My beautiful, brilliant Mom passed away one year ago today on January 23, 2025.

Losing my Mom broke me. There’s no other way to say it. I had never known a pain like that before and I think it has changed me at a molecular level. I am not the same person I was before it happened and I don’t think I’m meant to be. There is a before and an after to losing such a close loved one that I did not anticipate.

Things are somehow darker, more vivid, raw and real. I’ve always been incredibly independent and self-sufficient, but my heart was so deeply devoted to my family.

This is the first moment the foundation on which I stand has been halved. The world I have known, no longer really there. Or, still there, but forever altered. That love, with nowhere else to go but to turn to grief.

With that change, I’ve tried my best to keep her memory alive and honor her in any way that I can. I talk to her constantly and ask for signs. I’ve received them in (multiple) visits from a spotless lady bug in my NYC apartment, black and blue butterflies flying at me, in beautiful skies and sunsets, and in music, her favorite songs finding me at just the right time. She has visited me in my dreams and given me just enough hope and affirmation that she is always with me. Giving me a lot of strength to begin to heal and move forward.

My therapist once said to me that “Death often makes people stuck, but for some reason death has pushed you forward.” Through immense pain and sadness, I’ve moved forward.

And, it’s been quite a year. I’ve helped support my family through the aftermath of losing my Mom, I quit a very secure and stable job that made me extremely unhappy, I took a chance and moved into start up mode again, I was asked to host industry conferences, I finished my second round of egg freezing, I traveled to Italy on a whim and found beauty, joy, connection and hope again, I spent time with my family every second that I could, and I realized that my friendships and community are more important and profoundly supportive than I could have ever anticipated.

The strength that I’ve found this year is not new. It’s inherited. My Mom would always say that “she named me Bridget because it means strong and you have to be strong to survive in our family.”

She gave me that strength through my name and through modeling it her entire life. Losing my Mom has made me discover just how alike we really are. She may not be physically here, but she really is with me and in me, becoming more pronounced daily. I couldn’t be more proud of that.

My Mom was an incredible human being. The expression “an angel got her wings” was definitely created for her. She was an angel on earth and I just wish more people had gotten to know the brilliant, creative, layered, and fun person she was.

With that, below is the speech that I prepared to give at my Mom’s service earlier this year. The words still ring true a year later (please excuse the grammar, it was written in deep despair). I had debated sharing it widely, but I feel driven to further introduce her to the world. I want people to know my Mom, love my Mom, and understand what made her so special.

So, for those who were unable to make the service due to the distance or the big snowstorm that day, or for those who just want to support me, please indulge me and honor my Mom by learning a little bit more about the person that she was.

It brings me joy to read and remember. I miss you, Mommy <3

Memorial Service, February 6, 2025 –

I honestly had no idea where to start when thinking about what to say about my Mom. I’ve been absolutely heartbroken by this and I just want everything to be perfect for her because she was too amazing and giving and wonderful to not make it as beautiful of a tribute as can be.

But, I have to remind myself that she would be grateful for any of this… and honestly stunned by the outpouring of love and support for her in the wake of her loss.

She genuinely did not understand how many people loved and cherished her, so it’s important to me that we celebrate her well and I can only hope that she can see all this love for her being shared.

—

My Mom and I shared a love for pop culture and celebrities, so let me first start with a celebrity mention — one I knew she loved and really “got a kick out of”:

Anderson Cooper. He has a podcast on grief. And, Amy and David Sedaris were recently on it talking about the loss of their mother. One quote in particular really stood out.

To paraphrase, Amy says, “I can’t believe I got through my mother’s death, I didn’t think I would be able to live without her.”

Then David says, “Or just without her love. And so I feel like it’s my job as a writer to get the world to love my mother as much as I did. I don’t know why it’s so important to me, but I felt like she deserved the world’s love.”

In the wake of this deeply painful loss, this really sums up how I’m feeling. 1) I don’t know how or if I will ever get through this and 2) I feel this deep urge for the world to know, understand, and love my mother. She was just too insanely special and beautiful not to be known and seen, and celebrated for all that she was.

So, I want to share a few of the many beautiful things that she was with you today:

—

Firstly, she was an Explorer

Not many people know this, but as someone who lived in the New Milford, Torrington and Kent area her entire life, my mom had the heart of an adventurer. When she was a little girl she wanted to be a race car driver when she grew up. She would go on adventures with her friends, running around her neighborhood, Blue Bonnet Knoll, here in New Milford, barefoot, challenging the boys in her neighborhood, and exploring the woods and fields around her house.

With many trips to Cape Cod with her parents, she began a fascination with feats of engineering— planes, boats, trains—she couldn’t get enough. She would literally travel all the way up to the St. Lawrence seaway just to see boats navigate through locks, she absolutely loved it.

As she grew up, she wasn’t afforded the opportunity to travel or become an engineer, or that race car driver. So, that adventurous spirit transferred into a love for learning and for any/all things exploration on TV. She was endlessly curious and constantly reading books and magazines. She would watch shows about Bigfoot or lost treasures, then read books by their experts. She would watch shows about Alaska, Maine, and homestead living, and dream of one-day having a cabin or taking a trip to Alaska. She would watch shows about aliens and just find so much fun and intrigue in the unknown.

One of her favorites, she had a big love for Josh Gates and his Indiana-Jones-like adventures. I just happened to run into him in Charleston SC when I was walking around and the first thing I said to him was “My Mom loves you! And, one of my favorite things to do is watch your show with my Mom.” Vanessa also got her a cameo from him that just cracked her up — in it he called her an honorary member of the Explorer’s Club and it became bragging rights for her from them on out.

—

She was also an Artist

My mom went to New Milford High School where she first met my Dad in art class. She then went on to UCONN to study art. And while her time there was short lived, her love of art and talent for it, remained integrated subtly into our daily life.

Imagine doing a science report on tigers in school and having a cover for it with the most amazing, hand-drawn tiger you’ve ever seen. I have no idea how I didn’t get in trouble for that as it hung in the hallways of 5th grade, as it was so clearly not my doing.

Or, imagine being a 30-something in NYC and getting the most beautifully decorated, ornate cards with stickers all over them in your mailbox for every holiday. She was my forever Valentine, and I will be mourning that loss forever.

Her talent was just epic but she didn’t get a chance to really showcase this to others or shine through her art publicly until she got into teaching. She would design beautiful decorations for her room at school - like her Kindness Wall, she would illustrate pictures and design activities for books to help engage kids, she got to help put together the school art fairs and even got to showcase her work at them.

I remember after she retired she kept in touch with Mr. Coffil, our art teacher, and in one email, he referred to her as an artist. That just meant the world to my mom. Someone saw her for who she was at her core, for her passion, and identified her as just that. She was so grateful and touched by this — I think she always believed it but never got that direct validation in her life. So, thank you to Mr. Coffil for that.

—

As I mentioned, she was an incredible Teacher

When I was in 2nd grade, our class was the biggest in the school with 50 kids (which for the town and time, was overwhelming) and they needed extra help with us, so they hired two assistant teachers to support this large, unruly group - one of them being my Mom. She followed my class for many years, then my little brother Sean’s. This was the start of what would become a 25 year run as one of the most impactful, caring, and beloved teachers at Kent Center School.

Her artistic creativity brought flair to her assignments and her room at school, making it a magical experience to work with Mrs. Heaton in her room. But, what I think really made her impact so large was her patience, dedication, and deep caring for all of her students. She would often work 1:1 with the students who needed extra help and she was always able to find creative ways to engage them and make learning fun. She also taught kindness above all else and instilled so much of her beautiful moral compass, that my siblings and I were able to experience, into her students’ lives as well.

Over 25 years, hundreds of students were impacted by her teaching, creativity, patience, humor and kindness. And, it would bring so much joy and pride to her when she would see one of her students later on in life, grown up and successful, and filled with gratitude and nostalgia for the impact she had on their lives.

—

She was also an amazing friend

There was not a more loyal or loving person in this world than my Mother. Oh if you were friends with my Mom, you were so blessed.

My mother had a difficult childhood and experienced a lot of pain in her life. Instead of that turning her inward, it actually turned her outward in search of love, kindness, and support from good people in her life.

My Mom was friends with everyone and her friendship was a gift, sometimes literally. She never forgot a birthday or Christmas gift. She’d always customize or decorate a special card. She was just so giving because she knew what it felt like to be left out or forgotten. She didn’t want others to feel that way and she sought out that same love and loyalty reciprocally.

If you were my Mother’s friend, thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for her and celebrating her. She deserved it and loved her friendships so much.

—

As you can see, my Mom was so dynamic — she was so many things…

But, most importantly, she was a Mom.

She was absolutely everything to me. Literally everything.

She is who I am at my core, she is the foundation behind everything I’ve ever done and accomplished in my life. None of what I am today or what I have, would exist without the support of my parents.

My parents sacrificed so much for me and my siblings — working long difficult jobs, making sure we had a roof over our heads, food, even through the toughest of times, they signed me up for every sport and drove me all around the northeast to compete, they never pressured me to do anything I didn’t want to do but supported me doing everything so I could figure out what I enjoyed and pursue that, they never wanted me to go without or have less than my peers and gave endlessly to my siblings and I.

I always felt that deep love and sacrifice and I spent a lot of the last 10-15 years or so of my life trying to give back to them as much as I could. In hopes that they could feel that same love and support. So, they knew the depth of my gratitude and admiration.

I am one of those crazy kids that actually really like my parents and who wants to spend time with them. And, I was lucky enough in the last few years to get the upgrade from daughter to friend.

I just loved spending time with her—going on shopping trips to TJ Max, day trips to Rhinebeck, coming home in the summer to get lunch at her favorite place, Clamps. Sitting with her for hours watching adventure shows or the latest in prime time shenanigans on the Bachelor, or dreaming of winning the lottery and working with David on HGTV. We’d go up and sit on the “veranda” in the back yard and enjoy the sun, we’d go shopping for flowers to bring a smile to her face. We discussed celebrities and pop culture and one-upped each other with the latest news.

We had so much fun. We all wanted to make her laugh. I would do things like shout her full email address in public to elicit a rare “Bridget Melanie!” or “Bridget Melanie Kathryne!” I’d hang on her with hugs and kisses, or say her name in all these crazy ways like “Maj, Meej, Mooj” or make silly noises and dance around the house. All just to get a laugh and see her smile, and bring her joy.

—

This joy was so important to me because one other thing my Mom was, and that she was incredibly proud to be - she was a survivor.

Because she was one of the strongest people and so much more than the things that happened to her, I don’t want to fixate or dwell too much on this part, but it’s an important part of her life and integral in knowing who she is and why she was truly incredible.

My Mom experienced many traumas and as a result, often lived a challenging life. The things my Mother went through and persevered through are hard to comprehend. Many others, I imagine, wouldn’t even know how to go on if they’d had to live through what she had to endure.

But, despite it all she lived a beautiful and full life because she was able to find joy, hope and possibility in everything. Even through times of sadness and worry and stress, she was so strong and resilient, and in the end, guided by joy and by love and by so much gratitude.

On Thanksgiving, every year, my mother would cut out leaves on construction paper in fall colors and would have us write down what we were thankful for, then we’d put them in this basket. They were private and we never needed to share them. This past week, I looked at that basket and saw the one she had written this past year placed right on top. It read, “I am thankful I have survived… I am thankful for my family, my home, my car, and for a chance to be me.” She was just so grateful to be alive and to have a chance to be herself in this world.

—

My Mom was an Angel on earth.

I was so incredibly blessed to have her as my Mother.

She always would say that she named me Bridget because it means “strong.” And, that “you had to be strong to survive in our family.”

But, she didn’t only teach me how to be strong and resilient and survive in this world.

She taught me to be kind and a friend to everyone.

She taught me empathy and compassion.

She taught me to be generous and giving.

She taught me curiosity and a love of learning.

She taught me to be adventurous and to go after the things I want in this life.

She taught me to be creative and to dream big.

She taught me that family is the most important thing.

She taught me how to be silly and wacky and laugh– how to tap dance in the kitchen, believe in things like Bigfoot, plant flowers, look at the stars, have a “moment of nature,” enjoy beautiful clothes and jewelry and knickknacks, to really love and be passionate about things.

She taught me that you can still shine bright and be kind even in your darkest moments; that to live a beautiful and full life, you need to embody love and find joy in the little things.

I always said that I felt myself becoming more and more like her, and my dad, every year, and that I would be so proud and honored to become just like them someday. Because they are genuinely my heroes.

My hope is that she can see us now and see the absolute magnitude of love directed to her. That she can see just how much she meant to everyone around her — that while we are lost without her love and heartbroken without her in this world, that we will be okay because she gave us the strength and tools to carry on. And not just carry on, but live a beautiful life in her honor.

Here’s to being strong, for my mom, and continuing to share these beautiful pieces of her with the world so she can truly be seen and understood for the brilliant, kind, resilient woman she was.

Here’s to my mother and her beautiful life, where she found and shared so much joy and love. I’m so grateful that she felt like she could just “be me.”

I LOVE YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK, MOMMY

This was my second time hosting a Customer Marketing Summit and I am so grateful for the opportunity.

I’ve been lucky enough to do keynotes, panels, and workshops across these events in the past, so for me, the chance to host unlocks new opportunities—to make myself uncomfortable and put myself out there to grow professionally, to share a wider range of my experiences as I moderate the event, and to get to comment on the industry as a whole as it is evolving so quickly.

Just like in NYC earlier this year, I kicked off the event with a look at what’s Top of Mind (TOM) for me in the industry and heading into the event.

Check out my Opening Remarks below and let me know what you think!

Bridget’s Top of Mind: Customer Marketing Summit Opening Remarks, September 2025

“Hi everyone!! Welcome to Customer Marketing Summit San Francisco!!!

My name is Bridget Heaton and I will be your emcee/chairperson for the next two days. That’s right…they’ve entrusted me with the power of the mic and it’s my job to steer this ship to success over the next two days and ensure it’s the best CMA Summit yet!

Always starting with a moment of gratitude

On that note, I will start with a moment of gratitude…THANK YOU to the Customer Marketing Alliance, Martha Harris and the entire team that put the event together today. Let’s all give them a round of applause!!!

Thank you for trusting me to host the event this past spring in NYC and for giving me the opportunity to come back and host again in San Francisco. For me, it’s an incredible honor to do this — I’ve done keynotes and panels in the past at these events -- but for me, at this point in my career, to get to challenge myself in new ways and grow with opportunities like this is just incredible. So, thank you CMA and thank you all for being here!!

Now, most of you are probably thinking…wait a second, who is this girl?

Who am I?

So, I should probably start off by introducing myself…Here’s my background in 30 seconds —

• I started my career in the non-profit space, helping to administer international student exchange programs for the Department of State.

• After that, I moved into education tech, at a company called Schoology, which later was acquired by PowerSchool.

  • There, over 5 years I did just about everything on the marketing team from demand generation, to content marketing, to social media, PR, and more.

  • But, most importantly, I built their community and started their advocacy program - taking it from 18 to 150 and then scaling it with tech to over 4000 members.

  • I also had the amazing opportunity to start their customer marketing function and build out their first-ever lifecycle marketing program.

• From there, I moved into big data at Collibra, seeing if I could duplicate this playbook with another audience, another industry, and I did. I built a vibrant community and scaled it in half the time - - getting us to about 4000 community members and advocates in 2 year’s time.

• I left Collibra to start my own consulting company - focused on that for about 2 months before I got the call from Slack and jumped at the opportunity to join the team.

• I just spent the last almost 4 years building the customer marketing function and officially leading the team in the last 2 years. At Slack and Salesforce, customer marketing was a high touch, high impact sport, where our job was to focus on developing customer advocates and stories with the biggest brands in the world. Which you all know is very hard but very rewarding.

Fast forward to now - I cannot believe I’m on my 4th company and 4th program now! I recently left Slack for a new opportunity this summer and I am about 6 weeks into my new role as the Director of Customer Marketing at WRITER.

WRITER is the agentic platform for the enterprise and I am there building the customer marketing and community programs. I’m back in start up mode and it’s been a wild and incredible ride already. More on that to come….

Top of Mind

I always like to start off by sharing what’s Top of Mind (TOM) for me as I head into these events. It’s an easy and concise way for me to communicate the many things buzzing through my mind.

When I worked at Slack I’d have a weekly automated TOM workflow go out to the team to share what was on everyone’s mind and to-do lists for the week.

Now, I send them regularly in my marketing channels at WRITER to ensure everyone knows what I’m up to as I start to build out the program.

It’s a great async way to check in and share. Let me know if you want help learning how to automate that in Slack.

So, just as I did in NYC this spring — I’m going to kick off the event by sharing 3 things that are TOM for me right now, in both the customer marketing space as a whole and what I want to intentionally get out of my experience here at the event this week.

1- A NEW, new era of Customer Marketing

I’ll start off by saying that we are all lucky to be able to come to these events - they’re one of a very few moments where our community comes together and it always represents such an interesting slice or snapshot of what’s going on in peoples minds, programs, and effectively the industry, in any given moment.

In fact, I feel like I’m having deja vu because…

In March, I stood up here and stated that we’re in a new era of customer marketing — I discussed the identity crisis we often feel in our roles and how that feeling was at an all time high — that there was clear demand for our roles and our outputs from a leadership perspective but that there was a lack of understanding of our functions and processes. And, this trend has prevented us from really growing in our organizations and getting the resources and support we’ve needed to become leaders and to grow our field further.

So, ultimately, not challenging the number of customer marketing jobs on the market overall, which we’ve seen increase, but definitely has challenged the upward mobility, professional growth, and leadership potential for customer marketers in seat.

I also discussed how demonstrating the ROI/value of our programs was no longer an advanced topic for customer marketers but table stakes. That Lifecycle Marketing and Advocacy had taken over as the topic du jour. And, that customer marketers were starting to dabble in generative AI but at a very surface level.

And, all of these, strong opinions, loosely held, were reflected back to me in CMA’s State of Customer Marketing report data and in the agenda that took place this past March.

That was the moment… and I’d argue is still the moment in 2025 with one major amendment.

I’m about to stand up here again and tell you that 6 months later — we are AGAIN in a new era of customer marketing. YES. A NEW, new era of customer marketing.

Are you ready for it? Customer Marketers are now officially in our agentic AI era!!!!

That’s right…agents!

The tech space is constantly changing and it feels like the last 1-2 years, customer marketing has finally started to keep up with it. Why? Because I’d predict we feel this value gap that I described above. So, we are constantly innovating, trying new things, and evolving our programs — ANYTHING to create the most value for our companies and customers, with the often very little resourcing that we have.

So, with the tech space changing at such a rapid rate these days — and AI and agents popping up in some way shape or form across all of our products and companies.

Customer Marketing, again, is at the front of the line for this moment. We are in an incredible position to experiment with AI, and we’re evolving both out of excitement and innovation as well as the need to show value and ROI for CMA survival.

Customer Marketers are now shepherds of AI transformation—we’re using generative and agentic AI to help us automate some of the challenging tasks we have, to help us drive creativity alongside productivity, and to help us extend the resourcing for our teams that we so desperately need.

At WRITER, keep in mind, I’m 6 weeks in — I’m using agents throughout my workflows to extend my capacity and move faster. I have an agent to help me build webinar content, I have an agent that helps me put together all of the promotional materials I need for a customer story GTM plan, I’m training an agent on the tone/brand/creative voice for storytelling, and I’m scoping an agent that is going to help reduce the many internal questions to me/my team and eliminate the need for me to answer every “do we have a story about a X customer?” slack.

Agentic transformation for Customer Marketing is here.

But it also gives Customer Marketers the unique opportunity to lead from the front and help organizations during this era of change.

2 - Customer Marketers are the future leaders of our organizations

In this new era, customer marketing has the opportunity to rise as the new leaders in the organization.

Firstly, because we are the early trailblazers — constantly experimenting and innovating. So, I call on you all to raise your hands to learn, to try, to help. Meet the moment, grab that seat at the table. And use this moment to show just how incredible customer marketers are!

You might be thinking? But Bridget, we are a people-centric role, how can we start thinking about agents? …

Secondly, in this new era, being people-centric will be more important than ever and that does not have to change - this very important customer marketing skill will help you differentiate yourself.

As we lean continue to lean into our agile, experimental approach to marketing and start building agents that help us and our teams do more with less and increase our capacity, Customer Marketers can focus on the work that matters most. We can focus on the creativity, the strategy, the relationship building—the special skills that we uniquely do so well and that are so important to the success of the customers and the company as a whole.

Customer Marketers are the perfect models for how humans and AI agents can work together to driving efficiencies and value but not at the expense of delivering an incredible customer and human experience.

And, I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. This summer I was lucky enough to join 15 fellow CMA leaders for a retreat in the Rockies. There, we discussed the future of Customer Marketing and this very idea that customer marketers are the future leaders of our organizations. In fact, we came together to develop a manifesto. I’ll quote just one line of that manifesto:

“Humans trust humans — and in the age of AI, that is the most powerful lever for growth.”

Customer Marketers are experts at developing programs and experiences that make customers feel - yes FEEL.

We champion them, we create belonging, we build fun experiences, we inspire them, we educate them, we engage them and we make them FEEL a part of something. AI is amazing, but it will never be able to replace that. And it shouldn’t.

So, my call to action for you all is to not be afraid of experimenting with AI and agents because leaning into this new era will help us to show value, to show that we’re innovative marketers, and that we’re taking our companies into the future.

And, equally, I call upon you, to continue to be the voice and advocate for your customers in your organizations. Advocate for the human beings that they are in this new agentic era and for the amazing experience they deserve to FEEL with your brand and company.

Both of those things in combination will help us lead from the front in this new agentic era and help us grow our careers as leaders.

And, I’ll wrap up with a quick, personal number 3:

3- Building the Customer Marketing Program of the Future

While I may be at one of the most exciting agentic AI companies in the world right now…I’m very much in build mode…

I’m excited because I have the unique opportunity to be able to build the Customer Marketing Program of the Future at WRITER where I can focus on not only growing and scaling my team in the traditional sense, but I can think about how generative and agentic AI can help me increase capacity and optimize the traditional workflows of customer marketing for this new era. I feel like it’s a privilege to be able to have this vantage point and I’m excited to share as I learn more along the way.

But this also means that I am at the event to learn. I’ll be listening closely to your sessions because it’s been a while since I built out a program from scratch — give me all the advice please!! And, in turn, I invite you all to connect with me and follow along on this journey with me — I’ve been in this space for 12+ years now, but it feels like a whole new era full of possibilities.

I’m making this event meaningful to my journey and I hope you will, too. I challenge you to write down your own TOM for the event and/or some goals to enter this week with intention.

What do you want to get out of this event?

Lean into making this a meaningful experience for yourself — and I will focus on bringing the fun :)”

With themes of identity, delivering value, and lifecycle marketing taking center stage, I called upon the audience to lean into our customer marketing foundations to find true success in this new era of customer marketing. Rapid value extraction is great for your business but it’s our job to ensure mutual value for our customers. The more we lean into that, celebrating the human beings behind these programs, the more the value of these programs will continue to shine through. And, in return the more successful we will be in our roles and careers.

Check out the remarks below and let me know what you think. Then, stay tuned for a new top of mind and discussion coming from the San Francisco Summit next!

Bridget’s Top of Mind: Customer Marketing Summit Opening Remarks, March 2025

“Hi everyone!! My name is Bridget Heaton, I currently lead the customer marketing team at Slack, and I will be your emcee/host/chairperson for the next two days!

Starting with a moment of gratitude

I am incredibly excited and honored to be here! I also have a long history of presenting with Customer Marketing Alliance and their summits- I’ve done keynotes and panels and more — so I am grateful for this opportunity to try something new, make myself uncomfortable and put myself out there in a new way.

Who am I and why am I here?

I should probably start off by introducing myself…

Here’s my background in a few short points:

• I started my career in the non-profit space, helping to administer international student exchange programs for the Department of State.

• After that, I moved into education tech where over 5 years I did just about everything on the marketing team from demand gen, to content marketing, to social media, PR, and more. But, most importantly, I built their community and started their advocacy program - taking it from 18 to 150 and then scaling it with tech to over 4000. I also had the amazing opportunity to start their customer marketing function and build out their first lifecycle marketing program.

• From there, I moved into big data, seeing if I could duplicate this playbook with another audience, another industry, and I did. I built a vibrant community and scaled it in half the time.

• I left Collibra to start my own consulting company - lasted about 2 months before I got the call from Slack and jumped at the opportunity to join the team.

• I have been there for 3.5 years, building their customer marketing function and officially leading the team in the last 2 years. At Slack and Salesforce, customer marketing is a high touch, high impact sport, where our job is to focus on developing customer advocates and stories with the biggest brands in the world. It’s hard but extremely rewarding.

I always say that my customer marketing super power is that I’ve worked at just about every size company across several different industries and have built and scaled customer marketing across it all.

Top of Mind

So, I thought I’d kickoff the day with a Top of Mind (TOM) update.

Now, I work at Slack — who uses Slack in here? Raise your hand.

Good good.

At the beginning of each week I send a workflow to my Customer Marketing team channel that prompts my team to tell me what’s Top of Mind for them this week — this can be hopes, dreams, their to-do list, time off, etc. Complete with the brain sparkles emoji. It’s a great way for me to asynchronously checkin with them and understand where they’re at.

So, I’m going to start today by sharing 3 things that are TOM for me, regarding the customer marketing space and what I want to get out of my experience here at the event:

1 - To start, I think this past year we’ve officially entered a new era of customer marketing.

Intense, right… let me explain

For those of us who’ve been in this space for a while, who’ve attended events like this before, it’s very much felt like customer marketing has been going through a bit of an identity crisis in the past few years.

Customer Marketers had carved out a role for themselves that encapsulates so much —community, advocates, storytelling, content, events, engagement, product adoption and education, and more. That’s quite an expansive and impactful list. Yet, across companies customer marketing remained this nebulous entity with varying titles and scopes, teams that rolled up into different departments. And, in my opinion, It’s been a bit of a battle to stake out our importance and impact.

These variations have definitely impacted the growth of the industry due to the way that customer marketers are then perceived by their leadership and their peers. Resulting in the value we drive for the business and for customers essential parts of the company success but without proper visibility, respect, and frankly any investment.

Think about it — Sessions at conferences like this would be session after session about the same stuff that people had been talking about since 2017-2018.

You’d get the occasional new session about the customer journey or lifecycle marketing or ROI…and those would be the big pillar moments of the event.

Now I want you all to look at the agenda this year…. Almost every session is about lifecycle marketing…there are also people with very different titles presenting these sessions than you might be used to….and if you can believe it, it’s not just B2B Saas companies in here — there are B2C companies here with us today…

I think this is an important signal — that we’ve unlocked a new era…an era where driving ROI and value for your company is not a nice to have…it’s essential. An era where needing to drive results and value for our programs led us to dollars vs. sentiment and success, where customer success metrics have become less important and activities aligned to driving revenue are now key.

2 - Revenue is now king/queen; Lean into the opportunity and evolve

I think we’ve all experienced in some shape or another how difficult the last few years have been. We’ve seen lots of layoffs in the space, reorgs, cut budgets, losing team members and not getting replacements. It’s been hard!

We’ve been asked to do way more with a lot less.

And in some cases completely shift our priorities to focus on activities that directly drive business. It’s become about output — produce more - drive clear value to the businesses bottom line. Drive that revenue.

Now revenue isn’t the only key metric, don’t get me wrong here. But, it’s the easiest and clearest way for those around us in the organization to explicitly see our programs’ value.

And with that shift, we’re also starting to see a lot of opportunity, more jobs, more budget. Just taking new shape.

So, Customer marketers are being called to evolve — their skills, their strategy, and even their perception of the industry.

In some cases we are being called to step up and adapt, to learn new skills, expand your scope and strategy. Or, bring new internal stakeholders to your table.

it might mean that the ever evolving term of customer marketing is expanding even more to include roles and stakeholders you might not expect. You might be called to influence, empower and educate others across your organization to do the work of customer marketing on your behalf to scale even more.

But, with so many new stakeholders and this drive towards value at all costs. It’s never been more important to remember where you came from.

3- Don’t forget what it means to be a customer marketer; lean into your foundations.

Customer Marketing is about relationships, about human beings, about understanding that at the other end of that advocacy activity or newsletter or event scan, whatever, that there is an actual person who is engaging. Not just a company, they’re not just what they give you.

We need to give them value in return.

We need to continue to show up and advocate for our customers in this new landscape.

It’s our job to ensure that they still have the most amazing experience possible with our brands regardless of what we’re being asked to do.

So, how do you do that? We lean into our programs - the frameworks we are so good at developing that enable us to scale and that set expectations internally and externally on what people can expect.

We over communicate and we are inclusive of other teams in our planning.

We become champions of customer marketing and empower everyone internally to be customer marketers and help us drive towards our goals.

And above all, advocate for our customers.

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You may be saying Bridget - I know all this - then congratulations you are in it, embracing this new era. I’m just here to say all the hard stuff out loud :)

It’s a super interesting time in our industry. So, before I get into housekeeping items I want to challenge you to write your own TOM for this event - let’s be intentional about what we want to get out of this!!

What perceptions are you coming in with? What are you aiming to learn? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to meet?

Feel free to share those reflections with your new friends at the table.

Here’s to a great event!! And, to welcoming in this new era of customer marketing!!”

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