The Demand+Expand Conference brought together 500 B2B Marketers from 15 countries and 28 states in San Francisco.
It’s the only conference that unites the entire funnel with tracks ranging from Go-to-market to Expansion for PLG and sales-led companies.
It was an amazing two days with great keynotes, networking, and meeting IRL customer lifecycle marketers from WalkMe, MaintainX, LeanData, Glean, Freshworks, Boomi, Databricks, Canto, Mural, and LifecycleX.
Plus, I’m a fanboy of Ed King, CEO of Openprise (should have taken a selfie).
There were two ground-breaking presentations for Customer Lifecycle Marketers
The Expansion Trap: Why Cross-selling too soon destroys the revenue you are trying to create
Clio Castruccio, Head of Customer Demand Generation, Boomi.
This is one of the first B2B companies that has cracked the code on cross-sell.
The question: Can a company identify that a customer is ready for a cross-sell before the customer knows?
Yes, tracking usage changes over time provides monthly signals:
Account telemetry: Where is the customer vis a vis utilization (up-down-stuck)
Forward prediction based on historical trends (churn, status quo, expand)
Third-party intent signals
The no more cold calls Expand play:
The system flags the account for expansion.
SDR automatically assigned and personalizes outreach based on utilization signals, third party intent, context, and product story.
Meeting booked by SDR.
AE joins the call knowing why the account is ready.
Results: 89% more opportunities, 178% more pipeline, 182% more marketing sourced revenue, 50% larger deal size.
Three things to steal:
Run expansion readiness first and use intent to time the move
Annual target list is a snapshot, Expansion readiness is a film with moving pictures
When sales, marketing and customer success run different models, the customer receives different plays and fells it
How To Build AI Native Customer Marketing
Sandhya Simhan, Head of Customer and Growth Product Marketing, Glean
Customer marketing at Glean is new. They are creating an AI-native program with no legacy programs to weigh them down. It helps that Glean is a hyper-growth AI-native company.
The question: In an AI world, what should the customer marketing function become?
The reality: We sit on top of a huge amount of signals. Data, content, and customer context are fragmented but very little of it arrives in a form we can use cleanly. Teams compensate with hustle.
3-Steps: Detect, Decide, Deliver
Detect= Better Maturity Detection. What’s actually happening with customers. Research stops being a quarterly readout and becomes a live input.
Decide= Clearer action. Lack of a robust decision layer is where customer marketing loses its leverage.
Deliver= Faster time to value. There are scalable ways to deliver the work
Takeaway: It’s not just more webinars, case studies, and advocates. Customer marketing starts to look less like a content function and more like an orchestration layer if it can search its customer knowledge, apply learnings, and convert raw expertise into trustworthy deliverables.
Upcoming Events
The Great AI Roast: A live online session that roasts the overhyped workflows, cringy AI copy, and big promises flooding the marketing world right now. June 11@1pm ET
SlapFive’s CustomerX Road Show is coming to London on June 12 and Boston on October 2.
UserEvidence’s Highline 2026 is in Jackson Hole from Aug 3-5.
Jobs
For an analysis of Customer Lifecycle Job Descriptions check out this research report.
Recent Hires and Promotions
Val Geisler, long-time customer marketer, just started her own firm focusing on lifecycle and retention.
Gina L, Director of Customer Marketing, Clio
Tammy C, VP Growth Marketing, Cyberhaven
Austin A, Lifecycle Marketer, Affinity.co
Olivia P, Marketing Director Lifecycle, Constant Contact
Carrie K, Director, Global Customer Marketing, SAP Concur
Who’s Hiring
TotalExpert, Lifecyle Marketing Manager
WalkMe, Senior Integrated Marketing Programs Manager, Customer Marketing (not accepting)
Bloomerang, Customer Marketing Manager, Adoption & Lifecycle
Canary Technologies, Lifecycle Marketing Manager
Trinet, Director Customer Marketing (not accepting)
Novara, Customer Marketing Manager
Instructure, Manager Marketing, Customer Marketing
As a 4X Customer Marketing Director and X-Forrester, I know the value of communities of practice and independent research. I founded Repetitos to address one of the biggest impediments to customer lifecycle marketing, the health of a company’s customer contact database. The B2B CLM 300+ Newsletter is the next step in my journey…Irwin Hipsman