartner/Forrester, review site like G2, 3rd-party like UserEvidence, etc) to combat the "hey did you just make this up?" question.

Aggregate data/proof/evidence can be another good way to still show proof w/o names - check out this article - https://userevidence.com/blog/customers-wont-go-on-record-heres-10-creative-ways-to-use-anonymous-roi-stats/

#8-references - September 02, 2025 at 02:23 PM

@Jennifer Eberhart one tip if you're going to ask a question about references you might as well get some context on what type of reference or advocacy activities they want to do - will be more helpful than a simple yes/no field. E.g. most of our customers at UserEvidence include something like this (image attached).

Re "referenceable rate" - we measure two things - and here are the averages across our 150 clients (which are all generally B2B tech with 100+ employees - lots of enterprise saas/software, IT/security, etc)

1. % of respondents who will be named (vs blinded/anon) - avg = 17% - this can vary pretty widely though. e.g. sales/martech like Gong can be more towards 40%, whereas as enterprise security more towards 5%
2. % of respondents that will volunteer/raise hand for at least one reference/advocacy activity - 23% - note if this were only one choice (ie reference? yes/no) i would expect this to be lower - but when you give people a menu of options they are usually willing to do something. and yea in security you do get people that won't be named (for a testimonial or case study) but will do a private 1:1 reference Hope that helps!

#general - August 28, 2025 at 03:52 AM

Thanks Mary, appreciate all your support!

#open-share - August 27, 2025 at 05:23 PM

#open-share - August 27, 2025 at 05:22 PM

Big congrats to the Zealot team (@, @Brandon Jakobson, <@U08FRCCMM8Q>) - we're super stoked to have you as part of the team at UserEvidence! Bringing advocate engagement + reference management together with customer evidence/content is game changing for customer marketers. Read more about the acquisition announcement and our funding round here and here - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/evanhuck_customermarketers-customermarketing-activity-[…]m=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAGs7KgBysTtLv7zfeLvU9EnO2yVyM9WtAQ

Thanks to this community for always being supportive of us, and here's to continuing to elevate the customer marketing function! Happy to answer any questions here or on LinkedIn.

#open-share - August 25, 2025 at 04:26 PM

#open-share - August 25, 2025 at 04:25 PM

some big customer marketing+advocacy news coming from UserEvidence this week that will def shake things up a bit - link to register for the announcement webinar here this Weds at 9 AM PT/12 ET - [Highline](https://userevidence.com/saddle-up-customer-marketers>

Also thanks to everyone in this community that came to our <https://userevidence.com/highline) event in Jackson Hole, WY last week - it was pretty epic, and some great conversations (not just from customer marketers - from some bigtime CMOs) on the increasingly criticality of customer advocacy and building trust/credibility via your customers in this noisy world! Hope to see you all next year!

#jobs - August 18, 2025 at 10:52 PM

Not affiliated

#jobs - August 18, 2025 at 06:06 PM

Customer Marketing Leader role at Thinkific (solid salary range w/experience) - https://www.thinkific.com/careers/head-of-customer-marketing/

#general - August 15, 2025 at 07:14 PM

that's cool - thx for sharing!

#jobs - August 15, 2025 at 01:50 PM

Good UE customer / let me know if you have questions or need help connecting.

#general - August 14, 2025 at 02:49 PM

i like their newsletter at least!

#open-share - August 14, 2025 at 02:16 AM

Epic podcast name btw - well done :)

#open-share - August 06, 2025 at 08:06 PM

#jobs - August 06, 2025 at 08:05 PM

we analyzed the last 100 job postings in this channel - some interesting data points, including salary benchmarks (up to $240k+ for a few Director roles!)- https://userevidence.com/blog/we-analyzed-over-100-customer-marketing-and-advocacy-jo[…]stings-here-are-the-expectations-and-realities-of-the-roles/

#jobs - July 21, 2025 at 03:30 PM

have a couple buddies there that are Enterprise AEs - company is doing very well and growing fast - way overdue for customer marketing, so great opp to make a big impact. no shortage of happy customers/users to work with.

#7-case-studies-stories - July 17, 2025 at 08:41 PM

the use-case vs industry data is really interesting - makes sense intuitively but have never seen data to back it up - thx for sharing!

#jobs - July 15, 2025 at 06:16 PM

if anyone is looking at opps/openings in our customer base - i'm always happy to help and share context/insight, make intros, etc - https://www.userevidence.com/user-research-library

#general - July 15, 2025 at 06:12 PM

yea i don't think there's a set rule. it definitely can invite some skepticism/hole poking around sample bias, etc - but if it's high or it changed to be higher after some company/product change, that's potentially interesting externally (think of it more as an interesting Relative stat vs an Absolute - e.g. quarter over quarter change in NPS or NRR is interesting. Just a single point-in-time NPS score needs a lot more context/comparison/story to be interesting)

If you reframe PR's question to - "what interesting data point/evidence can we cite externally to showcase customer momentum/value?" - then that opens up the playbook on your answer a bit more.

IE if you include some more questions on the survey - there might be some more interesting outcome-based stats to publish from a PR perspective. E.g. from our UE on UE survey. (e.g.. time to value, increase in revenue, hours saved per week, $ savings etc)

some good thoughts/advice/templates around customer surveys here - https://userevidence.com/blog/the-ultimate-customer-survey-playbook/

#general - June 30, 2025 at 05:09 PM

@Liz Richardson and @Deena Zenyk have been putting out some great content on this topic recently - eg https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lizrichardson2_community-advocacy-its-the-new-hot-topi[…]m=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAGs7KgBysTtLv7zfeLvU9EnO2yVyM9WtAQ - guessing they might know some practitioners on the leading edge

#open-share - June 27, 2025 at 12:36 AM

Invite her too :)

#open-share - June 26, 2025 at 09:01 PM

Hey everyone - we have about ~10 spots left (out of 100) for our Highline event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming from Aug 18-20. Pretty stacked lineup - including some big CMOs like Meagen Eisenberg (Samsara), Kyle Lacy (Docebo), and top customer marketing leaders like @Kevin Lau (VP freshworks), @Alicia Johnston (VP Sprout Social), @Angela Wells (Sr Dir Splunk), @Antu buck (Sr Dir Gigamon), <@U08F7J0HCUB> (Dir Talkdesk), Gillian Farquhar (VP CM Infor), Jenny Hooks (Sr Dir Cisco), Julie Perino (VP Adobe), Kalpana Singh (SVP Recorded Future), Megan Miller (Sr. Dir Attentive), and a bunch of product marketing leaders as well.

Asking attendees to take care of their flight and hotel, and then we'll take care of everything once you're here. Will be some fun non-conference activities the first day - rafting down the Snake River, horse-back riding, fly-fishing, mountain biking, etc. Jackson Hole and the Tetons in the summer are pretty sweet if you haven't been.

Check out more details, and a link to apply here: https://userevidence.com/highline

Feel free to dm me w/any questions as well - thx!

#general - June 26, 2025 at 06:52 PM

but that's a somewhat vague recollection of the thread, so don't quote me too tightly on that

#general - June 26, 2025 at 06:51 PM

if i remember the basic consensus was it was sort of a scam and not really worth worrying about - it's just a scraper and aggregator of customer reviews and case studies. but the general consensus was that no serious buyers really traffic the site, so it's not really something you need to worry about.

#general - June 26, 2025 at 06:48 PM

there was a big thread on this i want to say 15 months ago that I'm having trouble finding (@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) remember this one?)

#general - June 25, 2025 at 03:51 PM

super interesting data, thanks!

#open-share - June 12, 2025 at 08:25 PM

we're back!

#open-share - June 12, 2025 at 07:52 PM

sorry our hosting provider is having an outage do to the big cloudflare/google cloud outage - will let you know when it's back!

#open-share - June 12, 2025 at 05:52 PM

our Director of PMM, Alex Eaton - is doing a webinar next week (Weds, June 18 at 9 AM PT/12 ET) on How to Build a Customer Evidence Program in 90 days. Will talk through strategies for collecting stories/evidence, publishing content at scale, and advanced distribution of content to sales/GTM teams. Don't have to use UE or a platform for this to be useful. Link to register here: https://userevidence.com/stop-scrambling-start-scaling-how-to-build-an-impactful-customer-evidence-program-in-90-days/

#general - June 11, 2025 at 05:26 PM

it's definitely a way to increase your salary by 40% if your a RevOps person :)

#general - June 10, 2025 at 10:03 PM

have not heard of it (and i spend a lot of time around surveys/nps)
• for free/low cost stuff - SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms
• for the next level up (still pretty low cost) with SFDC integration - GetFeedback, SurveyMonkey Enterprise, AskNicely, Delighted, SurveySparrow
• if you really want to burn some money and need enterprise-y features - Qualtrics, Medallia
• then you have a bunch of CS (Customer Success tools) w/NPS in it - Gainsight, Vitally, ChurnZero, Planhat
• Then a bunch of product tools w/NPS in it - eg Pendo, UserPilot
• Then finally some customer marketing tools w/NPS in them - e.g. UserEvidence and others (forget exactly who but a lot of them)

#general - June 06, 2025 at 05:08 PM

oh yea that whole customers are the most credible sales people thing 😉

#general - June 06, 2025 at 05:05 PM

I'm obviously not in the no-vendors channel, but for folks that are new the community I haven't met yet, I'm Evan, the CEO/founder of UserEvidence 👋. If you do have questions (or if you have feedback on our sales team or anything) on UE I'm always available here so feel free to DM me!

#open-share - June 03, 2025 at 04:21 AM

i can't believe i've never heard feed 2 birds with 1 scone, that's brilliant (birds are cool)

#general - May 22, 2025 at 06:00 PM

we use it for a lot:
• job changes (e.g. advocates changing companies)
• New in role (either to trigger outreach, gifting/congrats, etc)
• advanced scraping (e.g. to see if someone is hiring a CMA person, or to see if they have a Forrester/Gartner report)
• waterfall enrichment for data quality (e.g. phone numbers and emails)
• X-sell and upsell signals

#general - May 19, 2025 at 03:58 PM

still weird to me they didn't include customer content in this report - it's a small enough space where it's hard to have a conversation about advocacy and references w/o considering customer content

E.g. good content/evidence often obviates the need for a live reference call esp in a SMB or mid-market sub $40k deal.

#general - May 19, 2025 at 03:57 PM

You are a legend <@U08E9JC8TB4> 🙌

#jobs - May 15, 2025 at 02:52 PM

UE customer, Expel (cybersecurity) hiring a CMM manager (remote). It's a great team! https://expel.com/about/career-listing/?gh_jid=7994783002

#general - May 14, 2025 at 06:13 PM

curious to see how it compares to our 2025 Customer Marketing Tech Landscape Report

#general - May 14, 2025 at 06:09 PM

very interested haha

#jobs - May 14, 2025 at 05:30 PM

fyi in case this is helpful for job seekers when you're evaluating an Offer with equity (esp at an earlier stage startup) - wrote an article on how to think about the value of that equity component - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-value-startup-equity-tips-understanding-job-candidates-huck-lv0bc

#general - May 09, 2025 at 09:25 PM

looks great!

#jobs - May 09, 2025 at 09:24 PM

RapidSOS hiring a customer marketing manager (remote) - great team - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/rapidsos/jobs/4698093007

#jobs - May 09, 2025 at 04:14 PM

great team!

#open-share - April 29, 2025 at 03:48 PM

yeehaw!

#open-share - April 25, 2025 at 12:49 AM

Haha yea super fun

#general - April 24, 2025 at 09:43 PM

I think one of the biggest GTM misses out there right now is weak competitive evidence and enablement (full rant/example on that here) - so I'd like to see CI more embedded in CMM and PMM, and I actually think CM is well positioned to handle it (it should be part of VoC).