Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worst 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. The trend has continued into 2024, with some of the biggest companies performing RIFs. The layoffs seem to be helping their stock prices — the S&P 500 has notched multiple all-time highs this year.
The Advocacy Mavens Coalition was created as a response to this reality — bringing together experienced customer marketing and advocacy professionals to collaborate, support one another, and continue delivering value to companies navigating industry disruption.
At the same time, many professionals affected by these RIFs spend tens of hours each week searching for jobs, preparing for interviews, or giving away intellectual property through extensive proof-of-work exercises to demonstrate their value to potential employers — all while depleting savings, worrying about the future, and pushing through enormous anxiety to show up for the next opportunity.
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Why the Advocacy Mavens Coalition Exists
1. For many of the large and publicly traded tech firms, the layoff trend is simply aimed at satisfying investors. Project budgets are still in place or even expanded.
2. The market competitiveness is high and work still needs to be done. Companies have to continue to provide great products, great service, and great experiences to thrive. One way to achieve great results in the new marketplace reality is by leveraging staff augmentation and tapping into external talent pools, temporary staff, or specialized agencies.
3. Most marketers have excellent skills to offer as freelancers and consultants. Customer-led marketers are truly special because of their multifaceted knowledge. They often impact business growth in their orgs by aligning product development, marketing strategies, and customer service with the needs and preferences of the customer base. They would love to take on a fractional role that allows them the time to find the right next full-time employment without depleting their economies, accepting a very low offer, or driving themselves sick with stress.
4. Generating demand as a freelancer can be challenging. As an individual, it is very difficult to dedicate the necessary time to creating effective demand generation campaigns that would position you in front of enterprises. It’s also difficult to meet the requirements of corporate procurement teams and be onboarded as a supplier — many companies enforce strict vendor requirements such as minimum annual revenue, years of operation, process or security certifications, liability insurance, and more.
5. Content is still king. Consistency and volume are the key to good demand gen. Demand gen sits on a few fundamentals: clear persona, content creation, social sharing, SEO, email nurturing. If a company has a good value prop, it’s all about establishing the brand name. Customer marketers can easily do that. This is — typically — an effort intensive, long-term endeavor. But not if many of us join forces and we each do just a little.
How the Advocacy Mavens Coalition Works
I believe people who are united in a mission, a vision, and an effort can achieve the boldest of goals. That’s why we decided to build a coalition of industry experts who are united by their goal to build their brands, find the next role, and take the industry forward in the process.
The coalition’s vision is to help professionals who were impacted by RIFs build a cash bridge between their layoff and their next role, elevate the anxieties associated with unemployment, give them a safety net during tough times, a community of friends who face the same challenges, and a way to take back control in a constructive and meaningful way.
As a group, we want to position staff augmentation as the solution to reconciling product and service delivery with the reductions in force the market demands. And, of course, produce that content, execute the strategy, deliver the services.
Advocacy Mavens Coalition Value Prop for Marketing Executives
Scalability: One contract, multiple rockstar professionals.
Low-risk: Contract for the duration needed.
Effectiveness: Get the work done with experienced professionals that have proven expertise.
Cost efficiency: No investment in recruitment, training, equipment. We take care of that for our members.
Accountability: One vendor for all your marketing needs, escalations, invoicing, support, success and project management. We are a coalition but you get a single point of contact and accountability.
Advocacy Maven offers a platform for the coalition through our website and social media. We consolidate individual thought leadership content into cohesive demand gen campaigns, we provide the technical resources needed for the group to operate and deliver work to clients, and we assign a resource from our paid staff to create a content calendar, produce a unified brand, create templates and flows, collect, and publish content, allocate work, track deliverables, invoice and distribute revenue.
Meet the Advocacy Mavens Coalition Members
The CMA professionals in this group are the best of the best. They advocate for a customer-first approach, ensuring that customer insights guide business strategies, product development, and marketing efforts. Their work involves listening to customer feedback, understanding their needs, and acting on this understanding to drive improvements, enhance customer experiences, and ultimately contribute to the company’s growth and success.
They are thought leaders, speakers, and award winners. They are the people who build some of the best corporate B2B communities in the world. And together they can take your organization to new heights.
Current members include respected customer marketing and advocacy leaders such as: Jennifer Susinski, Lauren Turner, Dave Hansen, Irwin Hipsman, Don Currie, Srishty Khullar, Nicole Zuccaro, Davin Wilfrid, Ole Goehring, Elisabeth Catuogno supported by Advocacy Maven.
How to Support the Advocacy Mavens Coalition
The coalition grows through visibility, collaboration, and new opportunities for meaningful work.
Follow the Advocacy Mavens Coalition page, enable notifications and then like, share, comment and repost the great content these professionals share. Help us create visibility.
Know someone who needs customer programs strategy, platform management, technical consulting, integrations and migrations, case studies, video testimonials, focus groups, round tables, or advisory boards, customer experience journeys, data cleanup and management, program analytics, events planning? Send them our way.
What This Collective Experience Means for Your Programs
Between all of these professionals:
➤ We touched over 150 customer programs
➤ We worked with Influitive (a lot) but also with Base – Customer Led Growth, Point of Reference, SlapFive: Customer Marketing, Upland Software (RoInnovation), Higher Logic Vanilla, Gainsight (Insided), and Khoros
➤ We integrated with CRMs, Marketing Automation, LMS platforms, reward vendors, identity management and analytics providers
➤ We designed platforms, created journeys, gamified experiences, customized and optimized workflows, built dashboards and cleaned data
➤ We total 267 years of experience running reference calls, testimonials, user groups, focus groups, and advisory boards
➤ We total 50 years of running review campaigns
➤ We total 59 years of integrations and migrations
➤ We produced more than 3000 case studies
➤ We discovered, nurtured, mobilized and motivated hundreds of thousands of advocates
Together, the Advocacy Mavens Coalition represents decades of hands-on experience building, scaling, and optimizing enterprise customer programs.
Whatever your customer program needs — strategy, execution, or platform expertise — the coalition can help.
Want to become a member? Apply here: https://bit.ly/amc-join
Want to hear more about our services? Just ask! https://bit.ly/amc-asks
Summary: The Advocacy Mavens Coalition: Turning Tech Layoffs into Industry Collaboration
The Advocacy Mavens Coalition represents a collaborative response to instability in the technology sector. By bringing together experienced customer marketing and advocacy professionals, the coalition creates a structure where talent can continue delivering value while navigating career transitions. For companies, it provides immediate access to proven expertise through a scalable staff augmentation model. For professionals, it offers visibility, community, and meaningful work during uncertain times — proving that collective expertise can turn disruption into opportunity.
FAQ 1: What is the Advocacy Mavens Coalition?
The Advocacy Mavens Coalition is a collaborative network of experienced customer marketing and advocacy professionals who work together to provide consulting, strategy, and operational support to companies. It was created to help talented professionals impacted by tech layoffs continue delivering value while pursuing their next full-time role.
FAQ 2: How does the coalition help companies?
The coalition provides companies with access to a pool of experienced specialists in customer advocacy, community management, and customer marketing programs. Through a single engagement, organizations can tap into multiple experts for strategy, platform management, integrations, content production, and advocacy program execution.
FAQ 3: Who are the members of the Advocacy Mavens Coalition?
Members are experienced customer marketing and advocacy professionals with backgrounds in community management, reference programs, customer storytelling, platform integrations, and customer experience strategy. Many are recognized thought leaders, speakers, and award-winning practitioners in the B2B customer marketing field.
