Every marketer wants to establish their company as a thought leader.
But sometimes the most credible thought leader isn’t someone who works for your company.
It’s your customer.
I recently spoke with Ashley Schwalje, VP of Product Marketing at WCG, about how WCG brings customers into its marketing—not simply to provide testimonials, but to contribute their expertise to the broader industry conversation.
It’s an approach that can be particularly powerful as part of a target account strategy. Your company can tell prospects what you know and what you can deliver. When respected customers are willing to share what they’ve learned alongside you, they provide something that’s much harder to manufacture: trust.
Why are customers such powerful thought leaders?
B2B buyers expect companies to say good things about themselves.
That doesn’t make your own thought leadership unimportant. Your subject matter experts should have a point of view and contribute useful insights to the market.
But customers bring a different level of credibility.
They’re dealing with many of the same challenges as your prospects. They’ve had to evaluate possible solutions, build internal consensus, implement new approaches, and live with the results.
As Schwalje puts it, “When a customer shares their experience, the conversation changes. It’s no longer just WCG explaining what we believe works. It’s someone in the industry sharing what they’ve actually learned by doing the work.”
The objective isn’t simply to get customers to endorse your product. It’s to give them a platform to share expertise that your audience genuinely wants to hear.
How do you make customer advocacy feel like thought leadership rather than a testimonial?
Start with the problem, not your product.
One example is WCG’s Moving Trials Forward webinar featuring Merck and WCG.
Rather than structuring the conversation around WCG’s capabilities, the webinar explored a larger industry challenge: as clinical trials become more complex, how can sponsors provide better support to sites and remove operational bottlenecks?
Merck’s Kate Boneck joined WCG leaders Kari Lotsberg and Amy Thue to discuss how Merck evolved its sponsor-site engagement model and how the two organizations built a relationship-first approach centered on trust, transparency, and consistent communication. The partnership scaled to support approximately 400 sites across more than 25 countries.
That’s a very different story from “Here’s why our solution is great.”
The customer becomes a practitioner with something valuable to teach the market—and your company earns credibility by being part of that conversation.
Why does customer thought leadership matter for target account strategy?
In account-based marketing, you’re often trying to engage buyers who don’t know your company well—or who know the name but don’t yet have a reason to prioritize a conversation.
Customer thought leadership can help bridge that trust gap.
Imagine you’re targeting another large pharmaceutical company facing similar challenges around site engagement. A webinar where WCG describes its approach may be relevant.
A webinar where Merck explains the challenge, the approach it took, and what it learned gives that prospect another reason to pay attention.
This is where customer advocacy can become valuable campaign air cover for Sales.
Marketing can build customer perspectives into webinars, events, videos, social content, case studies, executive roundtables, and targeted account campaigns. Sales can then use those assets to open conversations, multithread into accounts, and provide relevant proof during active opportunities.
One customer conversation can become much more than one piece of content.
Which customers should you feature?
The biggest logo isn’t always the best answer.
Start by looking for customers with a strong story and a willingness to share what they’ve learned.
Ideally, there is alignment between:
The problem your customer solved → the problem your target accounts face → the conversation you want to own in the market.
That last piece matters.
As Schwalje explains, “The best customer stories aren’t really about us. They’re about an industry challenge our customers understand deeply. Our role is to help create a conversation where that expertise can come through.”
When you find that intersection, customer advocacy can support both brand-level thought leadership and account-level demand generation.
Don’t just market to your customers. Market with them.
Customer advocacy is often treated as something Marketing does after the work is complete: secure a quote, write a case study, add a logo to the website.
There’s a bigger opportunity.
Your customers have expertise, experiences, and perspectives that the rest of your market wants to hear.
Give them the platform to share it.
Done well, you’re not simply creating proof that your company delivers results. You’re building a community of credible voices around the problems your target accounts care about.
And in a market where every company is competing for attention, borrowed trust may be one of the most valuable forms of air cover Marketing can provide.
