Evan Huck's Profile
Evan Huck
Recent Messages
#jobs - April 23, 2025 at 10:26 PM
UE customer btw - let me know if you have any questions/need help
#general - April 20, 2025 at 04:57 AM
lol totally misread that question
#general - April 19, 2025 at 03:54 PM
Ooo I like this one - in order of lift/involvement from the customer (heavier lift / bigger asks first):
• speaking engagement at event
• customer advisory board participation (CAB)
• Press or Analyst briefing
• Long-form in-depth case study
• 1:1 prospect reference conversation
• Customer video
• Give a referral
• Product feedback session / UX interview
• Join customer community
• Post a review to a review site (G2, GPI)
• Post on social
• Mini story / thought leader blog post
• Online Survey (eg UE survey)
• Support an announcement (eg Like/Engage with LI post)
#jobs - April 10, 2025 at 08:48 PM
great team!
#general - April 10, 2025 at 02:54 PM
I promise I will only use the General channel once a year 🙂 - but the 2025 Customer Marketing Technology Landscape just dropped this morning! Thanks @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly) for your support, and thank you all for your survey feedback and input on the 14 CM vendors we profiled. 200 CM pros (most of them in this community) contributed to the research.
I couldn't be more bullish about the CM function right now. Yes it's definitely growing in terms of complexity, scope and degree of difficulty (being a good customer story writer and knowing how to program/trigger automated lifecycle campaigns are totally the same skill set 😉) - but if we can successfully take more ownership of advocacy, content, lifecycle, customer education, VOC - we're going to see more VP level CM leaders w/ a seat at the exec table. Technology will support the mission.
I've never been more bullish on the strength and potential of the vendor ecosystem. With AI and a wave of new VC funding, and tons of new fresh perspectives and ideas from this community, the CM Technology Landscape is experiencing a wave of innovation, disruption, and new investment that will usher in a ton of power and capability for those that take advantage. Thank you to my fellow founders and entrepreneurs that are building great products. I know it was slightly uncomfortable to have a vendor like UE putting out this report (which is why we had Captivate Collective run all the research) - but I believe with your feedback and guidance we got to something balanced, and incredibly useful for the CM community. We're in this together, and a rising tide lifts all boats as we all further define and elevate the CM function.
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- would love to hear perspectives/reactions from folks and continue the conversation!
#open-share - April 09, 2025 at 08:01 PM
Big launch day at UserEvidence around our Collect set of features - enabling customer markers to capture higher quality data from customers w/UE surveys, and ingest data through external sources like G2 and Gong. Check it out -
#general - April 08, 2025 at 06:31 PM
@Nina Andres good question - depends a decent amount on industry (e.g. enterprise cybersecurity vs garden variety sales/marketing saas like Gong/Airtable/Grammarly setc) - but generally we see about 10% of a vendor's customer base is willing to participate in some sort of advocacy activity.
The % that actually participates has a lot to do with how proactively you put appropriate/varied menu of advocacy activities to participate in in front of them. If the only option is full blown case study - .
One interesting data point from our UserEvidence surveys - about 20% of total survey respondents are willing to be Named (vs more blinded/anonymous).
For our cybersecurity customers that sell to large ENT (e.g. finserve, pub sector) that rate is usually more towards 5-7%, and for garden variety SaaS it can be as high as 40%+ willing to share their name for well-loved brands (e.g. Gong, Ramp)
Also depends on how big the user base and if you're talking about engaged/advocate users or engaged accounts. Vendors like Salesforce, Grammarly, Gong, etc with huge user-bases might only engage 1-3% of them, but at an account level it might be more like 15-20% of accounts engaged.
#announcements - April 08, 2025 at 03:50 PM
thx for sharing @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)!
#general - April 08, 2025 at 03:41 PM
Clay can be pretty great for a lot of enrichment and automation use-cases
#jobs - April 08, 2025 at 03:41 PM
UE customer is hiring a Sr Marketing Manager w/ a good chunk of CM, Advocacy, Social, and Content Responsibilities - bonus points for UE experience -
Let me know if you want an intro.
#open-share - April 08, 2025 at 03:08 PM
T Minus 90 min til @Liz Richardson and I break down our new ~56 page report on the Customer Marketing Technology Landscape live. We analyzed 14 customers marketing/advocacy vendors in the 3 core CM disciplines - Customer Content Creation, Customer Reference Databases, and Advocate Activation & Mobilization - as well as 8 adjacent categories (Review Sites, Testimonial Videos, CM Agencies, Gifting, Community & Referrals, CS Tools, Sales Asset Management, and Competitive Intelligence)
The scope and complexity of the CM function is growing, expanding from reference management, to advocacy and content creation, and now to a whole host of related functions - lifecycle marketing, upsell/x-sell, customer education, community, and voice of customer.
While the degree of difficulty in execution is going up, this is a huge opportunity for CM to own more scope, deliver more value to their organizations, and solidify a position at the executive table. To seize this opportunity - technology almost has to be part of the solution (if not purpose-built vendors, at least AI-enabled DIY tools) at any 100+ employee org.
Luckily, the CM Technology Landscape is experiencing a wave of innovation, disruption, and new investment that is ushering in a new era of unprecedented power and capabilities for CMs who take advantage of these technologies. And while CM technology is borderline essential in this market - it’s tough for a customer marketer to make sense of the rapidly evolving landscape. This report and webinar will help you (start) to make sense of the landscape.
Register here (and if you can't join you'll at least get a copy of the recording) -
See you soon!
#general - March 21, 2025 at 08:50 PM
and Base I believe both have some point type gamification/incentivization - but both would be fairly redundant/competitive with RefEdge vs more complementary.
#general - March 21, 2025 at 08:48 PM
if you want to check out something way early-stage startup, might give Zealot a gander -
Don't know anyone that's used them but can say they are pointed at Influitive at least.
Another option that's a little more B2C/self-serve oriented (historically at least) is - rewards more in a referral and influencer marketing type context
#jobs - March 20, 2025 at 03:02 PM
yay @Taylor Page! sweet opp!
#jobs - March 19, 2025 at 04:02 PM
if anyone knows any great CSMs (e.g. ex Influitive CSMs) - let me know, we're hiring an ENT CSM at UserEvidence - thanks! -
#open-share - March 18, 2025 at 03:35 PM
In case you missed it last week - here's a summary and the recording of the webinar our Director of Product Marketing at UserEvidence, , did last week with some examples of modern approaches to case studies (think my favorite are the "playbook" style stories - see Sequel and Clay examples), and what the future of case studies might look like -
#general - March 14, 2025 at 09:34 AM
Yea assuming your overall score isn’t horrible, having some medium and even a few negative reviews actually increases conversion rates, and helps w perceived credibility b/c your page doesn’t look so varnished/curated.
+1 to Jaz and Erin - use the opportunity to learn and act, but I wouldn’t think of it as a permanent stain on a company’s driving record or anything like that
#general - March 07, 2025 at 08:13 PM
One pattern that can work well in this situation is triggered/automated win/loss surveys based on stage changes in the CRM. IE opp goes to closed/lost you ask questions more about why you lost, what could we have done better, product gaps, etc
Closed/won you ask questions about why you won, which competitors you beat, why you beat those competitors, what you're hoping to get out of the investment, etc -- and yes, what types of reference activities they might be interested in (eg reviews, taking a call, speaking at an event, etc)
Especially w/a scaled user base like Zoom or Grammarly or Gong or w/e, have a more 1-to-many scaled way to ingest feedback and structure the feedback into actionable buckets/patterns/themes in an ongoing way is important - and can feed A) internal insights for PMM, sales, PM, strategy, B) advocacy content creation (Case studies, testimonials, stats, etc) and C) building the top of the pipeline for more indepth advocacy/reference activities (ie community, reference program, CABs, w/e)
The scaled survey approach does NOT obviate the need for some sore of more low-scale, human, high quality interview though on a select set of "interesting" closed/won and closed/lost deals - you need that more nuanced, in-depth colorful 1:1 research from a good human interview to get that next level of detail. Even at UserEvidence where we obviously have no shortage of scaled survey feedback collection, we still used professional win-loss interviews on 6-10 interesting opportunities. But the nice part was the survey actually gave us insight into which opps were "interesting" that we wanted to dive into deeper and pass off to the interviewer. And of course you can tell the interviewer to include important questions like advocacy/reference identification. We used Goldpan for interviews, but Klue also has a win/loss research arm via acquisition that is really solid as well.
#open-share - March 07, 2025 at 03:35 PM
awesome - thanks amy! will do
#jobs - March 07, 2025 at 12:52 AM
Don’t tell them I still have my original TextExpander perpetual license I bought for $49 back in 2010…
#general - March 06, 2025 at 10:54 PM
In my experience @Susan Bell in incentivizing pub sec to take surveys, leave g2 reviews etc s lot of them appreciate and are comfortable w a donation to a charity of their choice on their behalf
#general - March 06, 2025 at 04:36 PM
@Susan Bell this is a good thread that answers a similar challenges -
Blinded/Anon is definitely oen way to reduce the friction in addition to the approaches @Daniel Palay suggested
Here's a blog we published on this topic:
#open-share - March 06, 2025 at 04:34 PM
Customer of ours has a daughter at Oregon State majoring in marketing who is looking for a summer internship - let me know if anyone wants an intro -
#open-share - March 03, 2025 at 05:07 PM
fyi our PMM at UserEvidence, Alex (and his 'stache) are doing a session next Thursday, March 13, on how create a persuasive and impactful case study -
#jobs - March 03, 2025 at 05:04 PM
400k views - that's a big one! nice!
“what on my resume made you want to speak to me” - my first interview out of college b4 I joined TechValidate was w/Goldman Sachs. I got GRILLED on the price of gold and oil futures and a bunch of other finance stuff I didn't really know much about. After taking the beating for 30-min on my lack of qualifications I finally asked:
"you invited me here, my resume has my experience, why did you even pick me to come in?"
"your resume said San Diego Chargers as an interest and I like the Chargers"
Wasn't the best reason haha but was good to know!
#open-share - February 28, 2025 at 03:51 PM
if anyone knows any great product designers - we're hiring! Thanks!
#open-share - February 21, 2025 at 09:08 PM
Yea TH is great - they did the 3 videos on our customers page -
#announcements - February 21, 2025 at 09:05 PM
just rewatching this now - this is awesome
#linkedin - February 20, 2025 at 03:12 PM
Got a little rant-y here - and luckily I encounter this problem less frequently then we used to - but man it's frustrating when we do encounter it - customer marketing not allowed direct access to customers (ie have to go thru CS or sales or whoever "owns" the customer relationship). Another reason why it's so important for Customer Marketing to have a leadership seat at the table.
#jobs - February 14, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Jen Anderson is one of the best CM leaders out there - great opp!
#jobs - February 14, 2025 at 10:29 PM
woohoo!
#general - February 13, 2025 at 08:54 PM
#discussions - February 13, 2025 at 02:14 PM
Yea we did put a field on the opportunity record to denote if the prospect received a gift, and the dollar amount or type. We experimented a lot w big giftcard campaigns (eg $100+ to take a meeting) to drive meetings. No surprise the close/win rate on those big gifted meetings (ie $100+) was a decent amount lower than an organic meeting without a gift.
However, a small gift (<$25) actually was correlated with a slightly higher win rate.
Takeaway for us was a small, thoughtful/creative gift that was more a “thanks for your time” type of gesture and vehicle/canvas for rep creativity was supportive of a deal rather than a “we’re going to pay you to show up” type of big incentive.
#general - February 12, 2025 at 09:22 PM
lol
#announcements - February 12, 2025 at 03:14 PM
Thank YOU Mary!
#general - February 06, 2025 at 05:02 PM
Funny timing our marketing team just posted this today -
#general - February 05, 2025 at 10:26 PM
nice! we did our blog b/c customers page generally has a more rigid/particular format - blog we can kinda do whatever (and it's let "case study" ish)
HackerOne:
Gong:
I think we still got light approval nods from our users but much less formal and much less red tape than a trad case study
#general - February 05, 2025 at 04:18 PM
@Jaz Cuevas - Gong trackers are a useful way to see if reps are using customer stories on live calls/demos
more granular tracking depends a bit on the rest of your infrastructure. if you use highspot/seismic you can get really granular insights on a rep-by-rep level internally (and of course lots of external engagement data). Some customer marketing tools like UE that have SFDC and Slack integrations can give useful analytics when reps consume content through those channels.
surveys on what type of content/evidence reps need is great too (esp for a larger team). pairing that w/focus groups as @Daniel Palay suggested is a good complement
It is a tricky and very common problem tho so regardless if you have good analytics it's the same concept as lead nurturing prospects - you need a proper always-on nurture campaign internally as well.
I'd highly recommend dripping a small selection of content every week to a sales slack channel as well. If you just send a big library once a year they will forget about it and/or be overwhelmed. so drip a few highlight assets every week to get them going back to the library. (yes even my own sales team at UE needs constant reminders) - rather than the whole library
#jobs - February 05, 2025 at 04:10 PM
the rare Director level role! Seismic (great company) -
know the team well so let me know if you have questions
#jobs - February 05, 2025 at 12:58 AM
#general - February 04, 2025 at 06:18 PM
yea blind/anon it a good approach (helpful if you have some independent, 3rd-party validation/verification of course but not necessary)
the other angle similar to daniels direction is to convert it more into a thought-leadership type highlight of their work (may not even mention Motive) - that's not an "endorsement" but at least is brand association.
One way to frame that is a "playbook" post - e.g. you get them to talk about how awesome their process is (and of course it may includes some elements of your product/offering) shaped in a more learning/showcase way
#discussions - February 01, 2025 at 02:13 PM
Yea all good
#announcements - January 30, 2025 at 07:41 PM
Thx for having us Mary! If anyone else has any follow-up questions feel free to ping me
#jobs - January 29, 2025 at 06:57 PM
Customer Advocacy Manager at Contentufl -
#jobs - January 26, 2025 at 11:52 PM
Owner is awesome
#general - January 24, 2025 at 05:03 PM
absolutely Chat GPT
#general - January 24, 2025 at 04:55 PM
it's a good question. there's a lot of value props for G2, but the one that is unique that you can't replicate anywhere else is the Intent Data (ie knowing when accounts are looking at your page or your competitors pages). So if you're in a mature/competitive space - this is pretty critical. G2 Clicks for lead gen has been really valueable for us as well. There's also some cool integrations w/other platforms (e.g. UserEvidence) that you can only do as a paid G2 customer.
Now - if you're not a paid G2 customer, there's still a lot you can do with G2, and it's obviously still important to invest in (even if just effort and not $) as it's a critical piece of buyer discovery and evaluation.
• You can still have a great page w/lots of reviews (plenty of ways to drive reviews to G2 w/o having G2 do the recruitment, tho it is nice)
• You can still leverage some of your G2 review content and badges (just can't publish your spot in grids etc and can't do more sophisticated content w/o the Content subscription)
#general - January 24, 2025 at 04:47 PM
Gong's is solid -
What I like about it:
• top carousel of 3-5 featured stories
• rolling wall/line of logos
• good organization w/tags, topics, industry filters, etc
• and of course their Customer Proof page is fire 😉
Another one I really like is Clay (homepage actually) - the logo wall has a little tag/pill that denotes if a logo has a case study behind it, and hovering over those pops up a Testimonial in a small modal -
#jobs - January 24, 2025 at 03:23 AM
BeyondTrust hiring CMM -