Editorial
The Gist
- Career path. Customer engagement acitvities can be a stepping stone for career advancement for professionals in marketing and related fields.
- Revenue impact. Leveraging customer engagement can lead to discovering new customer challenges and solutions, which can increase company revenue.
- Visibility boost. Promoting program achievements and pointing to financial impacts can make you more visible to superiors and increase your chances for advancement.
While managing customer engagement avtivities can be a challenging, fulfilling — and even fun — endeavor for marketing professionals, many may be wondering how such activities (and ideally successes) here can be parlayed into career advancement.
After all, while it’s nice to generate the satisfaction of connecting with your customers and perhaps even generating praise from your superiors in doing so, your end goal may be to leverage your successes into higher level positions and the accompanying pay increases.
Unlocking Success With Diverse Customer Engagement Strategies
While customer engagement activitites might include generating success stories, video interviews, references for sales, customer satisfaction surveys, managing your social media program or customer advisory board (CAB), each method provides a great opportunity to understand your customers’ business challenges, your company’s solutions and how they are being successfully implemented.
5 Career-Boosting Benefits of Customer Engagement Activities
Having observed numerous career advancements from those involved in managing or presenting at Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meetings, here are five ways to leverage customer engagement activities for career growth:
1. Get Noticed With Customer Engagement
Customer engagement activities offer those managing them an opportunity to showcase their skills and knowledge to superiors who otherwise might not have seen you in action. This might apply, for example, to marketing and events team members managing CAB meeting preparations or product marketers who usually spend much of their time building solutions or programming. Presenting at CAB meetings allows you show off your skills and talents, reinforce your importance and put you top of mind for potential promotion opportunities.
Related Article: 4 Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement
2. Discover New Customer Challenges and Solutions
By engaging with your top customers, you’ll learn not only how they understand and actually use your product, but potential previously unknown challenges they’re experiencing. Such insight may allow you to drive potential new messaging campaigns or help develop new capabilities to meet their needs — and the opportunity to increase revenue for your company. Sometimes, marketing or product marketing folks who learn about unmet customer needs and address these successfully can be put in charge of such new product campaigns, offerings and income streams.
Related Article: 4 Customer Engagement Tactics That Work, According to Marketing Execs
3. Promote Your Program Achievements
Once you’ve uncovered some successes that your customers have enjoyed with your solutions, or perhaps examples of how they expanded their use of your solutions as a result of your activities, you will want to promote these internally to your boss and superiors. After all, executives are busy and are often heads-down with their own challenges, so they may not see or be aware of your successes unless you bring them to their attention. Great ways to communicate these would be through your company internal communications or newsletter, during your company all-hand meeting or presenting your program during executive management meetings.
Related Article: Conquering the Customer Feedback Gap
4. Point to Financial Impacts
Money talks when it comes to quantifying your program (and self) value, so illustrating your success in incremental dollar terms will generate the most impact. This might include highlighting a customer who renewed their license agreement after getting training or a better understanding of your product value, or perhaps purchased additional solutions after they learned more about them through your efforts.
In addition, customers who publish case studies, speak at your events or participate in your CAB program are often invested in your company’s success and will speak highly of your firm (and possibly you as well) to their peers. If their referral leads to a new customer, be sure to let your superiors know!
Webinar
Oct
16
Agentic AI Playbook: Real-World Customer Service Use Cases You Can Deploy Now
Boost self-service by 30% and slash call volume by 63% with agentic AI.
Register
Webinar
Oct
22
Beyond Storage: Smarter Content, Bigger Impact with DAM + AI
Discover how the DAM + AI duo makes content smarter, stronger and more accessible.
Register
Webinar
Nov
6
Fix the Content Bottleneck: Build a Better WebOps Strategy
Content stalled? Dev overloaded? You’re not the only one. Learn how streamlined WebOps bridges the publishing gap.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Call Spoofing Trends Financial Institutions Can't Afford to Ignore
Don't let robocalls sabotage your customer relationships. Learn how to secure your voice channel.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
5. Communicate Your Desires
If advancement is your goal, be sure to communicate this to your boss and work together on a plan to achieve this, including measurable goals and milestones. While it would be ideal to agree to this before you make all your major accomplishments, expressing your promotion goals on your first day on the job may also not be a good idea.
It’s probably best to conduct your role (and learn your industry, company and customers along the way) for at least a year or two before communicating your advancement desires. Once you do, you may encounter a bit more scrutiny in your activities and accomplishments, so be prepared for a potential higher level of inspection. But if you’re serious about achievement, such measurement and review will be welcomed as you surely become successful in your customer engagement efforts.
Final Thoughts on Advancing Your Career With Customer Engagement Skills
Although moving into higher level positions requires hard work, dedication, success, outstanding personal relationships and perhaps a little luck, customer engagement professionals can advance their careers if they communicate their desires, help their companies and make superiors aware of their contributions to the bottom line.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
