Do You Champion The Marketers Who Champion Your Customers?

Forrester's State Of Customer Retention, Growth, And Advocacy Survey, 2026 shows a gap between B2B companies' stated focus on customers and the incentives and recognition that shape employee behavior. Customer advocacy and customer marketing professionals report fairly strong practice-level activity: many say their organizations act on customer insights and have voice-of-customer programs. But that surface-level activity doesn't fully translate into the behaviors that lock in retention and expansion.

• 47% of customer advocacy professionals and 45% of customer marketing professionals strongly agree their organization acts on customer insights.
• 49% of customer marketing professionals and 43% of customer advocacy professionals say they have a well-rounded voice-of-the-customer program.
• Yet only 27% of customer advocacy professionals and 28% of customer success professionals strongly agree their companies celebrate retention and expansion wins with the same enthusiasm as net-new wins. Customer marketers are more positive at 48%, but that is still under half.
• Compensation tied to helping customers achieve value is limited: 35% of customer advocacy professionals and 38% of customer marketers strongly agree their organizations compensate employees based on customer value achievement.

Stated commitment to customers without matching incentives steers behavior toward what gets rewarded. When recognition and pay emphasize net-new business, employees naturally prioritize acquisition activities. The result can be misaligned activity among postsale functions—customer marketing, customer success, customer advocacy, customer education, and support—that should be coordinated to retain and grow customers.

Make celebration a repeatable ritual: Turn renewals, saves, and expansion wins into recurring recognition moments. Use team meetings, town halls, and company forums to call out examples where keeping or expanding a customer hinged on cross-functional work—a reference call, an adoption campaign, or a process improvement.

Reward cross-team effort: Expand recognition beyond single-team wins to honor collaborative initiatives that produce retention or expansion. That includes informal partnerships that surface testimonials and structured cross-functional projects that cut customer friction and save time.

Connect compensation to customer value: Where possible, incorporate customer-value outcomes into incentive structures for roles that materially influence retention and expansion. Survey responses show only a minority of customer marketers and advocates report compensation tied to these outcomes.