When Your Best Marketers Are Your Customers

If you’ve been in this space long enough, you’ve felt the difference when a pitch or campaign lands because it’s led by someone who actually lives the problem. These people are our champions. You could also call them the backbone of every major marketing effort we've ever shipped.
The fastest route to credibility – and to marketing content that actually moves your buyer – is to involve your best customers as collaborators and co-creators in the work itself.

Let’s explore what that looks like in the wild.

Ditch “Marketing at People.” Learn From Them Instead.

In September we held a hands-on workshop co-hosted by Casey Samulski at Mission, where a group of product marketers spent 45min verticalizing content for real-world audiences. It wasn’t me or our CEO presenting our product - it was Casey, walking attendees through his process, step by step.

It doesn’t end there - After a full day of workshops, networking and pitching, Casey tagged along to a mishmash of a gym session. You haven’t lived until you’ve attempted Turkish getups (try it!) with someone who could deconstruct your last site redesign in the same breath. That’s where customer understanding gets human. It’s when the “customer” in the persona flip book starts breathing right next to you – describing your product features in a totally different way or highlighting problems and use cases you’ve never thought of before. Let them teach you the proof points that actually matter.

Let Customer Champions Drive the Narrative

This summer, on a very typical foggy day in San Francisco, we let Keith Hamrick at Docusign take the mic. Forget corporate B-roll or a stack of staged testimonials. Keith told a story about his morning commute (a 9 mile run with 2200ft of gain across the Marin Headlands!!), how he blends real insights into his strategy, and – most importantly for us – how his own authentic take on our product became the most credible piece of content we launched that quarter. “He didn’t just list features; he told the story of value as he lived it—making our product feel real, not theoretical.” The result? Peer validation for every skeptical PMM or strategy lead who’s ever rolled their eyes at another vendor case study.

Another example: On the hottest day in 12 years in NYC, we cohosted a brunch with Natalie from Navattic. She cut straight through the marketing narrative with an organic, peer-to-peer explanation of how GetWhys actually impacts her day. No slides. No pitch. Just one champion giving another PMM the “here’s what’s real” download. I guarantee that a few unscripted minutes from Natalie in a rented out coffeeshop did more to drive credibility than any branded asset we cooked up.

These moments surfaced our best, most actionable messaging – because it’s so obviously real, so clearly trusted.

Why Co-Creation Beats Corporate Messaging Every Time

What these stories share is a simple but underplayed principle: When you shift from marketing at customers to marketing with them, several things happen:

• Your content becomes truly insight-driven and way less corporate.
• You gain actual validation by working with PMMs and leaders their peers already trust
• Most of all, you build relationship-driven success – the kind that can’t be faked or repackaged.

This isn’t just about chasing another shiny testimonial. It’s about structuring your workflow so that your best marketers really are your customers: co-creating narrative, validating messaging through their workflows, and driving peer advocacy that’s impossible to manufacture internally.

None of this is painless. The people who can deliver peer validation are busy, often skeptical, and sometimes a little allergic to the marketing “side of the house.” - especially if long review cycles are involved. But if you invite them into the process with authenticity, you unlock all the things B2B sales and marketing leaders say they want: credibility, alignment, trusted customer voice, and rapid iteration.

Practical Takeaways

• Forget the perfect, finalized report or case study. Start small, ask “what am I missing?” and build tighter loops with your real-world champions.
• Invite your champions into the process early. Don’t wait until you need a quote for the website.
• Swap feature-first content for buyer-aligned stories and “borrowed” language directly from customer conversations. Let your product’s impact be narrated by the people living with it.
• The best proof points are the ones you co-create – not because marketing forced it, but because your champions want their peers to get value.

Take a minute to reflect on the relationships you’ve built – the champions, the critics, the people whose voices resurface in every major win.

How can you let them drive more of your marketing next quarter? What’s one real-world, unscripted customer interaction you can bring into your next messaging sprint, workshop or … blogpost?

Authenticity isn’t just the path to great marketing. It’s the only one that lasts.