No business thrives without its customers. And in today’s ultra-competitive climate, customer engagement and advocacy aren’t just nice-to-haves – they’re essential drivers of long-term success.

From personalized onboarding experiences and peer-to-peer communities to reference programs and success stories, customer advocacy plays a critical role in retention, expansion, and brand credibility. 

Yet, many organizations struggle to align these initiatives with their broader business goals, leaving advocacy efforts fragmented and underutilized.

So, how do you turn customer engagement into a strategic growth engine?

In this article, I’ll walk you through how adopting a lifecycle marketing model at Ivanti has transformed our approach to customer advocacy. We’ll explore:

  • The challenges of a post-acquisition customer landscape
  • How we built a structured, data-driven customer advocacy program
  • Practical use cases, including Project Thrive and our reference program
  • The business impact of aligning advocacy with the customer lifecycle

Overcoming post-acquisition chaos to build a unified advocacy strategy

Let me paint a rather bleak picture – one that may sound familiar to many of you.

Following a series of acquisitions, Ivanti’s customer advocacy efforts were scattered across different teams, each operating in silos. Processes were manual, our data was messy, and most critically, we couldn’t effectively demonstrate our business impact. 

It wasn’t for lack of effort – the teams were working incredibly hard – but we were missing the mark. We didn’t have clear priorities, everything felt urgent, and we lacked a comprehensive understanding of our customer journey.

The reality was that no one truly knew what it was like to do business with Ivanti from a customer’s perspective. That uncertainty created inefficiencies, confusion, and, frankly, a lot of anxiety.

Reframing our approach

At the start of this year, we took a step back and reframed our approach. It may sound obvious, but we were committed to seeing everything through the eyes of our customers. This was no small task – we undertook a major initiative to map out our full customer journey, identifying key touchpoints and aligning all our initiatives, customer experience strategies, KPIs, and business outcomes to each stage of that lifecycle.

A crucial part of this shift was the foundation of our voice of the customer (VoC) strategy, ensuring that we could listen, understand, act, and respond to our customers in a structured and meaningful way throughout their journey. 

For the first time, our entire team had complete clarity on what they were working towards and how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.

To reinforce this alignment, we developed a mission statement, a goal and metrics scorecard, and a visual framework that is now embedded at every level of the organization. It has executive buy-in, is consistently communicated across teams, and serves as a guiding reference for everything we do.

A shift in customer advocacy

One of our biggest challenges had been the siloed nature of our advocacy efforts, leading to operational inefficiencies and a disconnect from our go-to-market strategy. That is no longer the case.

First, we leveraged Ivanti’s well-established demand generation engine – scaling its methodologies and tools to expand our peer-to-peer customer community. Previously, our small advocacy team was responsible for everything, but now we can tap into subject matter experts across different teams, allowing my team to become specialists rather than generalists.

This shift also meant we could access deeper business performance analytics, creating a unified focus on driving outcomes across the customer lifecycle. 

The impact? A stronger, more strategic role for customer advocacy within the organization. We’re no longer an afterthought – we’re an essential part of the business strategy.

Demonstrating business impact and securing investment

Another major win was our ability to showcase the tangible impact of customer advocacy on business performance. The operational efficiencies we introduced allowed us to gather better data than ever before, proving the direct value of our work.

And that proof translated into action. Just this week, thanks to the metrics and reporting we built, we secured executive sign-off on a six-figure investment into our customer community programs – an initiative we had struggled to get off the ground in the past.

For us, this is more than just a financial win. It’s a validation of the work we’ve done to align advocacy with business outcomes, demonstrating that when we put the customer at the center of our strategy, both engagement and revenue follow.

This is just the beginning, but it’s a massive step forward in how we elevate customer engagement and advocacy at Ivanti.