Implementing Customer Participant Management in Salesforce for SaaS

Tiphaine Coupel · 2026-01-06T10:45:04.788Z

Hi everyone wishing you all the best for 2026! As a solo Customer Marketing Manager in a SaaS company, I'd like to put in place systems (indeed we currently have no way to flag, identify, or segment key participants in our programs (such as CAB members, Top Account Program members, or customer advocates) inside Salesforce or any central system. Lists are managed manually on Excel by different teams, leading to inefficiency and data gaps) Do you have any experience in setting this? (I doubt I'll get budget for a specific tool - so I've reached out to CRM team and listed all the needs & challenges) If yes, what would be your advice to approach that, how did you build advocacy systems, what are the criteria to pondere advocacy acts, etc? thanks in advance :)

Implementing Customer Participant Management in Salesforce for SaaS | CMAweekly Customer Marketing and Advocacy Slack

7 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Maritessa Lymperopoulou
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Hi Tiphaine, if your CRM team can create the relevant fields in Salesforce that i.e. CSMs can update when applicable (e.g. CAB member, reference, or any other attributes you’d like to track), you’ll then be able to build reports based on those fields and export the lists you need for different projects or use cases. The key consideration is clearly defining ownership for keeping those fields up to date, so the data remains accurate and reliable. For example, if CSMs are incentivized to bring in advocates in the formats those customers are most comfortable with (CAB vs references vs speakers, etc.), they’re more likely to stay on top of updating those fields, especially since they’ll also be reporting on those metrics. When resources are limited, finding allies in teams with broader capacity has personally been a huge help for me.
💡1
Tiphaine Coupel
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thanks Maritessa for your feedback 🙏, super useful. I'm wondering also if I shouldn't go to local regional marketing people - they have that knowledge on the ground to fill out CRM. I need to think about the right fields and tags I'd need to have to map out those adovcates and get a segmentation available among them. May I ask you if you have any best practices here or kind of generic structure that could be helpful?
Chrissy Mariotti
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Hi Tiphaine Coupel — I agree with Maritessa Lymperopoulou about using Salesforce as a starting point. If that is not an option - another fairly inexpensive option could be implementing a shared, standardized list (or set of lists) via Smartsheet. It’s an easy way to centralize information, share updates, and even tag internal team members for specific actions.
Kelsey Dannels
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We are also working in a Google sheet and want to move it all into Salesforce. Does anyone have a recommendation about using the contact vs account page? Sometimes we have multiple advocates who are doing activities at one account. not sure which gives the best holistic view and is easiest to pull reports on. We are thinking about tracking some of the below (still revving on the list)
approved logo usage
last date of advocacy activity
types of advocacy activity (case study, webinar, CAB participant, blog post, speaking at an event, etc.)
Chrissy Mariotti Tiphaine Coupel Maritessa Lymperopoulou
Maritessa Lymperopoulou
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Tiphaine Coupel In my role, I cover the entire EMEA region, so connecting closely with regional teams is essential. Educating them on the value of advocacy and turning them into allies helps ensure that information flows back to you. A simple way to start is with a spreadsheet per region, asking regional teams to manually capture the details you’re looking for. From there, feed that information into Salesforce and make sure whoever owns contact updates in SFDC also maintains those advocacy-related fields going forward. This then enables Sales and CSMs to easily identify advocates and connect customers or prospects accordingly. Once teams see the value and how often this data gets used, they’re far more likely to keep it clean and up to date. Nothing overly sophisticated—just small, practical steps that require minimal time but deliver real impact.
Maritessa Lymperopoulou
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·
Kelsey Dannels I’m not sure what type of product you’re selling, but in our case—because we work with multiple personas, each with different needs—tracking this at the contact level has proven more useful. It’s not always easy to reflect that level of detail at the account level in Salesforce, depending on how the instance is built. So I’d say the right approach really depends on your product and the types of requests you typically receive. Choose the path that will serve your teams best.
Tiphaine Coupel
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·
Huge thanks all for sharing your advice, insights! I'll move forward with CRM team to get way to flag & fields + coordinating w/ IMM, CS & CG across the different regions - get everyone's buy-in to build and coordinate that advocacy system

Maritessa Lymperopoulou
·
·
Hi Tiphaine, if your CRM team can create the relevant fields in Salesforce that i.e. CSMs can update when applicable (e.g. CAB member, reference, or any other attributes you’d like to track), you’ll then be able to build reports based on those fields and export the lists you need for different projects or use cases. The key consideration is clearly defining ownership for keeping those fields up to date, so the data remains accurate and reliable. For example, if CSMs are incentivized to bring in advocates in the formats those customers are most comfortable with (CAB vs references vs speakers, etc.), they’re more likely to stay on top of updating those fields, especially since they’ll also be reporting on those metrics. When resources are limited, finding allies in teams with broader capacity has personally been a huge help for me.
💡1
Tiphaine Coupel
·
·
thanks Maritessa for your feedback 🙏, super useful. I'm wondering also if I shouldn't go to local regional marketing people - they have that knowledge on the ground to fill out CRM. I need to think about the right fields and tags I'd need to have to map out those adovcates and get a segmentation available among them. May I ask you if you have any best practices here or kind of generic structure that could be helpful?
Chrissy Mariotti
·
·
Hi Tiphaine Coupel — I agree with Maritessa Lymperopoulou about using Salesforce as a starting point. If that is not an option - another fairly inexpensive option could be implementing a shared, standardized list (or set of lists) via Smartsheet. It’s an easy way to centralize information, share updates, and even tag internal team members for specific actions.
Kelsey Dannels
·
·
We are also working in a Google sheet and want to move it all into Salesforce. Does anyone have a recommendation about using the contact vs account page? Sometimes we have multiple advocates who are doing activities at one account. not sure which gives the best holistic view and is easiest to pull reports on. We are thinking about tracking some of the below (still revving on the list)
approved logo usage
last date of advocacy activity
types of advocacy activity (case study, webinar, CAB participant, blog post, speaking at an event, etc.)
Chrissy Mariotti Tiphaine Coupel Maritessa Lymperopoulou
Maritessa Lymperopoulou
·
·
Tiphaine Coupel In my role, I cover the entire EMEA region, so connecting closely with regional teams is essential. Educating them on the value of advocacy and turning them into allies helps ensure that information flows back to you. A simple way to start is with a spreadsheet per region, asking regional teams to manually capture the details you’re looking for. From there, feed that information into Salesforce and make sure whoever owns contact updates in SFDC also maintains those advocacy-related fields going forward. This then enables Sales and CSMs to easily identify advocates and connect customers or prospects accordingly. Once teams see the value and how often this data gets used, they’re far more likely to keep it clean and up to date. Nothing overly sophisticated—just small, practical steps that require minimal time but deliver real impact.
Maritessa Lymperopoulou
·
·
Kelsey Dannels I’m not sure what type of product you’re selling, but in our case—because we work with multiple personas, each with different needs—tracking this at the contact level has proven more useful. It’s not always easy to reflect that level of detail at the account level in Salesforce, depending on how the instance is built. So I’d say the right approach really depends on your product and the types of requests you typically receive. Choose the path that will serve your teams best.
Tiphaine Coupel
·
·
Huge thanks all for sharing your advice, insights! I'll move forward with CRM team to get way to flag & fields + coordinating w/ IMM, CS & CG across the different regions - get everyone's buy-in to build and coordinate that advocacy system