Welcome to the Deeto Hub
A resource and community space for modern marketers, sellers, and builders using customer voice to grow — together.
A resource and community space for modern marketers, sellers, and builders using customer voice to grow — together.
This hub is built for anyone who wants to do more with the voices of their customers. Whether you're scaling advocacy, building trust with proof, or rethinking how to go to market — you're in the right place.
How-to guides and playbooks for building with customer voice
Campaign-ready templates and swipe files
Benchmark reports and reference best practices
Event recordings, expert sessions, and community spotlights
Ask questions. Share ideas. Trade wins. This is your space.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. The Deeto community connects you with other leaders using customer voice to build better GTM motions, faster-growing brands, and smarter strategies. If you are interested in joining when it launches, sign up below.
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In this episode, Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, shares her perspective on how authentic customer voice is reshaping modern go-to-market strategy. Drawing on her experience leading teams at some of B2B’s most iconic brands, Sydney discusses the shift from traditional SEO to AI-powered discovery, the power of peer reviews, and the evolving role of customer feedback in brand building. She also reflects on how customer voice fuels category creation, campaign strategy, and trust at scale—offering thoughtful lessons for anyone building customer-led programs today.
[Podcast Intro – Host]
Welcome to Authentic Customer Voices, the podcast exploring how today's most thoughtful marketers and go-to-market leaders are scaling advocacy, trust, and peer connections in a bold new way.
I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, Sydney Sloan, the Chief Marketing Officer at G2. Sydney is a four-time CMO who’s led some of the most well-known brands in B2B, including SalesLoft, Ada, and Adobe. Now at G2, she's helping define the future of buyer behavior, from AI adoption to how trust is built at scale.
Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today. I'd love to start by grounding in your perspective. You’ve worked across brand, product, and customer marketing, so I’d love to understand how you define authentic customer voice today, and maybe how that meaning has evolved over the years.
[Sydney Sloan]
What I love about marketing is that you get to champion the customer from the very first impression all the way through the journey and their lifetime with your company. We get to partner across the organization to ensure that the customer experience is consistent, on-brand, and driven by feedback.
The best thing marketers can do is really embrace the customer and their personas and make sure they’re served. Authenticity is part of an evolution. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we moved toward account-based marketing, buying groups, and personas, but somewhere along the way, I wonder if we forgot about the user.
How do we ensure we delight and exceed expectations for every single user? What if our goal was to make every user an advocate for the value they receive? What would that take, and what would you ask them to do?
Customer voice is at the core of brand building. It always has been, but now, with large language models (LLMs) indexing conversations from Reddit, G2, or Wikipedia, authenticity is literally what shapes perception. Those voices are powerful. They’re real. And they’re happening in public.
[Host]
Absolutely. At G2, you really do have a front-row seat to this shift in software buying behavior. From your perspective, what’s one key behavior change that marketers and sellers need to pay attention to, especially in light of the G2 Buyer Behavior Report?
[Sydney Sloan]
The big shift we saw was in organic traffic. Suddenly, SEO and PPC weren’t working like they used to. That’s because, as of our 2024 report, 79 percent of buyers are using chatbots or LLMs for research, discovery, and shortlisting.
That’s a massive change, and what’s drastic is how fast it happened. Buyers just disappeared from Google. They’re getting answers from other formats now. Everyone’s trying to figure it out.
At G2, we’ve had to shift too. Our business was built on search. Now we need our data to show up in those answer engines. So, authentic reviews and where they’re captured matter more than ever. Brands need to make it easy, weave it into strategy, and think intentionally about how that voice gets indexed.
[Host]
And you've led some powerful category-defining efforts at SalesLoft and at Alfresco, where voice of customer shaped the narrative. How did that play out?
[Sydney Sloan]
At SalesLoft, SDR platforms were emerging. There wasn’t a defined category yet. I interviewed at Outreach, Clari, and SalesLoft, and I asked the Forrester analyst: “Is this going to be a category?” She said yes. It took Forrester three years to create the Wave. It took G2 three months.
That’s the power of customer voice. Categories don’t form unless there are enough happy customers leaving reviews. You see it in real time. It’s organic.
At Alfresco, we were disrupting a 25-year-old category. The founder had built Documentum and was now disrupting his own creation. We brought analysts on the road with us to hear directly from customers. It wasn’t just about buyer influence, it was about analyst influence, shaped by real voices.
[Host]
One theme you’ve spoken to is balancing automation and authenticity. How can teams embrace AI without losing the trust that comes from real customer stories?
[Sydney Sloan]
There’s a lot of innovation right now. We partner with Deeto, and we’re seeing how transcripts can be converted into meaningful follow-ups, emails, task lists, or even identify happy customers and suggest reviews or case studies.
The key is to connect those systems. From conversation to advocacy platform to review site. That’s your always-on strategy.
There’s also what I call the easy button, embedding review requests into your product, just like in B2C. “Do you like this app?” to “Leave a review.” Some top G2 performers do this really well.
[Host]
And for content and campaigns, especially in an AI-first world, how do you think about using customer proof at scale?
[Sydney Sloan]
A year ago, I would’ve said put customer quotes in your campaigns. That’s still true. But now, we can do more. We feed real voice data into our persona profiles. That trains LLMs on what customers actually care about.
We’re even starting to power agents with this data, small language models trained on customer voice. Not just your own recordings or first-party data, but industry-wide input. That gives you a broader, category-level perspective.
[Host]
Let’s connect this to brand building. If traditional SEO is being overtaken by AI and peer reviews, what should marketers do differently?
[Sydney Sloan]
You can’t buy your way into pipeline like you used to. PPC is breaking.
So first, back to brand strategy. Trust takes time. You have to be consistent and clear about what you stand for, and voice of customer reflects that better than anything.
Second, influencer strategy. B2B micro-influencers, people your buyers trust, matter. Whether they’re on podcasts, reviewing tools, or posting on LinkedIn.
You need to understand where your buyers live, newsletters, communities, events, and participate. It’s about returning to fundamentals and doing them in a new context.
[Host]
Final question. For those building customer-centric programs from scratch, what’s the one piece of advice that’s held true for you?
[Sydney Sloan]
Talk to your customers.
My foundation came from events, working booths, hosting our first customer conferences. You connect with happy customers, help showcase their stories, build them up. At Jive, we joked that if you spoke on main stage, you’d be working there the next year. It was often true.
Your job is to identify those advocates, amplify their voice, and raise their profile. That’s the foundation. And community is part of that, open dialogue, even when it’s not about your product. Help people connect with each other.
In all this disruption, we’re learning new things but also returning to the fundamentals.
[Host]
Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.
In this episode of Authentic Customer Voices, Sydney Sloan explores how AI, customer reviews, and real-world advocacy.
The insurance and InsurTech landscape is transforming at record speed. From AI-driven underwriting to automated claims and digital customer experiences, new technology vendors are reshaping one of the world’s oldest industries. But as innovation accelerates, so does skepticism.
Insurance buyers are cautious, risk-sensitive, and highly regulated, which means new vendors must earn trust long before they earn business. In this world, one factor consistently drives confidence and conversion: the authentic voice of the customer.
At InsureTech Connect (ITC) Vegas 2025, Deeto sat down with leaders from Egnyte, Infosys, Smart Communications, Carpe Data, Neutrinos, Optimity, GhostDraft, Proof, Retarus, and Canidium to ask three simple questions:
Their answers reveal a universal truth: in insurance, proof is the product.
The first insight was unanimous. In InsurTech, buyers don’t believe marketing; they believe other insurers.
Matt Sodnicar, Product Marketing Manager at Canidium, explained:
“It’s absolutely huge because it’s social proof. The customer wants to feel like you know their industry. You’ve got experience in their industry, and it helps accelerate the sales process because nobody wants to be your test pilot.”
Chris Schmitt, Senior Director of Industry Marketing at Egnyte, agreed:
“The people we talk to demand social proof. They don’t want to hear from us; they want to hear from our customers about what they solved for and why we’re important to their business.”
In a regulated, risk-averse space, this dynamic carries even greater weight. Insurance executives aren’t buying software; they’re buying proof that a partner can deliver securely, compliantly, and with measurable business results.
Jose Suarez, Marketing Manager at Retarus, described the impact clearly:
“There’s no better way to tell your story than the stories you’ve already completed. Customer stories and success stories are some of our most visited pages. They hit SEO-quality keywords and show proof of the problems we’ve solved.”
In InsurTech, the most effective marketing asset isn’t your demo. It’s the real outcomes your customers have achieved.
If customer proof is so powerful, why is it so rare?
Capturing and publishing stories in insurance is uniquely difficult. Legal, regulatory, and competitive constraints make advocacy programs slow and complex, even for the happiest clients.
Ben Offringa, VP of Marketing at Carpe Data, summarized the challenge:
“You have insurers that view your solution as a strategic advantage. They don’t want competitors to know what they’re using, so they won’t always come forward publicly as customers.”
Anshul Agarwal, VP Marketing at Infosys, described the internal bottlenecks:
“Once we get an advocacy piece, it has to be vetted through legal, marketing, sales, and project teams. The entire company reviews it first. The timelines are long, and even a single tweak can take a week.”
Ashish Jha, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at Neutrinos, pointed to another barrier:
“When you go back later to find the data, teams say, ‘We never captured it.’ Getting delivery and customer success teams to track the right metrics early on is the hardest part.”
Even when approvals are granted, motivation can fade. Matt Sodnicar noted that many customers see little reason to participate once their project is live:
“They’ve already gone live and moved on. There’s nothing in it for them, and strict NDAs mean some amazing success stories never see the light of day.”
Despite the challenges, InsurTech marketers shared clear, practical strategies for capturing and activating customer voice while respecting industry constraints.
Brenly McCulloch, Head of Demand Generation at Smart Communications, said timing is everything:
“As soon as that deal closes, that’s when everyone’s most excited. That’s the perfect time to get a customer testimonial—right there, before the moment passes.”
Holly Monroe, Content Marketing Manager at AgentSync, emphasized collaboration:
“You need a strong relationship with your customer success team. Marketing, CS, and the customer have to move together. And don’t just publish proof once. Repurpose it into different formats and share it everywhere.”
Customer success teams are closest to the stories. Working together ensures valuable feedback is never lost.
Jane Wang, CEO of Optimity, shared a simple approach:
“We make it easy. We prep reports with real metrics and business results, and let customers put it in their own words. It’s faster, more authentic, and brings the case study to life.”
Kelley Pidhirsky, VP of Solutions Consulting at Proof, offered a collaborative idea:
“Pull your best customers together under NDA to talk openly about challenges. It’s valuable for everyone because they’re in the same industry and facing the same problems.”
Private advocacy groups allow for candid discussion while still giving vendors a powerful, compliant way to collect insight and social proof.
The conversations ended with a shared truth: in insurance, proof isn’t a campaign. It’s a measure of trust.
Every customer story, testimonial, or quote represents a relationship built on results. When companies make it easy for customers to share their experiences authentically and safely, they do more than generate leads—they strengthen credibility across the industry.
As the closing statement of the video reminds us:
In insurance tech, proof isn’t just about marketing. It’s about building trust in a competitive, regulated space.
For InsurTech leaders, the implications are clear:
At Deeto, we believe the future of InsurTech growth depends on authentic, scalable proof.
Our platform helps insurance and InsurTech companies:
With Deeto, customer voice becomes a continuous signal that drives confidence and measurable growth.
Insurance has always been an industry built on trust. Today, that trust extends beyond policies and premiums. It lives in every customer story.
By investing in authentic advocacy, empowering customers to speak safely, and using AI to scale the process, InsurTech companies can turn proof into their strongest competitive advantage.
Because in insurance—just like in every trust-driven industry—proof doesn’t just beat promises. It is the promise.
Unlock the power of word-of-mouth marketing to build trust, grow your brand, and drive better conversions.
Overview:
AI has changed how we work, but not what buyers believe. People still trust people. Teams that win today are finding ways to pair automation with authenticity, using real customer voices to build confidence and open doors.
In this session, Deeto and Samplead will show how leading marketing and sales teams are balancing technology with trust to create outreach that actually converts. We’ll share what’s working in the field, how to bring customer proof into personalized outreach, and simple ways to make every interaction feel more human.
You’ll learn:
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Time: 9:00 AM PT / 12:00 PM ET
Location: Live Virtual Event (Zoom link sent upon registration)
Buyers don’t convert without trust. Learn how to build credibility across every stage of the funnel.
In this episode of Authentic Customer Voices, Captivate Collective co-founders Liz Richardson and Deena Zenyk share why the most powerful customer stories are often the least polished. They discuss how authenticity drives trust, the importance of embedding advocacy across the entire customer journey, and how AI is reshaping what “real” customer voice means. Tune in for fresh insights on measuring impact, building genuine connections, and the future of customer-led growth.
Host: Welcome to the Authentic Customer Voices podcast, where we chat with leaders who are rethinking what it means to bring real customer stories into the spotlight. Today we have not one, but two incredible guests. Liz Richardson and Deena Zenyk are the co-founders of Captivate Collective, a community helping companies build customer advocacy and engagement programs that are anything but old school.
Liz is the Chief Revenue Officer and Deena is the Chief Customer Officer. Together they bring a ton of experience in customer marketing, community, CX, and more. They have been at the forefront of pushing our industry forward, and I am extremely excited to have them with us today. Liz and Deena, thank you so much for being here.
I would love to kick things off by having each of you introduce yourselves and share what led you to start Captivate.
Liz: What an amazing story that would be. That is a whole other podcast, Shawnna, but thank you so much for having us. We are thrilled to be here. I cannot take credit for founding Captivate since Dina went forth and paved the way. I am far too fearful to do that on my own. Deena took that leap.
What led us here was the idea that advocacy is not confined to a single platform. Advocacy is a methodology and a practice. Although Deena and I both came from a platform vendor in the CMA space — you might even call them the category creator — our passion was bringing that education and methodology to anyone, whether they are using a spreadsheet or the fanciest, most expensive advocacy tool out there.
We were able to do that by going off on our own and building Captivate. Deena, I will pass it to you.
Deena: I think there is another element to why we started Captivate. We are both entrepreneurial people with a lot of ideas. When you are working inside someone else’s organization, your big ideas do not always land. They do not always have space to breathe and grow.
With Captivate, we are pulling in the best pieces of who we are and how we want to see the practice. We built the kind of business we would want to work at. That was important to us with Captivate.
Host: I love that. And Deena, you have long championed authenticity over polish when it comes to advocacy. How do you define authentic customer voice in today’s landscape?
Deena: That is a really good question. My answer is simple and straightforward.
What does the customer actually say? What do they think when it is unpolished? You have to take the good with the bad. You learn from the bad and you celebrate the good. Too often people take customer voice and put it through a blender. They grind away the rough edges and polish it up.
We are people. We want to hear real stories and be conversational. When you read five-star reviews now, you look for balance. I always toggle to most recent and then the middle of the road. I want to see the good, the bad, the ugly, and the unpolished.
Liz: I agree. I go immediately to the three-star reviews to understand where that middle ground is.
Host: Liz, from your client work, where do you see the biggest gaps between how companies say they use customer voice and what they are actually doing?
Liz: First, I will acknowledge that in B2B SaaS we have won the battle of agreeing you need customer voice, at least in marketing and sales. We have gotten better at putting forward advocates and happy customers and infusing that authentic voice, polished as it may sometimes be.
The gap is in bringing that idea across the entire organization. People talk about being customer led, but they are not infusing customer voice into all aspects of the business. For instance, in my last role leading the CS team, no one was talking to customers when they decided to leave. We were not having sit-down exit interviews and then bringing those themes back to the team.
A survey is a great starting point for data, but what are the qualitative points when we sit down and talk to them? All the way to events. You may have a great customer event, but are you infusing customers as the leading voice? When you do a product launch, where is the customer voice on why a feature was brought forward, who wanted it, and how they will use it to be successful?
We are doing a better job capturing voice with new tools, but we are still missing the tried-and-true best practices and methodology of leveraging customer voice across the entire journey to impact and grow the organization in meaningful ways.
Host: I could not agree more. Advocacy does not belong in a silo. Deena, from a best practice perspective, how do you see advocacy and customer voice embedded throughout the customer journey?
Deena: We have a methodology we call lifecycle advocacy. It moves advocacy from a place you go to access opportunities into opportunities being served up at the right time, in the right channel, to the right customer.
You look for signals and triggers that tell you who is the right customer to send for a peer review, or when is the right time to ask someone to participate in a piece of customer evidence or a story. Too often advocacy lives in a silo, and sometimes it even lives only in a practitioner’s head.
Lifecycle advocacy removes guesswork and boundaries. It asks for a holistic picture of the customer. Where are they in their product adoption journey? What is the health of the account? How often are they interacting with us, our content, or other opportunities? Let that guide what you put in front of them.
Host: Amazing. Liz, you have worked with a wide range of B2B organizations. What are some of the most creative or effective ways you have seen brands bring authentic voice into their go-to-market motions?
Liz: One that immediately comes to mind is Amplitude’s Aha campaign. Instead of capturing another case study, they created a holistic campaign. They asked customers to sit down and tell them the aha moments they had with the product. When you combine those moments under a single theme, the impact is amplified. It signals that when people use the product, they are delighted and have impactful moments.
That is a great example of rethinking how customer voice is brought into GTM. We also see vendors making progress on letting prospects self-serve their reference experience and hear from customers at the point of need. We have to rethink how people consume content, how they hear about products and services, and how we empower advocates in those moments.
Deena: I will add that authentic does not have to mean non-anonymous. We are seeing the rise of anonymous or blind material where a customer story is told without naming the brand. That piece can be used publicly, and then the person or brand can be revealed later in a smaller or more private setting. It is still very authentic.
More broadly, I co-authored a book called The Messenger is the Message, and that remains true. Organizations that position customers as the conduit of the message will be heard above the noise. We have to get out of the way and let customers be the messenger. People are skeptical of brands.
Host: Absolutely. Deena, you started to allude to metrics and proving impact. What metrics matter most when it comes to showing the business value of customer voice?
Deena: We think a lot about leading indicators versus real business impact. Advocacy has been comfortable talking about leading indicators like how many case studies, how many program members, and overall engagement rates. The leap is connecting a piece of content to dollars and cents. Or connecting program membership to business impact.
Often teams are already showing impact, but they are not telling the right internal story. We helped one customer reframe her reporting and it moved advocacy forward inside the business. If you are unsure what business impact means at your company, look at what CS, Sales, and Marketing are held accountable to. That will show you where to hitch your metrics.
Liz: To get specific, we all end up measured on revenue growth and retention. Customer advocacy and marketing do not own those numbers, but they can influence them. Consider what portion of your revenue base you are touching through your programs. Where are the second connections you are bringing in?
If you can, measure upsell, cross-sell, and account growth of customers in your programs against a sample of customers not in your programs. Do the same for retention. If you have one person in a program, two, or three, does churn risk go down when you are multithreaded across programs, perhaps with an executive in one and a champion in a user community?
This is hard to measure and there are blockers, especially at larger organizations, but it is the right work. Do not forget efficiency. How much cost are you deflecting by leveraging customers to amplify social presence or deflect support tickets in community? Start measuring real dollars and cents and stop resting on vanity counts like total reviews alone. Your CEO will need more than that.
Host: Really concrete advice. Thank you. We all know AI is changing how we engage with customers. How do you see it helping or hindering authentic customer voice?
Liz: We do not fully know yet. Over the past several months, I have noticed a general questioning of authenticity in everything. I read something and wonder whether it was written by AI, supplemented by AI, or a person’s real thoughts and expertise.
If AI outputs are polished, maybe we will see a rise in organizations letting go and leaning further into unpolished, real content. To demonstrate authenticity, you have to allow the good, the bad, the ugly, and the wonderful to coexist. That might make readers less skeptical.
Deena: I think there will be a lot of positives. How much voice can we capture and lift up? Deciphering customer voice used to be a heavy lift. Now we have a powerful machine to do some of that work so we can get to the truth and the nuggets faster.
We will see customer-generated content triple because of the speed. Creation and syndication will happen in minutes. The fun begins as organizations figure out how to make their customer content stand out in a sea of it. We will come back to familiar questions about breaking through brand noise and now customer noise. Brands have empowered customers to share. With AI in place, we need new best practices to rise above.
Host: We are coming up on time. One last question for each of you. What is your bold prediction for how customer voice and advocacy will evolve in the next few years?
Liz: There is a lot of gray area among customer marketing, customer experience, and customer success. As we break down silos, where is the line? With community also entering the conversation, my prediction is these groups will roll up under single leadership and work more closely together. They will need to be one team rather than competing for ownership.
Deena: My prediction may be scandalous. In the next few years, we will stop paying attention to B2B peer review sites. We have created a crisis of trust by chasing only five-star reviews, over-incentivizing, and over-indexing on review volume. The skepticism we see in B2C has come to B2B. I do not see review vendors making changes that reverse the sentiment. That will open space for something new to take root. I do not know what that is yet, but I do not think peer review sites will command the same focus.
Host: I love those predictions. Liz and Deena, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining us and sharing thoughtful perspectives on what it means to embed customer voice across the entire journey. To our audience, if you found this valuable, follow along for more episodes with leaders who are shaping the future of customer-led growth.
Thank you for listening, and we will see you next time.
Captivate Collective co-founders share why the most powerful customer stories are often the least polished.
The HR technology industry is booming. From talent acquisition to employee experience, new platforms are reshaping how organizations attract, retain, and empower their people. At the same time, the market has never been more competitive. Vendors are racing to stand out, HR buyers are bombarded with options, and decision-making committees are larger and more risk-averse than ever.
In this environment, one factor consistently tips the scales: the authentic voice of the customer.
At the 2025 HR Technology Conference, Deeto sat down with leaders from WEX, SeekOut, Pebl, Fountain, Eightfold.ai, Phenom, Checkr, Awardco, Employ, and Healthee to ask a simple set of questions:
Their answers paint a vivid picture of why proof beats promises and how HR tech vendors can better capture and activate customer voice to drive trust, sales, and long-term relationships.
The first theme that emerged is simple but powerful: trust does not come from the vendor, it comes from peers.
As Eric Wendt, Growth Marketing Manager at WEX, put it:
“Building trust with prospects and clients is everything. We can say we’re great, but showing real testimonials and quotes from our customers is what convinces people to choose us.”
In HR technology, where buyers are tasked with managing sensitive employee data and shaping the employee experience, trust carries extra weight. These are not just software tools, they are systems that touch every person in the organization.
Lauren Heffran, Client Director at SeekOut, highlighted the role of word of mouth:
“Word of mouth is everything. Case studies and testimonials let prospects see themselves in someone else’s shoes — it’s the ultimate way to build trust.”
And Fatima Afzal, Head of Customer Marketing & Communications at Pebl, underscored the human element:
“HR leaders want to hear from their peers. It’s not about the brand telling the story — it’s about other people validating the value proposition.”
The takeaway: in HR tech, proof is personal. Buyers are not just evaluating features; they are looking for peers who have already solved the problems they face.
If customer voice is so valuable, why don’t we see more HR tech testimonials in the wild? The leaders we interviewed pointed to a consistent set of challenges.
Bastien Botella, Head of Growth & Marketing at Fountain, described the uphill battle many vendors face:
“Internal politics. You can have sponsors who love your product, but to go on record you need approvals from a whole chain of people inside their company.”
Even the happiest customer may be blocked by corporate marketing or compliance teams.
Carlos Tobon, Senior Director of Demand Generation at Eightfold.ai, added:
“Enterprise approvals. Even happy users have to go through legal, corporate marketing, and multiple layers to tell their story publicly.”
The result: advocacy opportunities stall or die in red tape.
John Deal, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Phenom, pointed to another problem:
“The biggest challenge is knowing what stories are out there. Often they’re happening in conversations with customer success, but marketing doesn’t know unless it’s surfaced.”
Too often, proof gets trapped in silos. CS teams hear the praise, but it never reaches marketing or sales in a form that can be shared.
These barriers are especially acute in HR tech because of the sensitivity of employee data. Public case studies are harder to approve, and companies are more protective of their HR systems than almost any other part of the tech stack.
Despite the challenges, leaders offered clear and practical advice for capturing more proof.
Kiri Wire, Senior Partner Marketing Manager at Checkr, stressed the importance of reciprocity:
“Make it valuable for the customer too. Promote them as a brand, not just yourself — tell their story holistically.”
Instead of treating a testimonial as a favor, vendors should frame it as an opportunity for customers to showcase their own innovation, culture, and leadership.
Paige Bennett, Director of Experimental Marketing at Awardco, highlighted recognition:
“Recognize your clients. When customers feel seen and appreciated, they’re far more willing to partner with you to share their story.”
Recognition can be as simple as a thank you, or as formal as an awards program or industry showcase.
Megan Ferenz, Senior Customer Marketing Advocacy Manager at Employ, emphasized experiences:
“Create memorable experiences. Hosting customer events and bringing people together at conferences sparks relationships and content.”
Events not only deepen relationships but also create natural opportunities to capture stories on video, in writing, or through peer-to-peer conversations.
Finally, Omer Maman, VP of Marketing at Healthee, urged authenticity:
“Be authentic. Don’t over-polish testimonials — share the real story, even the tough parts. People believe it more.”
The most powerful proof is not scripted or overly polished. It is real, relatable, and sometimes even imperfect.
The conversations closed with a powerful insight: in HR tech, proof is not just about marketing assets, it is about human connection.
When companies empower their customers to share stories in ways that feel safe, authentic, and valuable, they not only create stronger proof for the market, they also build deeper trust with the customers themselves.
As the closing statement of the video says: In HR tech, proof isn’t just about marketing – it’s about putting human connection first. And that is earned by empowering your customers while amplifying their success.
For HR technology companies, the implications are clear:
At Deeto, we believe the future of HR tech marketing is not about louder promises. It is about smarter proof.
That is why our platform helps vendors:
Instead of chasing logos and PDFs, HR tech companies can create a living, breathing library of customer voice – always current, always accessible, and always authentic.
The HR technology space is at a turning point. As AI reshapes the workplace, as employee expectations evolve, and as new vendors flood the market, buyers will rely more than ever on the voices of their peers.
For vendors, this is not a challenge. It is an opportunity. By embracing authentic advocacy, recognizing customer contributions, and investing in platforms that make proof dynamic and scalable, HR tech companies can build the trust that accelerates growth.
Because in HR tech, just like in every human-first industry, proof beats promises every time.
Customer voice drives trust in HR tech. See why peer proof beats promises and how leaders unlock advocacy.
Something fundamental is happening in B2B business. The organizations that win aren't just those with the best products or biggest budgets – they're the ones who can harness the voice of their customers most effectively across every team.
But here's the problem: most companies are sitting on a goldmine of customer intelligence and don't even know it.
Right now, your most valuable customer insights are probably scattered across departments. Your product team's user feedback is isolated from customer success health data. Your marketing collateral is disconnected from sales needs. Your customer feedback isn't informing product roadmaps.
This isn't just an organizational problem – it's a strategic disadvantage. Every team is optimizing based on their slice of siloed customer knowledge, whilst missing the bigger picture that could transform how you serve customers and grow your business.
When your product team prioritizes features, what information are they using to guide those critical decisions? Are they analyzing comprehensive patterns from customer success stories, quotes, and personalized interviews to understand real user needs? Or are they working with incomplete data and making educated guesses?
When your customer success team is identifying at-risk accounts, what signals are they using? Are they analyzing sentiment patterns from customer feedback and engagement data to spot early warning signs? Or are they relying solely on usage metrics that might miss critical satisfaction indicators?
The most successful B2B organizations share a common trait: they've created a unified view of customer intelligence that informs every decision across every department. They don't just collect customer feedback – they identify patterns that drive satisfaction, understand why certain customers succeed, and systematically apply those insights from product development to marketing campaigns.
Product teams use customer voice to build features that actually matter. Customer success teams predict and prevent churn using cross-functional insights. Sales and marketing teams access compelling proof points informed by real customer interviews. Everyone creates better experiences based on authentic feedback.
But for most companies, this level of integrated customer knowledge remains frustratingly out of reach. Not because they lack valuable insights, but because their systems treat customer knowledge like departmental silos instead of organizational assets.
The gap between having customer data and actually leveraging customer intelligence across teams is where opportunities get lost. It's where product improvements miss the mark. It's where customer success interventions happen too late. It's where compelling stories remain buried when teams need them most.
Imagine if every customer interaction, feedback and success story automatically contributed to growing intelligence about what drives success across your entire business. What if understanding customer needs wasn't about each department maintaining separate data, but about having an integrated system that reveals insights no single team could see alone?
Picture a world where your customer intelligence doesn't just document what happened – it predicts what's next. Where patterns in customer feedback inform product roadmaps. Where early indicators of customer health are visible across all teams. Where the most relevant customer stories surface exactly when any team needs them.
This isn't just better organization. It's the transformation from departmental customer data to organizational customer intelligence.
The organizations that achieve this first will have an insurmountable advantage. They'll build better products because they understand what customers actually value. They'll retain more customers because they can predict and prevent issues. They'll win more deals because they're using the most relevant proof points. They'll create better experiences because they understand what resonates with their market.
Artificial intelligence is finally advanced enough to unlock this potential. Not AI that replaces human insight, but AI that amplifies it across departments and automatically acts on what it discovers. AI that can identify patterns across thousands of customer interviews that would take teams months to discover manually – and then immediately trigger the right workflows based on those insights.
While traditional customer intelligence platforms stop at surfacing dashboards, AI-powered systems can now learn from every interaction to automatically prioritize product roadmaps, trigger targeted marketing campaigns, and alert customer success teams to at-risk accounts – all simultaneously across departments.
We're at the inflection point where scattered customer data can become unified customer intelligence that drives immediate action. Where the voice of your customers transforms from departmental insights into organizational competitive advantages that execute themselves in real-time.
The next generation of B2B success will be built on integrated, unified customer intelligence – not siloed customer data. Companies that can systematically connect insights across all teams will capture increasingly larger market share.
This transformation is already beginning. The organizations that recognize it early and invest in turning customer voice into organizational intelligence will build advantages that compound over time. Every customer interaction will make them smarter across all departments. Every piece of feedback will improve their ability to serve customers better. Every success story will contribute to intelligence that drives better outcomes everywhere.
The question for every B2B leader is simple: Will you be leveraging integrated customer intelligence, or will you be competing against organizations that are?
At Deeto, we've been thinking deeply about this transformation. We've seen how organizations struggle to unlock the intelligence hidden across their customer touch points. We understand the gap between having valuable customer knowledge in different departments and actually leveraging integrated customer intelligence for strategic advantage.
We're about to change that.
Very soon, we'll be unveiling how artificial intelligence can transform scattered customer feedback into unified organizational intelligence. How your existing customer data across all teams can become a competitive advantage. How the voice of your customers can drive every aspect of your business strategy.
The future of customer-driven organizations is closer than you think.
Stay tuned. The revolution in customer intelligence is about to begin.
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how AI is transforming scattered customer feedback across departments into unified organizational intelligence
Something big is happening in B2B marketing, and it’s not just another refresh of advocacy programs.
Customer marketing is entering a new (new) era. Not just the era of testimonials, reference calls, and post-sale newsletters. That was the first wave. This one is more ambitious, more strategic, and more embedded in how companies grow. It’s no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the connective tissue of go-to-market success.
The Customer Marketing Summit in San Francisco brought this shift into sharp focus. Here’s what stood out.
Customer marketing is no longer a downstream function. The best teams are influencing product roadmaps, enabling sales with real-time proof, driving adoption and retention, and powering expansion plays.
Advocacy is still part of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole picture. Sessions like “The Post-Sale Power Play” challenged attendees to stop treating customer marketing as an afterthought and start aligning it to real business outcomes like pipeline influence, win rate acceleration, and expansion revenue.
Scaling the old way isn’t working. Spreadsheets, one-off emails, and static PDF case studies slow everyone down and waste time.
In sessions like “From Hype to Habit,” customer marketers shared how they are leaning into AI and automation to identify advocates in real time, collect content without extra lift, match stories to deals automatically, and score sentiment to prevent burnout.
The goal isn’t to lose the human element. It’s to reduce the chaos and give marketers space to focus on what really matters—strategy, relationships, and impact.
This new (new) era of customer marketing is built on cross-functional collaboration. Sales needs high-trust proof. Product needs real-time feedback. CS needs engagement signals. Demand Gen needs credible content.
The most effective programs are embedded across teams and workflows. Customer marketing has become a critical operator across the GTM motion, supporting sales with proof, helping PMM validate messaging, and giving CS the insights they need to keep customers engaged and growing.
One of the most energizing sessions came from Emily Gover at Dropbox, who shared how Dropbox evolved its customer marketing program from reactive and manual to strategic and scalable.
Dropbox had a strong base of customer advocates, but advocacy efforts were scattered. Customer data lived across Salesforce, Airtable, Slack, Influitive, and spreadsheets. Sales didn’t find the old system useful, and reference requests felt like a scramble.
Emily brought focus, vision, and structure to the program. She led Dropbox’s shift to a modern customer marketing model, with a guiding principle: deliver the right customer voice, at the right time, in the right moment.
She helped the team secure executive sponsorship, pilot new workflows, and align stakeholders across Sales, CS, Enablement, and Product. With Deeto’s flexibility and AI-powered tools, Dropbox created a system that could scale and deliver impact.
Here’s how Emily and her team did it:
Sales began to trust and use the program. Reference calls were streamlined. Customer stories became easier to deliver. And everything was measurable.
Dropbox used AI to solve common problems. Volume? They grew the pool without extra lift. Speed? They delivered proof in real time. Trust? They protected advocates with sentiment scoring and approval workflows.
Emily’s leadership showed what’s possible when customer marketing is given the tools, support, and strategic focus it deserves.
The summit reinforced that proof is only the beginning. Customer marketers are influencing far more than advocacy.
Retention wins are becoming core KPIs. Product teams are co-creating launch plans with customer marketers. Expansion plays are powered by persona-specific content. And executive dashboards are tracking lifecycle impact—not just activity volume.
The future is about outcomes, not outputs.
Special shoutout to Bridget Heaton, Head of Customer Marketing at WRITER, who hosted the day with humor, warmth, and absolute pro-level energy. And who inspired the title of this blog post! She kept the sessions flowing, the crowd engaged, and the vibe on point. She set the tone for an event that felt both thoughtful and fun.
Big thanks to everyone who visited the Deeto booth and joined us at the Topgolf Swing Suite for happy hour. It was such a joy to connect in person.
And congratulations to our giveaway winners:
We’ll be in touch to ship out your prizes.
The old era of customer marketing is behind us. What’s ahead is smarter, more strategic, and more essential to growth than ever before.
This new (new) era is powered by AI. It is full-funnel and cross-functional. It is advocate-first and revenue-aligned.
Customer marketers are no longer operating in the background. They’re leading the way.
And if Emily’s session taught us anything, it’s this: when you give customer marketers a seat at the table, they build systems that move the business forward.
Want to see how Dropbox did it with Deeto? Let’s talk!
Customer marketing has entered a new era—strategic, scalable, and finally driving revenue where it matters most.
Today, we're officially launching Deeto's AI Interview Agent—a breakthrough solution that transforms how companies engage customers in Customer Voice programs and strategic relationships.
The challenge is clear across the industry: customer-led growth teams struggle with low participation rates, forced testimonials, and transactional relationships that fail to deliver authentic value. Despite customers' willingness to share their success stories and feedback, traditional approaches—generic email templates, one-size-fits-all processes, and vendor-centric asks—consistently fall short of creating meaningful interactions.
Our AI Interview Agent addresses this fundamental disconnect by personalizing every customer interaction based on their unique business goals, communication preferences, and strategic priorities.
Every customer relationship is unique. An innovation-focused CTO perceives their experience and priorities differently than a growth-focused CEO. An established enterprise customer has different motivations for sharing their voice than a fast-growing startup.
Yet most onboarding flows treat them identically—same email template, same value proposition, same questions, same process.
The result? Customers feel like they're being asked to do cookie-cutter vendor marketing rather than participating in mutual value creation. Customer-led growth teams get lukewarm participation that produces mediocre content. Customer relationships become transactional rather than strategic.
Even worse: customers who initially seem interested gradually disengage because the process feels disconnected from their actual business goals, communication preferences, and overall experience.
We've been exploring a fundamental question: What if AI could research each customer before inviting them to share their stories?
Not just account data or contract details, but actual communication patterns, business priorities, and sharing preferences from valid, credible sources. What if it could understand not just what to ask for, but how to frame the conversation in a way that resonates with the exact persona sitting behind the screen?
This isn't about replacing relationship building—it's about making every interaction more strategic by being more personal.
Before initiating any conversation, Deeto's AI conducts deep analysis across multiple dimensions of each customer relationship. Our research tools examine communication patterns from previous interactions, analyze their professional background, assess capacity through role and company context, and identify tone preferences.
This multi-layered research approach enables us to craft interactions that resonate on both professional and personal levels:
Innovation-Focused CTO: A short, technical interview focusing on the implementation and practical impact of your tools on their team.
Growth-Focused CEO: An executive-level discussion highlighting business results and competitive advantages achieved through your partnership.
Customer Success Leader: A detailed case study conversation exploring implementation strategies and measurable outcomes for peer education.
The same opportunity becomes three entirely different conversations—each calibrated to the individual's working style, availability patterns, communication preferences, and professional experience level. Our research tools ensure every interaction feels personally relevant rather than generically corporate.
This vision requires AI orchestration that goes far beyond template personalization or basic segmentation.
We're talking about sophisticated AI facets that coordinate multiple specialized research capabilities:
This approach follows a systematic workflow: retrieving comprehensive customer profile information, analyzing relevant vendor context, generating personalized interview plans, initiating customized conversations, creating adaptive follow-up schedules, and continuously refining communication style based on interaction history until the nurturing process achieves its objectives.
These capabilities work together seamlessly to create something that feels effortlessly strategic to each customer.
For Customers: Customer voice conversations that feel personally relevant to their business goals, respect their communication preferences, and clearly demonstrate an understanding of who they are.
For Customer Marketing Teams: Higher acceptance rates, better quality participation, and stronger ongoing relationships with participating customers.
For Customer Success Teams: Customer voice activities that strengthen customer relationships and provide real, relevant sentiment analysis.
For Marketing Teams: Authentic customer voice content from genuinely engaged customers who understand and believe in the value they're creating.
For Product Teams: Authentic customer feedback that can make a real impact on overall product roadmap and adoption.
We're not just talking about better interaction technology. We're talking about fundamentally changing how customers experience sharing their voice.
When customers feel that customer voice opportunities are genuinely aligned with their business goals, they don't just participate—they become enthusiastic partners who actively look for ways to expand their involvement and influence.
That's the future we're launching: customer voice relationships that grow stronger over time through AI that makes every interaction more strategic, more valuable, and more genuinely collaborative.
The future of customer-led-growth is here.
At Deeto, we've always believed that inviting customers to share their voice should feel natural and valuable—not like another vendor request. Today, we're excited to share a glimpse of what we've been working on: an AI Interview Agent that transforms how you invite and onboard your customers into customer voice programs.
Most companies today struggle with the same fundamental challenge: turning customers into growth engines. The traditional approach relies on generic email templates, standardized processes, and one-size-fits-all messaging that treats every customer relationship identically.
The results speak for themselves. Customer Success teams report low participation rates in voice programs. Marketing teams struggle to generate authentic testimonials and case studies. Sales teams lack the compelling customer stories they need to close deals. Meanwhile, customers feel bombarded by requests that seem disconnected from their actual business goals and priorities.
This disconnect isn't accidental—it's the inevitable result of treating customer voice programs as marketing campaigns rather than strategic partnerships. When customers receive generic invitations that could have been sent to anyone, they respond accordingly: with polite declines or lukewarm participation that produces mediocre content.
The cost of this approach extends beyond missed opportunities. It damages customer relationships by positioning the vendor as someone who takes rather than someone who creates mutual value. Every generic request reinforces the perception that customer voice programs exist to serve vendor needs rather than customer success.
We've heard consistent feedback from different teams: getting customers to say "yes" to sharing their voice is hard, but getting them engaged and providing authentic insights is even harder. Our AI Interview Agent is designed to change that by creating personalized experiences that help customers see real value.
The challenge runs deeper than most teams realize. It's not just about improving response rates—it's about fundamentally changing the customer experience from transactional to transformational. When customers feel genuinely understood and valued, they don't just participate in voice programs; they become enthusiastic contributors who actively seek opportunities to share their stories.
Early internal testing shows promising results: customers respond more positively when the AI adapts to their communication style and business context, and we're seeing higher-quality customer voice content from participants who feel genuinely engaged.
But the impact extends beyond individual interactions. Teams using personalized, AI-powered approaches report stronger customer relationships, increased customer lifetime value, and more authentic marketing content that resonates with prospects. The ripple effects touch every aspect of brand growth.
What makes conversational AI different from traditional automation? The answer lies in understanding context, nuance, and individual preferences at a level that generic systems simply cannot match.
Traditional customer voice programs operate on assumptions: that all customers respond to the same value propositions, that standard email templates work across industries, that timing doesn't matter, and that one questionnaire format suits everyone. These assumptions break down when applied to real customer interactions.
Conversational AI changes the equation by treating every customer interaction as unique. Instead of broadcasting generic messages, it conducts research, analyzes patterns, and crafts approaches that resonate with specific individuals based on their communication preferences, business priorities, and relationship history.
This isn't about replacing human relationship-building—it's about augmenting human insight with AI capabilities that can process vast amounts of relationship data and identify personalization opportunities that humans might miss.
Traditional feedback invitations feel transactional and one-size-fits-all. Our AI Interview Agent creates personalized, conversational experiences that make your customers excited to participate.
Here's what makes it different:
Time-Adaptive: The AI adjusts conversation depth and pacing based on each customer's availability and communication preferences. A busy CTO might receive a concise, technical discussion proposal, while a relationship-focused CEO might get an invitation for a more comprehensive strategic conversation.
Relationship-Aware: Adapts approach based on the customer's role, industry, and relationship stage with your company. New customers might be approached differently than long-term partners, and enterprise customers receive different messaging than startup clients.
Smart Value Discovery: Automatically identifies what customer voice opportunities would be most valuable and relevant for each customer. Rather than asking every customer to participate in the same activities, the AI matches opportunities to individual goals and interests.
Conversational Flow: Natural dialogue that feels like a strategic partnership conversation, not a vendor request. The AI understands context, maintains conversational continuity, and adapts its approach based on customer responses.
When customer voice programs work effectively, the benefits extend far beyond marketing content. Customers who feel genuinely valued and understood become more than references—they become partners in growth.
These enhanced relationships drive measurable business outcomes: increased retention rates, higher expansion revenue, more qualified referrals, and authentic advocacy that prospects trust. The quality of customer voice content improves dramatically when participants feel genuinely engaged rather than obligated.
For Customer Success teams, effective voice programs strengthen relationships rather than creating additional vendor requests. For Marketing teams, authentic content from engaged customers outperforms any manufactured messaging. For Sales teams, compelling customer stories from enthusiastic advocates close deals more effectively than generic case studies.
The compound effect creates a virtuous cycle: better customer experiences lead to stronger relationships, which generate more authentic content, which drives better business outcomes, which enables teams to invest more in actual customers.
The shift toward conversational AI represents more than a technology upgrade—it signals a fundamental change in how companies think about customer relationships. Instead of extracting value through standardized processes, forward-thinking organizations create value through personalized experiences that respect individual preferences and priorities.
This transformation requires rethinking traditional assumptions about scale and personalization. Many teams believe they must choose between efficient processes and personalized experiences. Conversational AI eliminates this false choice by enabling personalized interactions at scale.
We're currently working with a select group of design partners to refine the experience before a broader launch. These partnerships allow us to test our approach across different industries, customer types, and business models while gathering feedback that shapes the final product.
Stay tuned—we'll be sharing more about our AI Interview Agent journey very soon. The future of customer-led growth is conversational, and we're excited to show you what becomes possible when technology serves relationship-building rather than replacing it.
The future of Customer-Led-Growth is conversational, let's learn what that means.
See how Deeto helps you turn customer voice into a GTM advantage.
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