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The 2026 Top 100 CLG Awards honored the leaders rewriting the playbook for Customer Marketing across three connected categories: Reference Management, Scaled social proof, UGC, reviews, and references, and VOC and feedback programs. Four winners anchor the conversation. Mark Koh, Head of Global Customer Marketing at Broadcom, pivoted a loyalty program into the primary driver of Broadcom's strategic business objectives through the VMware acquisition. Kara Manfredi, Senior Manager of the Sales Customer Reference Program at Sage Intacct, has run a 25-year reference discipline that now influences 23% of overall deal outcomes. Bugs Subramaniam, Global Marketing Manager for Lenovo's Customer Reference COE, connects customer storytelling directly to revenue across the full buyer journey with AI-powered content generation. And Janie Carothers, Customer Marketing Manager at Apptio (an IBM Company), ran a program that lifted Gartner Peer Insights reviews 680% YoY and earned Apptio its first-ever Gartner Voice of Customer qualification.
Customer Marketing is being asked to do more in 2026 than at any point in its history, and the math underneath the function has gotten harder.
The first shift is the buyer. AI agents now stitch together vendor shortlists before a buyer ever visits a vendor website. The agents quote G2 reviews, Reddit threads, podcast clips, customer-authored LinkedIn posts, and analyst notes. The homepage is no longer the first impression. The first impression is whatever public signal about your customers' experience an AI can retrieve. Customer Marketing is suddenly the function with the highest leverage on that signal, because Customer Marketing is what produces it.
The second shift is the CFO. Boards are asking which marketing line items actually move revenue. The advocacy program that runs on a spreadsheet, the reference program that lives in a Slack channel between AEs and the customer marketer, the case study that takes six weeks to produce and ranks 12th in the next buyer's search results, none of those are defensible at the budget meeting. What is defensible is a revenue coefficient. A reference influence rate. A pipeline-influenced number. A Voice of Customer qualification.
The third shift is the operating model. Customer Marketing is still typically a team of one or two, and the workload has expanded into advocacy, references, reviews, community, lifecycle communications, video production, executive program management, and Voice of Customer. The instinct when AI arrived was to use it as a content multiplier. That produces volume but not impact. Content shops do not get headcount. Revenue functions do.
The 2026 Top 100 winners below took the harder path. Each rebuilt Customer Marketing around the same architectural shift: stop measuring activities, start measuring revenue influence. Stop running 1:1 reference fulfilment, start operationalizing references as a coefficient on enterprise pipeline. Stop letting customer truth live in PDFs, start running it as governed, instrumented infrastructure.
Base AI is the AI engagement OS for customer-led growth. For Customer Marketing specifically, that means advocacy, references, reviews, community, lifecycle communications, and VOC run on one connected operating layer instead of four separate point solutions. Customer signal (NPS responses, support sentiment, product usage, advocacy intent, reference history) flows into one place and routes to programs automatically. The reference request that used to take three days now matches a qualified advocate in minutes. The case study that used to take six weeks ships with metric-anchored quotes already structured by AI. The Customer Marketing function stops being a content shop and starts behaving like a revenue function with infrastructure underneath it.
The four winners below are doing pieces of this thesis at their own companies. Mark built advocacy as a connected enterprise system across seven product divisions. Kara built references as a 23% influence rate on every deal. Bugs embedded customer proof into every stage of the buyer journey with AI-powered content generation. Janie connected reviews and VOC into a single motion that produces analyst-grade qualification.
Customer Marketing in 2026 is asked to do five jobs at once. Run advocacy. Fulfil sales references at the velocity sales expects. Produce case studies, videos, and customer-led content. Drive review and rating coverage across G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius. Capture Voice of Customer signal and translate it into product and CS decisions. In most companies the team doing all of that is one person, two if you are lucky, four if you are at scale.
The temptation when AI showed up was to use it as a content-multiplier: ten case studies a quarter instead of three, a dozen quote variations per advocate, an always-on customer-story chatbot. That instinct produces volume but not impact. It is also what makes Customer Marketing look like a content shop to the CFO, and content shops do not get headcount.
The 2026 Top 100 winners below took a sharper view. Each rebuilt Customer Marketing around the same architectural shift: stop measuring activities, start measuring revenue influence; stop running 1:1 reference fulfilment, start operationalizing references as a coefficient on enterprise pipeline; stop letting customer truth live in PDFs, start running it as governed, instrumented infrastructure. Here is what that looks like across four different operating models.
When VMware was acquired by Broadcom in 2023, most customer marketing leaders would have spent the following 18 months in survival mode. Mark did the opposite. He pivoted Broadcom's Customer Advocacy and Loyalty program from a secondary engagement hub into a primary driver of the company's strategic business objectives. He managed the transition with a small, mighty team across three continents while the rest of the company was being restructured around them. "We operate on a foundational principle," Mark explains. "The customer comes first in everything we do."
The playbook Mark built reframes what advocacy is for. Rather than the traditional model of cultivating static references and quote-friendly customers, his modernized advocacy engine builds technical authorities. Customers who drive market conversation, not just check a logo box. The structure runs on a four-tier membership model that rewards deep technical contribution and recognizes status that customers actually want (vExpert, Broadcom Knight). Regional marketers across seven product divisions are unified under a single global system instead of running parallel programs.
The results map directly to Broadcom's commercial objectives. The program is now the primary driver of verified peer reviews contributing to a 4.3-star VMware Cloud Foundation rating on Gartner Peer Insights. The team added 1,500 qualified members in six months, advanced 972 members to Champion status, deployed 31+ speakers at global events, hit an 85% challenge completion rate, resolved 400+ duplicate profiles for data hygiene, and delivers 30+ original assets monthly. Mark's framing of the work is the part every VP Customer Marketing should borrow: Agile Advocacy, adaptability as a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving landscape.
Kara's career is a counterargument to anyone who still treats references as a back-office function. Over 25 years she has built customer reference programs from the ground up, scaled them to enterprise-level impact, and produced one of the cleanest revenue stories in customer marketing.
The numbers are the point. "My programs have had a significant influence on revenue growth," Kara says, "with $5.1M in FY23, $8.6M in FY24, and $11.5M in FY25." Plus an additional $4.4M influenced year-to-date in FY26. Reference activity climbed from 479 to 864 to 1,104 engagements annually, with 1,276 engagements year-to-date. The structural lever, the metric every CFO listens to, is that references now influence approximately 23% of overall deal outcomes. That is not a soft metric. That is a defensible coefficient on enterprise pipeline.
What makes the program scale is operational design. In partnership with Simon Le Fevre, Kara has built what industry peers call a "Wonder Twins" operating model. "We often joke about being the Wonder Twins of customer marketing," Kara says. "Our dynamic collaboration activates solutions, innovation, and change wherever needed." Customer references are embedded seamlessly into sales and marketing workflows with clear operational guardrails, supported by a trusted Reference Team focused on execution, enablement, and continuous improvement. The duo earned Customer Marketing Team of the Year (2024) recognition from the Customer Marketing Alliance and keynote slots at the CMA Summits in San Francisco, New York City, and London.
Beyond Sage Intacct, Kara founded and leads the Worldwide Customer Marketing Networking Group, a global community of 500+ customer marketing leaders from organizations including Cisco, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Dell, IBM, and VMware. The deeper takeaway for a VP CM: references are the highest-ROI lever you have. The reason they look invisible on the dashboard is that the dashboard was built before references were instrumented. Fix the instrument, defend the function.
Most enterprise customer marketing teams scope their work to two or three downstream activities (case studies, references, occasional ABM support). Bugs runs the discipline as an end-to-end revenue function at Lenovo. "I am successful in customer marketing because I connect authentic customer storytelling directly to revenue impact," she explains. "I ensure every case study, video, and story supports demand generation, pipeline acceleration, sales enablement, and account-based marketing efforts."
The remit is unusually broad. Her team embeds customer proof into RFPs, acquisition decks, campaigns, and ABM pursuits. "I manage more than $2M in budget with disciplined ROI measurement and strict alliance governance," Bugs explains, "while co-marketing with strategic partners to expand reach and amplify impact." Results span all four of her success pillars (awareness, quality, usage, efficiency). The program has earned Webby, Telly, and Shorty recognition, which validates both creative excellence and commercial impact in the same breath.
The AI layer is where her work belongs squarely in the Top 100 Customer Marketing conversation. Bugs has deployed AI-powered solutions for content generation, translation, and sales engagement, producing measurable cost and time savings across the program. The discipline is the part to copy. She did not deploy AI as a content-multiplier or a novelty experiment. She deployed it where it removes the operational drag that prevents customer proof from being available everywhere a buyer makes a decision. The lesson for any VP Customer Marketing being asked to define the enterprise CM operating model: structure first, AI second, and measure the function on its presence across every stage of the buyer journey. Not just on the assets it ships.
Janie's program is the cleanest demonstration in the 2026 Top 100 of what Voice of Customer + scaled social proof can produce when they are treated as a single connected motion instead of two separate workstreams.
The numbers tell the story directly. In FY25, Janie grew overall product reviews 25% across three platforms to 1,514 reviews and 630 ratings. She lifted Gartner Peer Insights reviews 680% year-over-year. "We also earned our very first qualification for Voice of Customer in the Cloud Cost Management Tools Market for Cloudability," Janie says. Her work delivered 69 G2 badges, #1 rankings in 11 G2 reports, and TrustRadius Buyer's Choice awards for IBM Apptio, Cloudability, and Targetprocess (for the first time). The downstream commercial signal is the part the CFO reads: 92 G2 website referrals, 115 profile CTA clicks, 10,000+ buyer-intent signals, and three TrustRadius research reports outperforming benchmarks by 1.6× or more.
What makes the program defensible is the framing. Janie did not run a "review-generation campaign." She built a program that connects people, stories, and outcomes. Turning customer proof into market momentum. Reviews and references are downstream of relationships, and relationships are downstream of value delivered. Her work amplifies customers, strengthens those relationships, and produces the buyer-intent signal that pipeline acceleration depends on. The deeper takeaway for any VP Customer Marketing wondering how to defend review-and-rating coverage as a discipline: it is not vanity. It is the volume of independent customer voice that shows up in the analyst report, the buyer's shortlist, and the CFO's review of the marketing line.
Four customer marketers. Four different scopes (global advocacy at a megacap, enterprise reference program, full-funnel COE, and review/VOC-led market positioning). One operating shift.
If your Customer Marketing function still operates as a service desk for sales (reactive case studies, ad-hoc reference fulfilment, content-on-demand) the 2026 Top 100 pattern translates directly: instrument references, reviews, and VOC as connected revenue lines, productize the programs so they scale beyond the operator, and use AI as the layer that absorbs the operational drag without sacrificing customer trust.
That is what Base AI operationalizes. Advocacy, references, reviews, community, lifecycle communications, and VOC programs run on one connected operating layer. Customer signal (NPS, advocacy intent, reference history, support sentiment, product usage) flows into one place and routes to programs automatically. The reference request matches a qualified advocate in minutes. The case study ships with metric-anchored quotes already structured. The buyer-intent signal that pipeline acceleration depends on becomes visible on one dashboard.
The next blog in the series goes deeper on the most cross-functional theme in the awards: how the 2026 winners are unifying the post-sale journey itself with AI to drive expansion and retention together.
Next in the series: The 2026 Post-Sale Playbook: How AI Turns CS Into Expansion Revenue →
→ See how Base AI operationalizes this pattern: Advocacy Solution · References Solution · Customer Marketing Guide
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