Customer Advocacy at GitLab

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.

  • We create programs and opportunities that put Enterprise logos and advocates in the spotlight.
  • We partner with Sales and CS to identify, capture, and tell the right stories that help us sell.
  • We support the bottom line by fueling our integrated campaign motion with the customer voice.

Meet the team:

  • Nicole Smith — Director, Product Marketing, Customer Advocacy
  • Steve George — Product Marketing Manager, Customer Advocacy

Programs we drive and support

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.

Quick Links

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.

Quick Links

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.

Quick Links

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

How do I work with the team?

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.

How do I find a customer story?

HighSpot

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.

Website

Visit about.gitlab.com/customers to find our external customer stories page.

Other Links

KPIs

  • Number of stories, including case studies, blogs, videos, and podcast episodes

    • Content metrics including traffic, CTR, time on page, conversion, etc.
    • Associated pipeline
    • Number of speakers
    • Session metrics
    • Associate pipeline
  • Number of references including references for quarterly earnings calls, analyst reports, press releases, etc.

  • Number of reviews on peer review sites

  • Number of program members, including EAB and Base (external advocacy program)

    • Attendance and Engagement
    • Survey feedback / NPS
    • Associated pipeline

Approved Customer Logos for promotion

We are actively working on a single source of truth document. In the meantime, please contact the advocacy team for any logo inquiries.

Which customer reference team member should I contact?

While the team is growing, please start in the #customer-advocacy-and-references channel and your question will be triaged.

Base Customer Advocacy Platform

Base is a B2B Customer Marketing & Advocacy automation platform that uses AI to enable marketers to streamline engagement, generate customer references, gain insights, capture VoC, and scale advocacy. The team is currently working to implement Base. Stay tuned on this page for more info soon. If you have questions, feel free to reach out on #customer-advocacy-and-references slack channel.


Customer Advisory Boards
GitLab Customer Advisory Boards Purpose: To help foster DevOps transformation and adoption we are establishing a Customer Advisory Board, where we focus on sharing DevOps best practices and lessons learned with each other. We believe that transparency and sharing is a key way to help encourage the success of DevOps transformations. The GitLab customer advisory board is intended to be home to learning and collaboration so we can all experience success through DevOps transformation.
Customer Advocacy: Sales Support
Sales Quick Reference Links: NEW: Advocacy Program Pitch Deck NEW: Customer Champion Award Individual Customer Case Study Slides TEI Sales Metrics Slides Forrester TEI 2020 Page Requesting a reference for a sales call Case Study Board - Search Email Copy for Case Study Reference Customer Logo Authorization Form Media Consent and Model Release Form Quarterly Earnings Customer References Earnings statement customer reference identification and outreach is a continuous activity that occurs across each new quarter in support of the public earnings package.
Customer case studies
The goal of the customer case studies program is to share and market the success of our customers.
Customer Events
Requesting a Reference Customer Requesting a Reference Customer to speak and/or otherwise support an event The customer reference team supports an average of 12 customer requests per quarter; we prioritize speaking requests from teams that directly support demand generation activities (field marketing/campaigns/alliances/partner and corporate teams). We can support the following customer speaker requests as a minimum commitment each quarter; beyond that we will need exceptional management review. Once a customer speaker request issue is raised, the CRM will link it to the appropriate tracking issue below.
Customer Insight Page
Case Study Creation Process Case Study creation is maintained by the Customer Reference Team in the Product and Solution Marketing/Product Marketing Project. When a reference manager begins the process of new case study creation, the following steps are taken: Issue created using Case Study Template in this project Customer Reference Manager begins to gather information (from Reference Edge, Command Plan, other internal resources such as sales call notes) Customer Reference Manager syncs with CSM/AO
Customer Reference Program - External Nomination
Learn more about the External Customer reference process at GitLab
Peer Review Management
Peer Review Management GitLab actively manages its Peer Review presence as part of its Customer Reference Program to maintain its values of Transparency, Collaboration, and Iteration. By listening, analyzing, and engaging with customers and the GitLab community as a whole via Peer Reviews, GitLab gains a clearer grasp of customer expectations. Consistent maintenance of our presence on public Peer Review sites allows a current and dynamic understanding of the Voice of the Customer and this in turn helps helps GitLab Customer Success, Product, Marketing, and Sales teams build better products, sell faster and easier, and make customers’ lives better.
Quarterly Customer References
Quarterly Earnings Customer References Earnings statement customer reference identification and outreach is a continuous activity that occurs across each new quarter in support of the public earnings package. By identifying customers as part of this process, they enter the referencing “pipeline” to provide valuable proof points for the earnings statement and additional customer story content in the future. For the purposes of the earnings statement, there are two key categories of customer: