Irwin Hipsman's Profile
Irwin Hipsman
Recent Messages
#general - September 09, 2025 at 11:35 PM
@Shannon Howard <@U08V0DUNXQB>
Lots of folks, there is a CAMP Boston LI group. This is the best way to reach the community here.
Would love to meet up but at Bases conference in NYC on Monday. Any chance you can meet up on Tuesday?
#open-share - September 05, 2025 at 03:21 PM
Just posted an article in LinkedIn: .
Key finding: 60% are responsible for multiple disciplines and departments. Most prevalent being VP of Customer Marketing and Product.
Before you read it, guess how many there are.
#general - September 03, 2025 at 03:06 PM
@Chris Dalton would you recall any of the questions asked. Would love to see the survey!
#jobs - September 02, 2025 at 07:19 PM
@Rachel Bonistalli I am not differentiating between senior and not senior managers/directors. It gets too complicated based on the size of the company and title inflation/deflation. I think this will get more useful as we have more months under our belt.
#jobs - September 02, 2025 at 01:53 PM
Monthly Report on the CMA Job Market
August is in the books and lets see what happened over the past 3 months.
My analysis: Summer is typically a slow time of year and it was good to see lots of openings. It's no surprise that 92% of openings were for managers and specialists. Directors are filling out their teams or companies are replacing managers who left as they moved on to other companies.
Now that most companies are headed into budget season and have a pretty good sense as to how their numbers will look by end of year, I expect that job openings will decrease in Sept and October. Smart companies will start posting in November in order to have people in place for the first of the year. Not so smart ones will wait till January to post roles. In either case, I expect that the # of Director roles will increase starting in November and lasting into February as budgets are approved.
There were 160 CMA postings identified by Frank Advocacy. 28 were community related, which I don't track. Of the 132
• 87 customer marketing
• 40 customer advocacy
• 5 customer lifecycle
Let's look at titles
• 67% Manager
• 22% Specialist
• 8% Director
I looked at the posting made in June and 28% were filled by end of August. With end of summer, I expect more will be announced in the next few weeks bringing the fill rate to 50%, which is the norm. Of the ones that were filled, 42% were by people who went from one job to another, 42% had a gap between jobs and 16% were promotions.
This data is pulled from LinkedIn and if you are a vendor in the space and want to know more, let's talk.
Next posting will dig deeper into VP's.
#general - August 27, 2025 at 01:59 PM
<@U08U4PV81KP> Can you go a little deeper into what you mean..thx
#general - August 27, 2025 at 01:55 PM
I just posted some research in the jobs channel on ?
One takeaway was that the vast majority of openings were Manager level and none were VP level. I asked: Are there no VP's or are they just not posted? @Kevin Lau had some personal insight into this question, which got me thinking.
How many CMA VP's are there? I identified about 100. My rough estimate is that there are about 2,000 customer marketing and advocacy programs, with 5% having a VP.
What jumped out to me was grade inflation. About half of the 100 were at SMB or MM companies, and the person got a big title.
Here are some of the enterprise companies you would expect to see--SAP, Cisco, Docusign, Freshworks, Netsuite, Okta, Optimizely, ServiceNow, UKG, BMC, Workday, Microsoft.
I have the list of 100. Any ideas what to do with it?
#general - August 27, 2025 at 01:22 PM
I just posted some research on What’s Happening to Customer Marketing & Advocacy Job Openings?
One takeaway was of the job postings I analysed, the vast majority were Manager level and none were VP level. Lots of positive feedback and @Kevin Lau asked some insightful questions.
#jobs - August 26, 2025 at 01:58 PM
What’s Happening to Customer Marketing & Advocacy Job Openings?
I asked the crack data scientists on my team to analyze job openings from 8 and 4 months ago. The list is from two of Frank Advocacy’s weekly roundups of open roles. #AlexieGlover does a great job of identifying new openings.
8 months ago: 18 openings
• 9.5 filled (3 were internal hires)
• 8.5 not filled
4 months ago: 20 openings
• 9 filled (1 was an internal hire)
• 11 not filled
My Analysis
This is just a snapshot in two moments of time, but the trends are pretty clear. About half of the postings from these weeks were filled. Roles typically take about 2 months to fill and have been trending a little quicker recently.
What makes the analysis a bit challenging is titles can change from the JD to the actual job, and not everybody updates their status on LinkedIn.
I did see a few roles from 8 months ago reposted this week. When a job is not filled, was it due to the role being pulled or delayed, or were there no viable candidates due to skills required, location, or compensation offered?
Roles
The vast majority of titles were Customer Marketing (a catchall for advocacy and lifecycle), 5 were Advocacy, and 1 was Lifecycle. The levels were:
• Specialist 2
• Director 8
• Manager 28
This over-representation of Managers was expected as companies have downgraded titles over the past 1-2 years. What jumps out at me is that there are no VP-level roles. Do they not get listed, or are there none? I will dig into this question in the next post.
An average of 20 postings per week translates into 1,000 openings annually. If the 50% pattern holds, there are about 500 CMA practitioners landing a new job every year. How many of them are new positions is hard to assess. Is it 33%, 20%, 10%? My rough estimate is about 17% (85) of the 500 are new roles.
This just touches the surface of the question, and as always, I would love to hear from practitioners and vendors as to what data would be helpful.
#general - August 20, 2025 at 04:17 PM
I put the numbers below out a few weeks ago and have a round 2.
New hires and new roles (e.g. promotion) across customer marketing, advocacy, and lifecycle on a rolling 3-month basis averages 7%. Half are new hires (higher than round 1) and half have a new role (this is new).
Is there a small group of people (@Kevin Lau @Gianna Scorsone @Rachel Ward @Rachel Bonistalli) that want to put our heads together? The task is to understand what data is useful to those in charge of CMA programs and vendors in the space. LinkedIn does not make it easy to work with, but have been experimenting with some tools that can get much better results down to the individual level.
3,000 in Customer Advocacy
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 2.5% (10% annual*)
6,500 in Customer Marketing
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 2% (8% annual*)
1,100 in Customer Lifecycle Marketing
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 5% (20% annual*)
#9-lifecycle-expansion - August 20, 2025 at 04:11 PM
I know you are busy with events. If you have some time lets talk 1-1....Irwin
#general - August 20, 2025 at 03:17 PM
I spend lots of time in Sales Navigator. This may be an interesting stat.
#9-lifecycle-expansion - August 20, 2025 at 03:15 PM
Sadly, there is not much of an organized customer lifecycle community. I spend alot of time in Sales Navigator. When I do a search there are about 300 people with Customer lifecycle titles. It's 10X when it is just lifecycle marketing. Many of them are B2C or focus on pre-sales and not easy to separate out.
That all said. Ed King the CEO of Openprise does lots of good writing and is worth following. Inflection is another company I follow.
#general - August 18, 2025 at 09:26 PM
That’s where I met Christine!!! I also had a short speaking gig in NYC.
What is your topic? Hope you have a good time slot. By end of day audience is a bit tired. Connect with Bridget Heaton the moderator in advance. She was moderator in NY and is great.
A few things.
1-There is no list of attendees so it’s a lot of serendipity as to who you meet
2- Being a speaker is pretty standard. PPT slides and presentation. After the talk people will come up to you
3- it’s colocated with 2 or 3 other customer success events. Unfortunately, not much overlap expect in the exhibition area.
4-try to engage with the people you are presenting to.
5- it’s a good group and they are eager to learn
Would love to chat with you afterwards for your take.
#9-lifecycle-expansion - August 15, 2025 at 06:03 PM
I recently ran into this company infection. Worth getting on their newsletter. They just made this map of the complete lifecycle journey. Pretty wild.
#general - August 14, 2025 at 05:07 PM
I am mixed about ExitFive, but I keep renewing every month as I get a few valuable tidbits.
Their content is great and some of it is available without a membership. You could do a trial to see if you like the community. It's interesting to see what is on everybodys mind.
Very few customer marketing types (less than 10). Lots of demand gen, brand and AI talk. For vendors it is pay to play and they delete self-promotion, which is a very grey area.
#jobs - August 13, 2025 at 10:13 PM
I am a Exit 5 member and someone posted about the opening. This is from their website.
From our founding as an occupational health software provider in 1985 to today’s EHS SaaS solution, we’ve never stopped innovating to give our customers more. Trusted by over 1,500 customers in 120 countries, Cority deeply cares about helping people work toward a better future for everyone.
#jobs - August 13, 2025 at 09:41 PM
Cority is hiring for a community and advocacy manager. As of a few days ago it has not been posted. The JD is crazy long and if interested DM me and I will send it.
#general - August 09, 2025 at 02:21 AM
@Taylor Bogar My go to’s are Topline, Opscast, and Exit Fives CMO
Podacst. Rarely about customer marketing but great to hear how other parts of the org. think about things. My all time fave is Plain English by Derek Thompson, very thoughtful and touches on lots of topics.
#open-share - August 05, 2025 at 02:53 PM
@Aparna Sharon Isa Dass Here is the survey. Check it out to see where it can be customized and how the scoring works. Would love to be on the podcast to talk with you about this and the other research I have been doing and have up my sleeve.
#general - August 05, 2025 at 02:48 PM
@Kevin Lau - Yes. Title definitions are tricky. For example, if someone had a customer marketing and advocacy title, which bucket would they be in? Customer lifecycle marketing is the hardest as most are DG pre with a little post sales, and some are just post-sales.
I will be taking another pass at the data pretty soon, and have some ideas as to where to take this research, as I know who all these people are.
What would you or anybody else reading this find to be of value?
#general - August 04, 2025 at 06:46 PM
How many B2B Customer Advocacy, Marketing, and Lifecycle practitioners are there?
As someone who researches (see the ) and writes about customer marketing & advocacy, I wonder! Are the numbers growing, shrinking, and how many people go to work at new companies every year?
Is this interesting...should I update quarterly??
3,000 in Customer Advocacy
• 66% in NA
• 16% in EMEA
• 16% in APAC
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 2.5% (10% annual*)
6,500 in Customer Marketing
• 46% in NA
• 38% in EMEA
• 16% in APAC
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 2% (8% annual*)
1,100 in Customer Lifecycle Marketing
• 35% in NA
• 42% in EMEA
• 27% in APAC
Changed jobs in past 3 months = 5% (20% annual*)
There are a few caveats
1. These are not exact numbers, as that would take much more work.
2. There is an overlap in titles (e.g. someone with a Customer Marketing and Advocacy title is in 2 categories). I estimate there are 10-20% fewer people in each category.
3. I focused on B2B industries, but some B2C slip in as LinkedIn does not categorize by B2B vs B2C. There may be another 10-20% fewer people in each category.
4. Lifecycle marketing is the one to keep an eye on. Over time, I expect some will move from an advocacy to a lifecycle title.
5. Changed jobs was based on the past 90 days and extrapolated to an annual number.
6. Changed jobs does not include those who are open to work or have not updated their LI profile. I would estimate that for each person who has changed jobs, there are 1-2 looking, so a fairer estimate of overall turnover is in the 20-30% turnover range
#general - July 23, 2025 at 04:23 PM
Mary- I’ve been thinking of a group for lifecycle marketers. It would bring in people who are not CMA members. Is this the type of private group you are thinking of?
#general - July 22, 2025 at 09:37 PM
<@U084ZQ7NXT3> Are you thinking about LinkedIn ads and communicating to people you do not know (more of a cross-sell) or communicating to customers you already k know.
What I have been thinking about recently is how to take a customer contact database and add 2-3x contacts at the account. Still early thinking and if you would lien to chat 1-1, LMK.
#general - July 21, 2025 at 08:48 PM
Astronomer CEO Debacle: If this happened to your company, could a message be immediately sent to customers?
Unfortunately, according to the , only 63% of B2B companies can get a crisis communications out the door in a business day.
If you can, who would receive it? All customer contacts, main points of contact…. If you can't bring this case study to an executive and volunteer to head up a group that develops an action plan.
#general - July 14, 2025 at 09:28 PM
For the first time would avoid it. It’s also pretty controversial in the B2B world. Boaz Maor has written alot about it recently and may be worth checking out.
#general - July 08, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Upsell vs cross-sell--"What Happens When Marketing Owns Expansion?" Join me on July 16 as I participate in a webinar to discuss this highly misunderstood topic with lots of implications for customer marketers.
#general - July 01, 2025 at 06:19 PM
New state privacy laws go into effect this month in Minnesota and Tennessee—adding to the growing patchwork of U.S. state privacy (and email) regulations. These laws introduce new obligations for organizations handling personal data, and enforcement is fast approaching.
Location is usually the worst data about your customers in a CRM. This impacts field marketing and legal. They would be so appreciative if customer contact location is up to date. Check out the to see how bad it really is and how to fix it.
#general - June 26, 2025 at 09:45 PM
A vendor just asked me for a testimonial. He used . Incredibly easy to send text or a video. Might be worth looking at for testimonials right after a customer interacts with you, e.g a support call or user group.
#general - June 20, 2025 at 08:43 PM
@Kevin Lau It will be a big day when an Accenture or McKinsey add a customer marketing practice to work with their B2B customers.
#general - June 20, 2025 at 02:25 AM
I wonder if they paid top dollar or if it was a heavily discounted.
#general - June 20, 2025 at 02:17 AM
It would have been interesting to turn the tables and ask them all sorts of questions. How does a consulting firm internally address customer marketing, what questions are their customers asking, how are they answering, do they have any consultants on staff who handle customer marketing requests?
#9-lifecycle-expansion - June 13, 2025 at 04:10 PM
Such an important topic. I am pretty good for most of these times. Thanks for coordinating.
#general - June 13, 2025 at 04:01 PM
Thanks <@U0806J8HHHR>
@Kayleigh Bateman The report is available at
Segmentation and customer contact databases is my jam. If you would like to chat, let’s set up a 1-1.
#general - June 11, 2025 at 01:35 PM
The hottest job opening not on your radar is GTM Engineer. Is it fancy RevOps? Marketing’s identity crisis? The missing link in your GTM strategy? Here is the link to live convo. Worth understanding what this role is all about.
#general - June 07, 2025 at 03:54 PM
Brand new annual report on communicating with customers via email by Litmus. Lots of great takeaways for customer marketers. Check out my take and link to the report.
#general - June 05, 2025 at 06:19 PM
I was at a ZoomInfo prospect/customer event yesterday and they sent me a feedback form after the event. Nice to see one of the questions was about becoming an advocate. Here's the quid pro quo with field marketing...we get you customer speakers and you ask this question in the follow-up.
#general - May 30, 2025 at 07:08 PM
Hannah- are you looking for customer marketing influencers or ones in jellyfish’s space. I am a few months into a similar journey and happy to share what I’ve learned.
#general - May 28, 2025 at 02:21 PM
In the just released report, the two most impactful ways to improve the overall customer contact database health score are:
- Have a cross-functional group that thinks about and coordinates 1-many customer communications
- Improve your customer contact segmentation maturity beyond titles and start looking at roles vis a vis your product For more ways customer marketers can shine, download the report.
#9-lifecycle-expansion - May 28, 2025 at 01:28 PM
Last week we published the report on the State of B2B Customer Contact Databases. The audience is customer lifecycle marketers, CSOps and RevOps. Lots of ways to improve overall health scores. Download your copy
P.S. Next is the CMO version
#general - May 27, 2025 at 02:27 PM
Great infograph on Go To Market and AI from Gabe Larsen.
#general - May 21, 2025 at 11:42 PM
All of the analyst companies are pretty strict about research behind the paywall. Some of the rules are extreme but you really can’t blame them as that is what they sell.
#general - May 21, 2025 at 11:39 PM
@Jennifer Lyons Clay is the new darling of the sales intelligence world. It’s primarily for prospecting. Think of zoominfo and apolllo as 1.0 and clay is 2.0.
I overlap with them a bit on customer contact database update and enrichment. But that’s all I do.
Sales would make the purchase and it’s a big decision for a company to make.
#general - May 19, 2025 at 06:06 PM
<@U08E9JC8TB4> I used to work at FORR and would suggest being careful about distributing their reports. I don’t know how aggressively they audit as there have been lots of layoffs, but they have they can see how many views a report gets. And it could impact the license of the person who accessed it. Sorry to be a downer.
#general - May 15, 2025 at 05:36 PM
The State of B2B Customer Contact Databases Report is live and here is the Exec Summary. The health score of customer contact databases is 47%. Not a pretty pix. Where does Customer Marketing fit into the Customer Contact Database challenge? More than you might think. to see the opportunities to shine.
#general - May 14, 2025 at 06:43 PM
I saw the blog post and will try to track it down. Anybody want to co-author a review with me. Have done this on other Forrester report.
#general - May 14, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Has anybody ever tried a program to let platform users know when they hit product utilization milestones. For example, top 10% of users that log in, or 100th time using a feature. If so, did you tie the message to ROI or outcomes or notice any impact. For example upsell, becoming an advocate….
#9-lifecycle-expansion - May 13, 2025 at 08:54 PM
is pretty impressive and Naomi west is someone to follow in the space. Most of their customers are B2C and always something to learn from our friends at B2C, but there are huge differences.
#general - May 05, 2025 at 03:37 PM
Are you a Lifecyle Marketer or thinking of making the pivot?
In a few weeks the first of its kind report on the State of B2B Customer Contact Databases will be published. It's not a pretty picture! In addition to the key findings, we will look at why customer advocacy practitioners should care about the health of the customer contact database. Attend, and you will be the first one on your block to get the report.
Friday May 9 at 2PM (ET):