The Customer Advocacy Team is dedicated to forging evergreen co-marketing relationships with top advocates and enterprise brands that fuel an integrated strategy aligned to pipeline-driving initiatives, threading the customer voice into all GTM motions.
Meet the team:
Evergreen customer story creation
We partner with the content team to run a continual pipeline of customer case studies and blogs. A selection and prioritization process helps us tell the right stories in the right format.
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Earnings Calls customer references
Each quarter the Customer Advocacy Team proactively partners with Sales and Customer Success to identify and create customer references for our quarterly earnings calls.
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Customer Advisory Board → Executive Advisory Board
The advocacy team has traditionally driven what we know as the “customer advisory board” at GitLab. As we evolve in FY24, we’re breaking out our advisory audiences into a Product Customer Advisory Board and an Executive Advisory Board.
For Product CAB questions (now driven by the Product Marketing team) head to #CAB-internal for any questions.
Executive Advisory Board (EAB)
The EAB is a small, invitation-only cohort of executives from select GitLab customers who are driving business and technology transformation with a visionary DevSecOps strategy. Throughout the annual program, the board will meet both in person and virtually to engage with GitLab leaders, learn innovative best practices from fellow members, and share important insights that help shape the future of GitLab.
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For any EAB questions, head to #fy24-executive-advisory-bard.
Marquee Videos
We partner with the brand and design team to deliver one marquee customer story video per quarter. You can find our videos on our Customer Advocacy spot on Highspot or in our customer stories playlist on YouTube.
Press
We partner closely with the PR team to find the right opportunity to pitch to customers at the right time. We lead with the opportunity that will provide the most value to the customer and will allow for a continued warm relationship for years to come.
Peer Reviews
Each quarter we partner with the AR team to identify a priority platform for driving Peer Reviews. We run dedicated efforts to drive an increase in quality reviews that will create an impact in upcoming reports.
Events
Our mighty team of two provides Tier 1 event support as resources allow.
For Tier 1 events, please notify the advocacy team during quarterly OKR planning and include the advocacy team at event kickoff.
For other events, we are currently unable to support speaker sourcing. We will however assist in sharing suggestions based on our relationships with advocates. Please tag Steve George into your event content issue and we will be happy to share ideas directly.
Quarterly Customer Advocacy Award
To formally recognize members of our revenue organization who partner with marketing to identify and create customer stories, our Customer Advocacy team is launching a new quarterly Customer Advocacy Award. The winner of this award will receive an exclusive GitLab-branded Yeti cooler and tumbler gift kit delivered to their door. For Q1, the winner will be announced at SKO. For other quarters the winners will be sharing on the WW Field Call.
FY23 Q4 Winner: April Marks, Enterprise AE
Make a request To create a general request for the Customer Advocacy team, open an issue here and assign it to Nicole Smith.
Nominate an advocate This process is evolving. While we’re under construction, please nominate an advocate here, or post in #customer-advocacy-and-references for any questions.
Ask a question Find us on Slack at #customer-advocacy-and-references.
Visit our Customer Advocacy spot on HighSpot to find all of our existing customer story content and filter based on industry, use case, region, and more! Here you can create a “pitch” and share out your content of choice directly from the platform.
Visit about.gitlab.com/customers to find our external customer stories page.
Other Links
Customer Story Pitch Slide: Leverage this slide to pitch the value of customer advocacy opportunities to your customers.
Customer Content Dashboard: Here we explore key content metrics related to customer content on the website.
Authorization to Use Company Materials (Standard Logo / Naming Agreement): Use when we do not yet have authorization to reference the customer publicly or use their materials (logo, etc) within our marketing assets. This is to achieve broad umbrella materials use which is not always necessary. Please consult the advocacy team.
Reference Language in Subscription Agreement (Scroll to Section 8.5): View Section 8.5 to see how our reference authorization lives natively within our Subscription Agreement. This is standard unless otherwise negotiated out. Section 8.5 can also be added via a checkbox within an Order Form.
More coming soon.
Number of references including references for quarterly earnings calls, analyst reports, press releases, etc.
Number of reviews on peer review sites
We are actively working on a single source of truth document. In the meantime, please contact the advocacy team for any logo inquiries.
While the team is growing, please start in the #customer-advocacy-and-references channel and your question will be triaged.
