Inside Gong’s Playbook: Turning Lifecycle Advocacy into Revenue

Our Trendsetter:

Jane Menyo, Senior Director of Solutions and Customer Marketing, Gong

About Jane:

Jane Menyo is an innovative leader in marketing, known for her visionary approach to customer marketing. With deep expertise in strategic customer engagement and lifecycle marketing, Jane has built scalable, impactful programs that consistently deliver measurable results. Passionate about storytelling and relationship-building, Jane is redefining customer advocacy through precise, lifecycle-focused strategies.

“Lifecycle advocacy allows us to scale meaningful engagement, maximizing opportunities to put our customers in the spotlight, and freeing our team to focus on what we do best, building relationships and creative storytelling.” — Jane Menyo

‍

The trendsetting vision: Lifecycle-led advocacy

With a rap sheet of over 12 years in marketing execution and leadership, Jane is well positioned to provide insight into what it means to be an advocacy trendsetter. “To me, an advocacy trendsetter is somebody who is nimble with their strategies and their playbooks, and deeply understands the business needs and the context for which they're driving customer engagement to help fulfill those outcomes.”

Her vision is clear: advocacy should be precise, scalable, and strategically timed to meet customers exactly where they are in their journey. Jane recognized early on that traditional advocacy playbooks, often broad and reactive, weren’t meeting the Gong’s ambitious growth objectives.

“We moved away from traditional playbooks…we took a lifecycle-led approach to drive engagement strategies with our customers, at the right time and place, to create a better experience for our customers and better outcomes for our business,” Jane explained.

Jane’s vision wasn’t just to tweak existing approaches, it was about pioneering a lifecycle-led advocacy model, setting Gong apart as an industry leader.

💡 Trendsetter Tip: Identifying the right signals in your customer journey is key. Use them strategically to engage customers when it matters most.

‍

How they did it: A new playbook for strategic engagement

Jane partnered with Captivate Collective and their deep expertise in lifecycle advocacy enabled Jane’s team to quickly move from vision to execution, developing targeted strategies to maximize engagement at critical customer moments.

“When we launched a new product, Captivate helped us pinpoint our happiest customers through clear signals. Then, we activated them strategically to amplify our market presence,” Jane said. This targeted, customer-first strategy marked a significant shift from Gong’s previous broad-brush approaches.

Central to Gong’s new playbook was adopting tiered engagement strategies. Jane and her team mapped strategic engagement to key personas and lifecycle stages, allowing Gong to focus their most intensive advocacy efforts on high-value opportunities while still nurturing broader advocacy participation through scaled engagement initiatives.

From there, engagement automations were mapped at opportune moments. Emphasizing leveraged marketing automation and nurture strategies helped ensure the team at Gong was able to manage advocacy initiatives more efficiently. By automating routine advocacy processes, they significantly reduced manual workload, freeing their team to prioritize one-to-one strategic relationship building.

“Since implementing Lifecycle Advocacy programs, the value has really been on how much time we're able to save within our team to be able to drive more one-to-one relationships,” Jane explained. “We're able to offload the burden of managing each program individually through automation, scaling our work more effectively.”

Actionable strategies from Gong’s playbook include:

• ‍Identifying Strategic Signals: Pinpoint precise indicators that identify customers ready for advocacy opportunities.‍
• Tiered Engagement: Create a structured engagement model based on customer lifecycle stages and personas, balancing intensive one-to-one interactions with scalable outreach.‍
• Automation for Scale: Leverage marketing automation to handle routine advocacy tasks, ensuring efficiency and freeing time for strategic activities.‍
• Persona-Based Activation: Develop advocacy initiatives tailored to specific roles and personas, driving higher impact through personalized engagements.‍
• Lifecycle Mapping: Align advocacy efforts directly with key customer journey stages to maximize relevance and effectiveness.

‍

The new playbook emphasized automation and precise engagement timing, significantly enhancing Gong’s customer marketing capabilities and freeing resources to focus on deeper, more personalized interactions.

💡 Trendsetter Tip: “Advocacy firms like Captivate Collective can scale your strategy quickly, turning visionary ideas into impactful realities.”

‍

The impact: Advocacy that drives business outcomes

Leveraging lifecycle advocacy didn’t just enhance customer interactions, it significantly boosted Gong’s internal efficiencies. By using targeted marketing automation and nurture strategies, manual program management efforts were dramatically reduced. This shift freed up valuable time, allowing Jane and her team to invest deeply in one-to-one customer relationships and strategic initiatives. 

Rather than getting caught in operational complexities, Gong could now confidently scale advocacy programming, transforming routine engagements into personalized, high-impact interactions that drive sustained growth and customer loyalty.

And it didn’t end there. Using a lifecycle advocacy strategy didn’t just improve efficiency, it delivered significant, quantifiable business results. Gong saw notable productivity gains, deeper strategic customer relationships, and a measurable impact on customer retention and growth.

“Since implementing Lifecycle Advocacy strategies, we've been able to scale up the work that we're doing. As a customer marketing team, we're leveraging traditional marketing automation strategies that allow us to engage at scale and be able to drive more productivity and outcomes from our team. In addition to the productivity gains, our advocacy programs are also having a huge impact on our health and expansion. From the revenue side, we've seen that accounts with advocates more likely to renew and upsell after being an advocate in our programs.” Jane also noted that they experienced increased internal buy-in due to clear, data-backed results, further solidifying advocacy’s strategic role within Gong.

Future-focused: Leveraging AI to scale further

Jane’s vision for Gong’s future is expansive, particularly as AI solutions evolve creating new opportunities to scale impact and reach.

“I truly believe that this type of work is just scratching the surface... AI technologies and agents will help scale this work further,” Jane said. Gong continues to be forward-thinking, integrating advanced AI capabilities to elevate their advocacy strategy further.

💡 Trendsetter Tip: Your closeness to customers is your superpower. Leverage empathy and voice-of-customer insights to maintain a strategic seat at the table. AI can not replace human-to-human connection. 

‍

Advice for aspiring advocacy trendsetters

For those looking to set trends in advocacy, Jane emphasizes the importance of evolving. 

“I think as any marketing leader, your playbooks and your strategies need to constantly evolve to keep up with your markets and customer behaviors. We're in an interesting time right now where the way that we actually drive engagement with people and with customers in this world of AI is completely changing. A lot of marketers are looking to better understand what their new strategies and playbooks are going to look like in the AI driven advocacy world.” 

Through Jane’s vision of a lifecycle-led advocacy model, Gong has set a new benchmark in customer marketing. And as Gong continues to push the envelope, it remains clear: trendsetting advocacy isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s essential for revenue impacting, customer-centric growth.

‍

Hear more from Jane:

----

‍

The need for advocacy trendsetters

trend-setter: one that sets a trend: someone or something that starts or helps to popularize a new fashion, style, movement, etc.

At Captivate, our mission is to not just keep pace with customer advocacy trends, but to lead them. Our most innovative customers forge new mindsets, build unique programs, and implement processes that drive customer loyalty and collaboration to a whole new level. They are, in fact, customer advocacy trendsetters. And it is our hope that by sharing their stories, we will continue to grow the visibility, buy-in and impact not only of the CMA practice, but of the customer-powered enterprise.

‍