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“Kevin Lau: If no one knows what you're doing, if they can't quantify exactly what is the impact you're driving within the organization, some executive could just say, does this function even need to exist? And so how do we highlight what's happening for the customer as part of the programs they're involved in? How do you get that visibility? It's being able to communicate proactively.”

[0:20] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is a repeat guest, Kevin Lau, who's the VP of customer engagement at Freshworks. 

Many of you will know Kevin from all of this incredible LinkedIn content where he really tries to elevate the function and shares all the things that he's learned from his time as a customer marketer and now as a customer engagement executive. 

I'm so excited to have him back, and there's so much I wanna talk to him about. Primarily focused around how do we get customer marketers promoted in 2025 and 2026. This function has clearly been through a lot, and now it's time to play offense and talk about how do you maximize your impact. And I can't think of a better person than Kevin to talk about all this with. 

Welcome, Kevin.

[1:04] Kevin Lau: Cool. Thanks again, Sunny, for having me.

[1:06] Sunny Manivannan: Great. Listen, it's been 18 months since you were last on the show. What's changed for you professionally or in how you're thinking about customer marketing?

[1:14] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, I've had a lot of both personal and professional changes. So one, I had a baby. So go through the whole process of being a new dad. So that was a big one. And then I was also crazy enough to start a new job at the same time. So my wife was about 7, almost 8 months pregnant at that point. So I left F5. Great company. I started a new job at a company called Freshworks. We do employee and customer experience software. So it's been a lot of big changes. Basically, I had to kind of start a whole new function from scratch. But we'll talk a little bit more about that as part of the podcast.

[1:49] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Let me ask you a question. Just a macro question around customer marketing. In your view, what is the biggest shift that's happening in customer marketing now? We can look back at the last 6 months perhaps, but what do you think are the macro forces that are shaping how customer marketing is viewed by, you know, CEOs or CMOs today in 2023?

[2:09] Kevin Lau: We talk a lot about this, I think, in similar forms, conversations, but I think it goes back hand in hand with what is the role of customer marketing in general. I think, historically, it's been seen as sort of like this evidence team that, frankly, I think CMOs didn't know exactly where to put them. You know, they could have been aligned to a function like corporate marketing, helping with storytelling. They could be aligned with product marketing to help with messaging and some of the evidence and insights. 

But I think if you look at, you know, 2020 when we went through this whole pandemic and this craziness, the focus on sort of the post-sale experience has always been something that I've been super passionate about, but something that I think has gotten higher sensitivity. Because I think in SaaS, the way that things are kind of evolving, the way that AI is kind of taking over how we go to market, how do we innovate, I don't think we can take it for granted anymore—sort of, like, the fact that we have customers that are paying for our solution services. 

And so I think inherently where this is all coming to a head is that there hasn't been a defined sort of post-sale engagement team. You could make the argument that it could be customer success, could be support, but I would say it's very fragmented. Regardless of what company or organization you work for, what size, there you know, if you talk to a customer across different industries and segments, I think the challenge is that there's not consistency in how a customer either experiences your solutions or the journey that they go through once they actually sign on the dotted line and become a customer. 

And so I think the role of customer marketing—and maybe customer marketing is not the right definition of it all because I think it gives a very narrow view of just this is a marketing function as opposed to really, I would say, kind of more of a customer experience type of role that looks at the entire funnel, the entire journey. 

And so I think that's still kind of an ongoing debate as far as we look at where these different functions are coming ahead and how do we support the customer at the end of the day.

[3:59] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna ask you 1 more question about your sort of purview at Freshworks. Tell me a little bit about your team. What are your success metrics, and how is the team organized at least at a high level?

[4:10] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, just related to your last question, I thought about this a lot because the customer marketing team, we actually call it customer engagement for a purpose. And the reason behind it was because most of what people inherently think about—how do we leverage the customer to help go to market—really fell under sort of the storytelling aspect. 

And I wanna kinda change the script that stories are sort of like an outcome if you do all these other things right within the post-sale experience. Right? So the customer sees value, if they go live, if they see some time-measurable impact, the likelihood that they wanna become an advocate increases. Right? 

And so I try to think about intentionally around what are the areas around how do we support the customer from more of, like, a center of excellence. We think about the entire post-sale experience—I mean, not just post-sale. I think we're really thinking about the whole lifecycle. What are the different dependencies we have to get that customer to become a raving fan? And so the way we kinda structure the team is we essentially have 6 foundational pillars. Advocacy, of course, is sort of, like, the most well-understood. It's everything about how do we create more storytelling, how do we focus on creating a platform for customers to share their use cases and innovations that they're seeing with using our products. 

But similar to the other conversations, we also built out a team specifically focused on lifecycle retention marketing. So how do we make sure that customer has a very impactful 90-day onboarding experience? How do we set that customer up to success? What are the tools and resources to make sure they know exactly once they get access to your technology, what do they do from there? Essentially, kind of like a copilot, if you will, to kinda help walk them through the step-by-step journey so that they start to see that realized value, and we don't leave it to chance anymore. 

In addition to that, we have our traditional community forums where we actually engage our customers for peer-to-peer networking, helping to answer and triage questions or concerns that might turn into a support escalation down the road if we're not being proactive. We also have a team that's very focused on customer education. 

So we rolled out sort of a new university curriculum that is meant to be self-service in nature. So a customer doesn't always want to talk to a CSM or support agent. You know, they'd rather, in some cases, just learn on their own. And so we wanna be able to meet the customer where they're at. 

And then we also have some other functions like voice of the customer—how we're actually measuring insights, feedback. How do we think about it from a horizontal angle across the company on customer communications? You know, 1-to-many comms. How do we organize that effectively with other folks within the team in the organization? And the other areas that, you know, we historically have played very heavily in sort of left that practitioner audience. And I specifically designed a team, so we're focused on personas. 

So how do we engage the customer from practitioner to sort of, like, that mid-level influence and then all the way to the executive audience? And so that's kind of how I have my team structured today, but it went through a lot of evolution as we got to this kind of holistic charter.

[6:58] Sunny Manivannan: I love this vision of customer engagement as almost like a customer copilot for their experience. Just guiding them to the next best step and helping them get further along their journey faster in terms of realized value. And that's an incredible vision and, yeah, awesome awesome estimation of the whole organization. Thank you. Okay. 

Let me switch gears now. I wanna talk to you. I wanna just spend the rest of this time talking about promotions. You are one of the very few vice presidents in this space in general. And, you know, now you support an organization, and you're building this organization as you just mentioned. I wanna ask you a whole bunch of questions around, you know, promotions. 

Let me start with this one, which is when people say they wanna get promoted in customer marketing, what does that actually mean? What are the common career paths and titles that you're seeing emerge today? What are the options for, let's say, somebody who's a manager-level person today?

[7:48] Kevin Lau: I think the fact that there hasn't been a very linear kind of career path for a customer marketer, I, even myself, like, I didn't necessarily get started in customer marketing. I kinda landed in this role or in this kind of career trajectory a little bit by accident. 

You know, I started doing things from a sales standpoint, then got into community management, social media, and all that. But I think the average customer marketer, they may have different types of roles that land them ultimately into an advocacy type of function. Right? They may come from customer success. They may come from being a business development rep or maybe even the managing marketer for that matter. I think those other types of industries and careers have a more linear progression. Right? 

Like, if you're a sales rep and you wanna continue in sales, you know that eventually your aspiration could be being a CRO or head of field sales. If you're in demand gen, typically, your career path is either becoming a vice president of demand or maybe a CMO one day. And I think you could say the same case with, like, brand and other functions. I think because customer marketing is such a unique role in that you could easily make the argument you could stay within marketing and be a CMO, but I think we haven't really seen that in fruition from a general population standpoint within the tech space. I think equally, you could make the argument that, you know, you could also go down the route of being a chief customer officer or even, like, a chief experience officer. 

I think what's happening right now is that the lines are blurring between marketing, support, customer experience, customer success. And I think in the future, especially with the evolution of seeing a sort of AI in general, there's gonna be sort of, like, one function when we think about the post-sale. And whether that is a chief customer role or experience role, I think that's where the evolution is going. But I think what the Right. The nice thing within our industry that we have control over is that we can kinda chart our own destiny. 

I've actually been kind of a big fan of letting whoever you report up to, let them know what are the options available. Because the traditional CMO is not necessarily gonna be as strong within the customer space. They may traditionally be more of a demand or brand marketer or someone that's focused on PR, and so they need some coaching and guidance. 

So going back to your original question around what does it take to get promoted, I think one aspect of it has to be think about what is your vision of where you wanna go from a career perspective. I don't think you necessarily want to just leave it in the hands of your boss to decide what that could be. I think you have to give them options. What does it look like? What could it be from a mandate perspective? Because every company is gonna be slightly different on where these things kinda fall. 

But I think if you can make it around the angle of what's in the best interest of the customer, you can start to align all these various teams and leaders across the board to help be your internal advocate and help you with that promotion. You know, when I look at promotions within my team, I don't look at just for subject matter expertise because I think you learn a lot of these things within customer marketing or soft skills too. And I think as you become whether you're a specialist to a manager to a director, you almost become more of a generalist as you move up within the chain. Right. 

I had to learn that myself as I've moved from being a first-time manager a couple of years ago to now being a VP where I oversee a larger team. And a lot of it requires stakeholder management with our CEO, with our CMO or chief customer officer, you know, because they don't necessarily understand the intricacies of what customer marketing does. They may understand sorta, like, the high level you know, you guys do things around making sure customers are happy and satisfied. 

But beyond that, they need us to kinda help guide and mentor them in some way. So it's kinda like you're coaching up just as you're coaching down. And we can talk more about the specifics there, but that's kind of just generally how I think about the promotion cycle even before we get to, you know, what role do you wanna get to next.

[11:22] Sunny Manivannan: I'm very curious as to your perspective on you know, when you're assessing someone for the next level, what signals do you look for that tell you that they're ready to the next level? You've talked a little bit about not just subject matter expertise, but more of the soft skills. What are their signals? And can you expand more on this?

[11:38] Kevin Lau: I look inherently for people that, one, they're hungry. They wanna learn. They wanna grow. Regardless of what level they're at, you see people that are essentially they're passionate about what they do. And I think that passion translates way beyond the user experience they have. I think if you can find those individuals and mold them and help give them that mentorship and that guidance, those are the people that have the potential to kinda do anything. 

And I think that's where there's sort of an art and science within customer marketing where what's nice about it is that it's not necessarily prescriptive similar to demand where you're running an ad campaign. You know exactly how it's gonna run. There's this element around the customer, which is slightly different. Right? The way that you talk to customers, the way that you nurture them, the way that you inherently get them to participate in some type of engagement with your company. 

And so that's why it balances where the relationship aspect as well as what are some of the impacts it's gonna drive for the business by leveraging this customer for different types of activities or engagement. And so I look for sort of like those soft skills, the inherent passion that a person has, their level of precision and discipline. I think that goes hand in hand as they kinda learn whether they're taking on a support role within your team. 

And maybe as an example, they're helping to fulfill reference requests or, you know, they're being sort of like an assistant to someone else that's more senior. And then eventually when they start to take on a program that they're owning from end to end, what was the thought process that got them from starting the program to how they finish it? And then it's not so much how much they finish it, but the process that goes into how they plan and execute and what's the post follow-up across it. 

So how they take that and package it and drive the execution, the communication is also super critical. I find that, you know, specifically when you're in organizations, we'll lead the silos because we're not communicating enough with each other. That's just one example. 

But I think just the ability for someone to communicate even with senior leaders way more senior than they are themselves to their peers? And how do you drive sort of that negotiation? Because I think it is very much an art and science. And you don't have to be necessarily a people manager to do that. I think you could be a strong individual contributor that still has influence where you're swaying executives and VPs as well as your general population to get them to take an action. 

So I look at all those kind of signals as ways to, you know, that this is someone that's a high performer, someone that I wanna nurture, I wanna mentor, I wanna help coach, and help, you know, carve the path of what their career can look like if they wanna continue at the same organization. Yeah. That's really amazing.

[14:08] Sunny Manivannan: I love that you talk about you never hear the word discipline that often when it comes to these promotion conversations, but you've mentioned it. You know, all the preparation, all the detail orientation that goes into successful single unit within a program. 

So let's take a references program like you mentioned. Fulfilling a single reference, there's so much detail orientation that can make the difference between a great customer experience versus a mediocre customer experience. And trusting somebody to fulfill that really, really well earns them the right to go do that across bigger, you know, influence areas, maybe take on the whole program. 

And then now you're looking at it at the program level and you can influence the program level, whichever way you think is right. And all of that, you know, you're watching. Right? Yes. You have an organization. You have a team. But I have to imagine you're the details on things just so that you know what is going well, what's not going well.

[14:56] Kevin Lau: Right.

[14:56] Sunny Manivannan: And it was great to hear you talk about, you know, hey. Leaders do watch that.

[14:59] Kevin Lau: It's okay if they mess up too. Like, if they make a mistake, but they're willing to learn from that experience and then how do they make a pivot going forward after that? It's 1 thing if someone continues to make that same mistake and then, you know, you have to have a conversation on how do we course correct. But I think the folks have even they start off strong and they have a hiccup. And then after the hiccup, they improve. I think those are the folks that actually have learned, and they could start to quickly innovate and change their approach to meet the needs of the business. And those, I think, are folks that are definitely highly sought after, the folks that you could kinda trust for execution and be able to drive a program from end to end successfully.

[15:36] Sunny Manivannan: So one of the challenges that I've faced in my career as a people leader is what you want as a leader is you want people to own outcomes for you, but those outcomes are not entirely within their control. They almost never are. 

And some people have a really, really hard time with that. And I've been in several whiteboard sessions where I will say, okay. This is the goal for the team. Can you own this goal? And they'll say, yeah. But what about this, this, and this that are not within my control? Yeah. And then we have to have the whole conversation around, well, it's under your influence. Yes. It's not under your full control. But, you know, look at my goals. My goals are not within my control. You know, I've got to depend on other people to go do things. And, you know, it just gets worse and worse the more senior you get within a company. You know, the CEO has full control over revenue growth, but yet there they are every single quarter, every single month having to go hit that number. 

So let me ask you this question, which is how much can you coach that? And what's worked for you in coaching people out of that mindset of, well, if I can't control it, I don't wanna be held accountable for it into more of, you know, a true leader where it's saying, okay. This is what the company needs, and I'm gonna go do it. And tell me a little bit about what your journey has been like coaching people through that dysfunction.

[16:45] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I really actually love our industry, customer marketing, is that inherently, I think we play more of an orchestrator role or a quarterback. We're not necessarily the front lines that—I mean, we may be talking to the customer directly, but a lot of what we're doing is through the orchestration for the rest of the company and the rest of the teams. 

And these teams have to work with us to either uncover the customer insights, learn about an opportunity where we can improve the road map, influence deals, revenue, whatever. There is, like, an inherent gap. If we didn't exist in that function, the flow of the way that go-to-market happens would just kind of stall, in my opinion. And I think the inherent nature of how we—we don't necessarily have just fixed outcomes like you said. You know, if it's something around, like, how do we improve product telemetry or usage or adoption, like, that's a perfect example. Right? 

Like, we're not necessarily the product owners that are—Right—telling the customer, okay. This is what you need to do. Like, we can help guide that action. We could help recommend the right customers to participate in, like, a product beta or something that may be going live based on the feedback that's being captured. But I think there is sort of a pro with that too is that whether you're an individual contributor or you lead a team within customer marketing, the ability to have, you know, sort of, like, the orchestrator, the quarterback for all these projects, teams see you as the person that is driving the momentum. 

But, you know, good and bad, obviously. But I think that also means our role becomes much more strategic in nature. So even for myself, like, when there's goals or outcomes when they have a major launch, if we have a customer advisory board even as example, we may be responsible for selecting members for that activity engagement, but we're not necessarily the owners for the content that a product team would deliver. We're not responsible for how we promote, you know, the launch on the website or anything else. But we can help influence sort of—and I think the keyword is influence. 

A lot of this is really just negotiation on calling out sort of the key dependencies if we know that something is wrong or we could approach it differently. And we should actually have that sort of authority to be able to say, we know the customer better than the rest of the company. This is how we should approach it better. That would lead to less friction or less challenge in the system and would actually deliver better outcomes for both us and the customer too. 

So I think it kinda shifts the perception that it's all on one person. We may be the person that's helping to drive the orchestration, but, also, I think the other part of it is how do we highlight the key dependencies that prevent us from doing our job well? And so there is sort of this inherent sense of, you know, we use this thing called a RACI model. You have a key decision maker. You have folks that are contributors. 

I see our job also as being sort of the people that help them to drive accountability. So we may not be the people that own the bottom line target, but we can drive the accountability where if something is sitting on a peer or someone within product organization or sales, we have to also be on the same page where we all have to work together as one team to be able to deliver the outcome that, you know, we set for this project and this outcome.

[19:43] Sunny Manivannan: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I love what you said about just—you know, it is just not easy to take accountability for something where you don't have full ownership, but influence, like you said, is the keyword. I think where we can influence, we do our best and let the chips fall where they may, and they usually do fall where where you want them to.

[20:00] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, I think every team has to go through some similar exercise too, especially—Right—you mentioned product as being a, like, a key one. I think any of these teams require any type of orchestration that is a bigger impact than just their own function. That I think is what also helps elevate someone to higher levels of position and authority. Right? 

Because if they're able to do that well cross-functionally—I mean, we all say that we're customer marketers that work cross-functionally. But I think being able to execute and drive that influence with all those different departments is what will actually help you get promoted and get more of these senior decision-making titles. Totally.

[20:37] Sunny Manivannan: Look. This this has been great so far. So far, I've gotten from you, you know, care about the craft and care about the details and have discipline and sort of, you know, make sure that even the basic unit of what you do is really, really excellent. 

I've gotten the idea of taking ownership even when you don't have full control. You know, you have influence, you don't have control, but still strive for ownership and tie yourself to outcomes, not just the things that you do or the activities that you do. You know, don't count the number of things that you deliver. Count what that leads to for the business. And that's been really helpful. 

I wanna ask you one last question on this front, which is what advice do you find yourself giving to customer marketers that surprises them? Like, is there any contrarian advice that you have or things that, you know, might surprise folks that are striving to get to that next level of the ladder?

[21:24] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, I I think that mistake a lot myself. I think part of it is thinking that we are actually full funnel marketers as opposed to just post-sale or just acquisition. 

And I think the customer journey in itself is a little bit broken. It you know, we all know that. I don't think it's gonna stay linear. I think with the rise we talked a lot about AI just recently too. I think what it's leading to is more opportunities for customers to be more front and center in the decision-making as opposed to led through a typical go-to-market funnel that leads them from evaluation to purchase and then expansion and growth. Right? 

And so I think because of that, we have to kind of shift our mindset of what is within our wheelhouse. And I think, traditionally, we see advocacy as just a natural thing of only what customer marketing does. And that's also can tend to be a perception of other teams that we work with. But advocacy is, like, I look at it as more of an outcome of doing all the other things well along the journey to deliver that kind of result. Right? 

So that's one thing I kind of talk a lot about. I think the other thing is, especially as I nurture sort of, like, more junior customer marketers that always wanna get promoted, I tell them, like, it's less about the number of activities you do because I think that's inherently how we had historically reported on things. And your point about outcomes, outcomes is, like, the way that you would communicate to your board. Like, what are you driving as an outcome for what happened this quarter? Just as a CEO, we have to almost take sort of, like, an almost general manager approach to what we do as a function, even if you're a general manager of just yourself or your one team. 

Because if you have that kind of mindset, then you can start to lead a function of 5 people, 10, 20, a hundred. And I think that prepares you for more leadership roles in the future to where you do have to be able to influence individuals either that fall within your team or externally. And I think the other thing is just we get asked to create a lot of content, whether it's in the form of videos, testimonials, you name it. I don't think it's necessarily we have to create more content. I think we have enough content that exists. 

It's how do we use that content effectively. I mean, we can go back and debate this a lot because I've had CEOs and executives argue with me that we need, like, the next shiny objects. But I think it really matters. We need customers to actually see value. And from that value, we can create whatever type of content needs to be, but oftentimes, it already exists in your toolkit.

[23:43] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. That's that's actually a really interesting point. And perhaps we'll get you back on a future episode and have a have a group discussion about, do we have enough content or not? 

By the way, I love what you're saying. I think more content is always great, but are we using the stuff that we already have? And I know that's a question that every CEO and CMO should just, you know, go ask and think about it. And I think that's really, really crucial. 

Was just reflecting on what you just said about this general manager's mindset and how that mindset really scales really well. You know, you can be the GM of just you and go do the outcomes across the company, but then that scales nicely to a team of 5, 10, 25, and so on. And how, you know, no CEO ever goes to a board and says, well, I had 1,500 meetings this past quarter. You know, they say, okay. How how much revenue do you have? You know, what's going on with all the things that you said you'd do 3 months ago. You know, where are they? 

And there's a whole bunch of company health metrics. That's what you're measured on, not how much work did you do or how hard did you work. And I think that for this function is a great lesson, so thank you for sharing that. Let me ask you something about something that you mentioned on LinkedIn recently, which is you talked about visibility within an organization. And how does a customer marketer go get this visibility? 

And one of the things that you said, which really stuck with me is that visibility isn't given. It's earned. How do you get noticed by leadership? How do you build cross-functional influence? And, really, how does a customer marketer advocate for their own work? This is a fairly common situation within customer marketing, which is someone is doing a lot of great work in the background. Churning out case studies, reference program is running like clockwork, trains are running on time, everything is great, customers are happy. 

But nobody within the company really knows about the importance of this person. What are one to two moves that they can make to get on the radar of senior leaders, whether it's within marketing or even outside of the function?

[25:26] Kevin Lau: One of the biggest things I think they could do for themselves is find an exec sponsor. Doesn't have to be, like, your c-level leader. It could be someone even one level above you or someone that has some inherent influence. They don't even have to have a large team. I think you wanna build concentric circles within your sphere of influence. So how do you make your sphere from a little circle to influencing a greater a greater radius? Right? 

So it starts with, I think, getting more internal awareness on just how do you communicate your wins? How do you communicate what's going on? Because to your point, like, you might be running a very efficient function around, like, just customer storytelling. But if only, like, your direct peers know, they're probably not necessarily talking about it to their bosses because they're talking about their own things. But if you can start to influence 2 or 3 or 4 levels removed from that, that's when it starts to get more visibility and highlight kind of the impact you're doing. 

Even if in your situation, it may not seem like it's earth-shattering news that the CEO would care about. I've talked to even my team about this. They thought that you know, I don't think anyone cares about what we're doing other than just our individual team. But if you don't ask them, if you don't let them know, then how will you actually know if it's actually gonna resonate with them or not? So sometimes, you have to take sort of, like, this calculated risk. And I think that's where you can start to get direct mentorship or connection with some type of exec sponsor to help guide your thinking. You know, that person might have different insights or different perspective, whether they sit within the same function as you or they sit in a completely different department. 

I'm actually a big fan of mentorship because I think it helps provide an additional level of context that is needed that we don't obviously have necessarily unless we go out there and seek it ourselves. It also empowers you to be in control of your current trajectory within that company too. Like, if you take the time to actually proactively reach out to people, I would say 9 out of 10 people that you talk to would actually raise their hand and say that I'd be happy to work with you.

[27:18] Sunny Manivannan: It's absolutely true. I think as an exec, anytime somebody reaches out to you and says, I'd love to learn more about what you're doing, you always just say yes, because those are the future leaders of the company. Right? And it's just obvious from minute one. And even if it doesn't lead to a second conversation or whatever, at least you get to understand what's going on at some other part of the company and what this person is passionate about.

[27:38] Kevin Lau: At the end of the day, it's really just sort of perspective.

[27:40] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. 

[27:40] Kevin Lau: How do you get a different perspective from someone else that has either been doing this longer than you have or has some other kind of exposure within the business that you've never been involved in. It's like merging some of the ideas together to create something more impactful.

[27:54] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. Okay. So we talked about influencing up. I wanna ask you about influencing out to different functions. How do you, let's say you're a customer marketer again, and you're, let's take you're a customer marketing manager or you're a customer marketing director. How do you get known and respected by sales, product, and customer success? Maybe if you could just take each one of those because there's various different functions. Yeah. How do you earn that respect, and how do you, you know, earn that visibility across those functions?

[28:23] Kevin Lau: We did this exercise once for, like, an off-site. It was called, like, speed of trust. It was, like, this whole Stephen Covey exercise, but it wasn't so much about, like, where you sit within the business. Inherently, we as humans, we're all emotional creatures. I think the more trust you could build, I think it also inherently the more visibility to build within the organization because it's it's fluid. Right? 

And so I think at the end of the day, it's sort of, like, the trust that you establish with sales. Maybe that first instance is, one, understanding what are their goals. So you know with your executive team or the sales team and find out, okay, you have a territory. You have a number of deals that you're trying to influence. How do you work with that team to kind of define what that working relationship could be? 

Because then it helps avoid sort of the situations where it becomes reactory, where, you know, they ask you for a reference call or, hey. Can I get this customer to do this, this, and this? Find out specifically what are the goals from those teams, and how do you work back to see, okay. What can we do to work together to accomplish and help influence what you're doing this quarter? Because sales, obviously, of course, they wanna know real time, what have what have you done for me lately? Right? Maybe you help identify a couple opportunities where, you know, it leads to expansion opportunity or helping them close new business for a certain vertical territory. 

But I think the other side of it too is the way that you establish that trust is that it can't just be one way. Like, you may be helping them with things that are gonna fulfill their need. I think it also goes back to what are they gonna do in return for you to help maintain sort of that ongoing relationship. 

And so whether that means, like, a deal closes, they refer those customers back to your programs, they help introduce you to those customers for, you know, other types of acts of advocacy, etcetera. I think if you collaborate both with sales and customer success, we could also see how do we make sure we almost have more of an account-based marketing approach where maybe that sales experience was great, but the next step of it is how do we make sure that the customer also has a great post-sale experience? You know, oftentimes, I think customer success has been viewed as sort of the stepchild when it comes to the sales relationship. They may be, like, the support actor. Sales wants the glory, and so they lead sort of the transition. 

But then once the deal's done, customers are on their own, and they have to kind of fend for themselves. So how do we ensure that the sales and CS handoff is great? How do we make sure the goals are documented? We have sorta, like, the right outcomes in place. That could be another thing that customer marketing helps influence. All teams are busy, but if we say, okay, why don't we all get together as a team of three and map out what does the success plan look like for these five accounts? 

And then I think that could be a value add for customer success to say, okay. That leads to better adoption, better value realization. And the outcome that we all want is we want these WAVE fans. We want these advocates long term. So let's have these check-ins over the next 3 to 6 months and see how things are going and how they could progress into more of a deeper engagement with the company. I think the other team you said is product. Right? 

So product, I think, inherently, there's a lot of things we could tackle from product. They always look for feedback. How do we create more structured feedback opportunities? One thing that happened kinda recently, we had a new chief product officer join. And the voice was, like, they wanna get feedback on what could we do to improve our road map. How do we get insights across the business? And the suggestion was, let's just talk to a bunch of customers. But it wasn't necessarily thought about from an ideal customer experience standpoint. Like, not every product manager knows exactly what to say to a customer, and how do we replicate that and ensure that it's consistent? 

How do we then think about the documentation of all the notes and all that back-end stuff that gets captured in those meetings? And so you can partner with the product and say, okay. How can we deliver a much more targeted and programmatic outcome when it comes to product insights and feedback? It could be spinning up a CAB. That could be a great thing we could do over the next six months. It could be establishing a series of strategic adviser councils or feedback loop sessions where, you know, if product wants to validate sort of the features coming out in the near term, let's set up a roundtable panel of a certain number of customers based on segment industry, etcetera, and then figure out, like, okay, what do we wanna get from this session? 

Then we could also think about it from, you know, overall just kind of where the product is going over the next several years from a vision perspective. Those are some of the ways we probably engage those various teams.

[32:35] Sunny Manivannan: Incredibly tangible and real examples. And, yeah, we'll definitely help somebody who wants to go on this journey themselves. Very cool. Okay. 

So we've talked about how you get noticed by leadership, cross-functional influence, and I wanna zone in on the person themselves, which is the customer marketer. And one of the things that I've observed, and I believe you've talked about this in the past, is customer marketers tend to be extremely humble. I would say to a fault, too humble. And so they are very good at advocating for their customers. 

But by the same token, they struggle often to advocate for themselves. And I see this and, you know, whether we want to believe it or not, we are in competition within our companies for attention, you know, for resources, and really just for bandwidth and and people to actually reflect on what you're doing. And so customer marketing is in this fight along with every other function. 

So how do you coach your team on advocating for themselves? What is your general guidance on helping marketers come out of their shells and sort of get rid of this imposter syndrome or whatever is going on that's leading them to just sort of stay within their lane, so to speak, and just help them sort of, you know, branch out and really spread their wings?

[33:45] Kevin Lau: Yeah. I mean, we touched on it a little bit. I think it goes back to sort of, like, visibility is earned. You don't just get it just because of the warrant of the title or the position you own. If that was the case, we wouldn't have to do any job at all. Right? We'd just sit back and relax and drink pina coladas all day.

[34:01] Sunny Manivannan: Right.

[34:02] Kevin Lau: But I think we have to be able to kind of have a game plan of what are we doing immediately once we get the job? And, like, what do we do to start driving momentum outcomes? But I think we've all been in sort of this tech environment where there's been layoffs, there's been challenges, budgets have been cut, all this stuff is happening. 

And I think if we just take it more proactively as sort of like a GM, like I mentioned at the very beginning, if no one knows what you're doing, then that could be a liability where some executive could just say, does this function even need to exist? And so if they can't quantify exactly what is the impact you're driving within the organization, the likelihood that it could be a detriment to your team is high. And so rather than leaving it to chance, we have to kinda take a step back and say, it's not about self-promotion. 

It's about how do we highlight what's happening for the customer as part of the programs they're involved in. Everyone wants to hear about the customer, whether you're part of the product team, marketing, sales, etcetera, or even these teams that may be farther removed. They just wanna know, like, what's going on. 

What we did actually sort of fairly recently is we actually started this whole, we call it a customer engagement interlock. This was meant to become an open forum where if teams didn't feel like they wanna be promoting themselves, we use this as a forum to say, okay. If you're interested in what's going on, what are the things we're doing to engage customers? Join this open forum. We'll do it once a quarter. We'll highlight a couple programs that are existing that we're running. And we had spokespeople from the team, folks that had talked about our community engagement. We've had folks that talked about this whole university launch that we just rolled out. And we said, hey. Just give a quick 5, 10 minute highlight on all the things that are happening and how this is gonna impact the customer. I think we had over 200 people join this session. We invited, like, over 400 people, and half of them showed up, which I think is so great. 

The fact that we had representation from various functions from HR—why would even HR be interested in this stuff—is kinda interesting. But we had sort of the traditional teams as well involved in that. And the outcome after the meeting happened was that we created so much goodwill where teams were just like, they said thank you. We appreciate this feedback. We appreciate the fact that you let us know because this is the first time we're actually being public about it. So that's just one example of just the fact that we don't know who's on the receiving end of this information and how they might feel about these outcomes. You know, we're actually doing in the context of HR, we're thinking about how do we use university content that is designed to educate our customers and use it for onboarding employees. How do we get them up to speed with how to use, like, our products faster? 

And so there's different use cases that may stem from this that we never even thought about that could inherently help the business grow. But I think what I'm also saying at the end of the day is it doesn't have to be this Herculean effort. Right? 

Like, we don't have to say, like, hey. Look at me. I'm great. Look at all the stuff that we're doing. It's really just these are the types of things. These are the programs we're rolling out. You should learn about them just because you could start to leverage them in your own capacity, whether you're a CSM or a sales rep or whoever. And just it's really about creating awareness and communication. 

That's all ultimately what we're trying to solve for. Because if you have a very large organization, whether you're, you know, 2,000 people, 10,000 employees, 30,000, the likelihood they're also getting tons of other communications from various teams is probably pretty high. And so in the sea of sameness, how do you get that visibility? It's being able to communicate proactively.

[37:23] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, I loved your example that you shared of just doing a forum. Maybe this is once a quarter and invite everybody. And if you wanna come, you can join us and just have lunch and just here's talk about what we're passionate about. 

And, yeah, the HR example is so spot on because maybe they're just curious about how your company takes care of its customers, which goes back to one of your early points about good communication cross-functionally. It's just nice to let people know what you're up to, and you never know what dots they may connect within their own world. And maybe that person in HR is in recruiting, and they're talking to candidates about how great, you know, your customer programs are. And that maybe gets you to close the—you never know. Right? 

There's so many of these different things that can happen, but I love doing it in an authentic way and just sharing your excitement for these programs and letting people who are interested self-select and do it.

[38:09] Kevin Lau: The way that I kinda scrub it to my team is think of that as, like, you're planting seeds. You want more seeds to be planted that nurture, that become plants just like on your shelf in the background.

[38:21] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. 

[38:22] Kevin Lau: So you want more of these trees planted so that it's more opportunity so that things get out there in the wild. So the teams, they may not even hear everything you're saying. 

But the point is the more you say it, the increased chances that it's gonna get more visibility, that other teams are gonna start to engage with your initiatives, etcetera, and helping you ultimately get more customers to be part of your programs and initiatives.

[38:42] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Well, Kevin, you know, you've shared so much amazing information. Just a sort of last question for you, which is as you look into the rest of this year and beyond, what sort of positive signs do you see for customer marketing as we go headfirst into this AI era? What are you seeing from your purview? We mentioned a little bit at the very beginning, but

[39:03] Kevin Lau: I think where all these kinds of functions are coming ahead, customer success, support, even professional services, marketing, a lot of these functions are, you know, bleeding into each other a little bit. The roles and responsibilities are also changing. 

And I think that also means greater opportunity to impact more of what the customer is experiencing. Whether you call it post-sale or full lifecycle, regardless of what it is, I think this actually gives us an opportunity to chart our own career path. It may not be fully defined where, like I said, we know exactly what it's gonna take to get to a VP level or a CEO of a company, but there's inherent skills that you're gonna capture along the way that are gonna help you be much more versed as a leader, whether you wanna continue as a marketer or do something down the road. 

I think that's gonna be kind of the nice thing where we have to define that as opposed to other functions which may not necessarily have that freedom to grow and explore what it could be.

[39:54] Sunny Manivannan: That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast again. I cannot wait to put your LinkedIn on the show notes because I think it is a must-follow for every single person in customer marketing. 

And you've shared so much great stuff with the community, you know, for free, and I can't believe it. And, this is just one more example. So thank you very, very much, and wish you the very best of luck at Freshworks and can't wait to get this episode out.

[40:19] Kevin Lau: Cool. Thanks again, Sunny.

[40:20] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah. Thanks, Kevin.