Last Wednesday, we launched The Outpost.

The launch isn’t really the interesting part. What’s more interesting is why we’re willing to bet on it in the first place.

At the start of the year, we defined four priorities and four big bets. This one might be the least obvious if you’re just looking at pipeline. It’s tied to a priority we’ve talked about internally for a while: building credibility within the customer marketing community.

To understand that, you have to rewind a bit.

When I started at UserEvidence back in July 2023, the customer marketing space still felt early. There weren’t many serious vendors. A lot of companies didn’t even have a dedicated customer marketing leader yet.

In some orgs, the role sat under product marketing. In others, it was folded into demand. Budgets were inconsistent. Seniority varied.

At that point, it didn’t make sense to build our entire strategy around that one persona. I didn’t want UserEvidence to feel like a niche tool for a function that wasn’t consistently senior or budget-owning yet.

We needed awareness with marketing leadership, product marketing, and the broader GTM org. If we narrowed too quickly, we would’ve capped ourselves. We started showing up in conversations we weren’t part of before.

That was the goal. And at the time, it was the right move.

Over the last year, though, we started noticing something in the data and in real deals.

Marketing leadership and product marketing often create the initial opportunity. That makes sense. They’re typically closer to budget and senior enough to move something forward.

Customer marketing, though, consistently influences what happens next.

They don’t always own the budget. They’re not always the most senior voice in the room. Championing cross-functionally can be hard.

But they shape sentiment. They validate tools internally. They influence whether something feels safe. When credibility is already there, deals just move.

Fewer late-stage objections and fewer random “can we talk to another customer?” requests out of nowhere.

It doesn’t spike conversion overnight. It just reduces friction. You see it in pipeline conversations and in renewals.

When it’s not there, you feel the drag. Extra calls. Extra proof. That slight hesitation late stage that doesn’t show up cleanly in HubSpot but absolutely shows up in how hard it is to get something across the line.

At the same time, our product strategy evolved. With the Zealot acquisition and multiple products now built directly for customer marketers, it became harder to ignore how central this role has become to what we’re building.

If this function is carrying more influence in deals and more weight in our product roadmap, it doesn’t make sense to treat credibility with that group as secondary.

Customer marketing isn’t a support function anymore. It shows up in pipeline conversations and in renewals. It shapes whether a buying decision feels safe.

But the way the role learns hasn’t evolved at the same pace.

The best playbooks are buried in Slack threads, behind paywalls, or sitting in someone’s Google Drive from two companies ago. The knowledge exists, but it’s fragmented and hard to reuse.

We’re asking customer marketers to carry real revenue influence without investing in better infrastructure for how the function levels up.

That’s the gap.

The Outpost isn’t meant to be a content machine. It’s meant to be something customer marketers actually reference. Fewer, deeper resources. Frameworks that get reused. Sessions where practitioners walk through tradeoffs and decisions, not just outcomes.

We’re being disciplined about what this is and isn’t. We’re not trying to out-publish anyone. We’re not trying to build a giant audience. And we’re not layering on programs we can’t sustain.

We’re trying to see if this actually changes anything.

Does sales use it in live deals? Do customer marketers pass it around internally? Does it get referenced without us forcing it?

If that starts happening, we’ll know this bet is doing what we intended.

The Outpost is the vehicle. The bet is that investing in credibility early changes how deals feel later.

Two years ago, broadening was the right move. This year, narrowing back toward the function that consistently influences outcomes is.

We’ll see if that holds up.

Stuff I’m digging this week

• We’re hiring our first Senior Customer Marketing Manager—Customer marketing is one of the most underinvested functions in B2B. We’re about to double down on it. You’ll build in public with us inside the CMA community and help show what customer marketing looks like when it’s taken seriously.

• I Built a Reference Program That Negated the Need for References—Cache Walker is kicking off our first session for The Outpost next Monday, 3/9. If you’ve ever chased a customer for a “quick call” before a deal closes, this will feel uncomfortably relevant (in a good way). Worth your time if you care about turning advocacy into a system instead of a fire drill.

• Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff—I’ve always heard “Benioff is one of the best marketers ever” for years but never understood why. Then you read his book and realize he was playing a different game entirely from the jump. It’s even crazier that this book came out in 2009 and everything I’ve read so far still feels relevant in 2026.

Hold up—what does UserEvidence do again?

Most companies have great customers. What they don’t have is a way to activate them.

So the stories, the insights, and the people who would actually help end up scattered across decks, tools, and Slack threads. Things get messy. Quotes get lost. Advocates get overused. Deals slow down.

UserEvidence fixes that.

We give your GTM team one platform to activate your customer base. You can find new advocates, capture customer proof, and publish original research— then use all of it where it actually moves the deal forward.

• Advocacy — Activate your best customers without burning them out.

• Evidence — Verified, believable stories and results buyers actually trust.

• Research — Original long-form research content that shapes your narrative.

UserEvidence helps B2B marketing teams make it easier for customers to show up authentically when trust matters most.