Executing Large-Scale Customer Advocacy at Meraki
At CustomerXCon 2024, customer marketing leaders shared how they tackled big challenges with limited resources. Cate Vanasse, the former Director of Global Customer Marketing at Cisco Meraki, discussed how external support helped her small team execute a large-scale advocacy initiative while staying strategic.
What challenges led you to seek customer marketing support?
"Our team was relatively small, and we had a major project that required both strategic oversight and execution. We needed additional expertise to scale our efforts without losing sight of our long-term goals."
How did external customer marketing support from Referential help?
"They played a crucial role in both execution and strategy. Not only did they help deliver a high-impact project efficiently, but they also provided guidance on best practices to ensure long-term success."
What improvements did you experience?
"One of the biggest benefits was their willingness to explore creative solutions. They weren’t just executing, they were thinking critically about how to make the project as impactful as possible, even if it meant adjusting our original approach."
What advice would you give to others considering a customer marketing agency?
"Leverage an agency’s broad experience. They bring insights from multiple industries and companies, helping you avoid common pitfalls and adopt best practices faster."
Final Thoughts
Cisco Meraki’s experience highlights an important takeaway: when scaling advocacy, execution is just one part of the equation—strategy matters just as much. The right partner ensures that both move forward in tandem.
In early 2025, we published our perspective on the shifts we believed would redefine customer advocacy—from stronger measurement and deeper GTM alignment to the growing role of community and storytelling. With a year of execution behind us, those predictions largely held true, but the pace and depth of change exceeded expectations. Advocacy teams are now being measured on pipeline influence, retention, and expansion, personalization has become table stakes, and community has emerged as a long-term strategic investment rather than a programmatic feature. This retrospective looks at what we got right, where our thinking has evolved, and what advocacy leaders should be preparing for as AI-driven orchestration accelerates into 2026.