In this episode
Deena Zenyk, VP, Customer Engagement, Service Delivery at Spotlight and co-author of The Messenger is the Message, argues that when AI tools assemble B2B shortlists from analyst research, peer reviews and community threads, influence can no longer sit inside marketing alone. Recorded live at Spotlight Summit 2026 in Kansas City, she and Greg Kihlström cover what Spotlight calls influence orchestration, why the discover-nurture-activate framework from her 2017 book still holds, who should own the narrative that answer engines pick up, and how to show a CFO that customer voice is moving the shortlist.
Key takeaways
- Influence now has to be distributed across the business. Analyst relations, influencer relations, customer engagement and customer advocacy each carry messages to the market, and influence orchestration coordinates them so they reinforce one position.
- The DNA framework hasn’t changed. Discover, nurture, activate still describes how to do customer advocacy well: understand customers, invest in them, then activate them around the metrics that matter to the business.
- What customers are activated toward is changing. Zenyk and her co-author are developing “precision advocacy,” which gets specific about each activation, such as targeted peer reviews.
- Answer engines reward cohesive narratives. Siloed teams sending their own versions of the message work against a company in the AEO era, which makes orchestration a strategic imperative rather than a nice-to-have.
- Influence orchestration can’t be a grassroots effort. It needs structural support, starting with cross-functional tiger teams and, within 12 to 18 months by Zenyk’s estimate, roles like VP of Influence or Chief Influence Officer.
- The orchestrator is the keeper of the message. The role needs to understand AEO and narrative, while specialists below it move the levers in customer engagement, AR and influencer relations.
- AEO makes advocacy measurable. AI visibility tools, AI audits, win-loss analysis and surveys show where customer voice reaches buyers and where it doesn’t.
- Video needs chapters and transcripts to be found. A YouTube presence alone isn’t enough, and existing content can be optimized rather than rebuilt.
- People are still the decision-makers. The answer engine is a channel to reach buyers, and marketing only to machines misses the point.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Introduction: recorded live at Spotlight Summit 2026
- 01:45 — Deena Zenyk’s two decades in customer advocacy and The Messenger is the Message
- 03:18 — Where B2B influence sits when buyers arrive with a shortlist
- 05:12 — What has and hasn’t changed since the book: the DNA framework
- 06:58 — Precision advocacy and activating customers toward peer reviews
- 07:49 — Balancing authentic voices with one consistent narrative
- 10:33 — Why influence orchestration needs a VP of Influence
- 11:27 — The orchestrator’s skill set
- 12:56 — Measuring influence and communicating value to the CFO
- 14:27 — Getting mentioned for the right things
- 15:03 — What answer engines look for: chapters, transcripts and format
- 15:54 — “Tell me about my company”: tracing an AI untruth to its source
- 17:41 — The human part of the buying decision
- 20:14 — Staying agile: curiosity, collaboration and the 80/20 rule
Why influence can’t live in marketing anymore
Marketing has always tried to influence the market, and done it well in its own silo. Zenyk’s argument is that the silo is now the problem. Every function that touches the market sends messages through its own channels: analysts hear one story, influencers another, customers a third. Influence orchestration looks at what each channel is saying, who it reaches, and how the narrative gets adapted once it’s out in the market.
The DNA framework still works in the age of AI
The Messenger is the Message, co-written in 2017 with Mark Organ, the founder of Eloqua, rests on the idea that what customers say about you when you aren’t in the room matters most. Its discover-nurture-activate method treats advocacy as an investment in customers before any withdrawal. Zenyk says that premise hasn’t moved. The change is in activation: being precise about what customers are asked to do, since peer reviews and similar content now feed the answer engines that build shortlists.
Who owns the narrative that AI picks up
Standardizing messages while keeping them authentic needs connective tissue across the organization. Zenyk sees clients forming cross-functional tiger teams now and expects dedicated roles to follow: a VP of Influence or Chief Influence Officer who keeps the core message and checks whether it’s working, while specialists in customer engagement, AR and influencer relations do the execution. Without that structural remit, she says, cross-functional work stays something people get to only when they have time.
How to show a CFO that customer voice moves the shortlist
Zenyk cites figures presented at the summit: more than 80% of buyers now start with answer engines, and a very high share buy from the first vendor they contact. Win-loss analysis and surveys can show where influence reached buyers and where it missed. AI visibility tools and AI audits, which Spotlight runs for clients, track movement in the engines themselves. For advocacy practitioners, she says, being able to measure customer voice in the machine-generated shortlist is a big deal.
Start by asking the AI about your own company
In a workshop in London, Zenyk had participants run simple prompts in whichever AI tool they preferred, starting with “Tell me about my company.” One participant got an accurate first line followed by claims he considered untrue. Checking the sources pointed straight to where the untruth came from, which gave the team a specific plan to counter it.
FAQ
What is influence orchestration? Influence orchestration is Spotlight’s term for intentionally coordinating message and narrative across every function that touches the market, including analyst relations, influencer relations, customer engagement and customer advocacy, so they reinforce one position in the B2B buying journey.
Does the DNA framework from The Messenger is the Message still apply in the age of AI? Yes. Deena Zenyk says discover, nurture, activate is unchanged: companies still need to understand customers and invest in them before activating them. What has changed is the context, especially what customers are activated toward, such as peer reviews that answer engines read.
Who should own influence orchestration inside a company? Zenyk argues it cannot run as a grassroots effort and needs structural support. She expects roles such as VP of Influence or Chief Influence Officer to emerge within 12 to 18 months, starting today as cross-functional tiger teams.
How can a B2B team measure whether customer voice is influencing AI shortlists? Use AI audits and AI visibility tools to track how the company appears in answer engines, and use win-loss analysis and surveys to find where influence reaches buyers in their journey and where it does not.
What makes video content more likely to be picked up by answer engines? A YouTube presence alone is not enough. Videos need chapters and transcripts, and existing videos can be optimized for answer engines rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Has AI changed the human side of B2B buying? Zenyk says no. People remain the ultimate decision-makers, and the answer engine is a channel to reach them, not a replacement for marketing to people.
About Deena Zenyk
Deena Zenyk is VP, Customer Engagement at Spotlight. With more than 10 years’ experience in advocate marketing, she is a world-leading expert and pioneer in advocate marketing. Her guiding professional principle is to make leading-edge marketing philosophies and practices accessible and actionable for the everyday marketer.
Deena Zenyk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dzenyk/
Resources
Spotlight: https://www.spotlight-io.com
This episode is brought to you by Spotlight. Spotlight is pioneering the future of influence orchestration in the B2B buyer journey.Trusted by over 165 teams globally, Spotlight is the world’s leading analyst relations consultancy and industry platform. Learn more at http://www.spotlight-io.com
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. What if the most important reader of your customer’s testimonial isn’t a buyer at all, but the model that will summarize it? I’m excited to share this episode that was recorded live at the Hotel Kansas City in Kansas City at Spotlight Summit 2026. I’m joined by Deena Zenyk, VP Customer Engagement, Service Delivery at Spotlight, and co-author of The Messenger is the Message. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Deena Zenyk, VP Customer Engagement, Service Delivery at Spotlight and co-author of The Messenger is the Message. Deena, great to have you here.
[00:01:33] Deena Zenyk: Great. Thank you so much for having me, Greg. I understand that you have hundreds of people who want to be on your podcast, and I’m just absolutely tickled and thrilled to be one of them, so thank you.
[00:01:45] Greg Kihlström: Looking forward to this, this conversation. So, before we dive in, do you wanna give maybe a little, a little more background on your role and focus and maybe a little context on, on the book and-
[00:01:58] Deena: Sure. Yeah. absolutely. so I have been in the customer advocacy space as a practitioner, as a consultant, and as a business owner, for the last two decades. I- it’s, you know, hard to believe, for me that, this practice has been around and churning and, and developing and evolving, for so long now, you know, more than 20 years. I’m a student of the practice. no matter what role I have had in my own journey, in customer advocacy, I’ve never stopped being just, like, so passionately interested in what this practice actually is, how psychology
[00:02:44] Deena: plays into it, how, you know, b- business factors and, and mathematics and relationship all kind of come together and converge in customer advocacy. That led me to, co-authoring, a book in 2017, with Mark Organ. he’s, he’s known as the category creator of customer advocacy. He was also, the founder of Eloqua, so very early on in marketing automation. so that was a wonderful experience to write a book with an incredibly smart and talented man who’s also super passionate about the topic.
[00:03:18] Greg Kihlström: Love it. So yeah, let’s, let’s dive in here, and I wanna start by setting the stage of, you know, B2B buyers today. I’m sure we all– we can all relate to this. they’re likely to have a shortlist, well, it’s half-formed, even more than that, before they ever even talk to a vendor and, you know, everything from analyst research, peer reviews, community threads, and now AI tools summarizing all of that to varying degrees and varying, you know, elements. So, you know, what’s genuinely changed about where influence sits, and what has that done to the question of who inside a company actually owns it?
[00:03:59] Deena: such a great question, to start off with. I think, like, marketing has always set out to influence, to influence, the market and has done it, like, quite well, in pockets, and in its own special and unique, silo. I think that the shift today about where influence sits is that it needs to be distributed across the different functions within the business that have anything to do with the market. that’s, what we call influence orchestration, at Spotlight, which is about that kind of intentional coordination of message, of narrative, of influence out, into the B2B buying journey. Um,
[00:04:44] Deena: inside the organization, you would look at functions like influencer relations, analyst relations, customer engagement, customer, advocacy, and, look at what messages are going out through those channels, who are they reaching, and how is that narrative then being, adapted, out, in there in, out in the market, and how does that reinforce your position.
[00:05:12] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so the, the book you wrote was, you know, it was pre, pre-ChatGPT which many would consider pre-AI. But, what’s changed? What’s stayed the same since, since the book?
[00:05:28] Deena: Yeah, I mean, the, the core premise of The Messenger is the Message is, of course, that the, the messenger, the, the customer and what they have to say about you and your business, like, that is ultimately the most important thing. What is said about you when you aren’t in the room? What is said about you on the places and spaces that other people may, visit to learn, about you? the book really was a practitioner’s how-to guide. not just a thought piece, but really how do you do customer advocacy well, and that comes down to a methodology that Liz and I, created many years ago, 10, 11 years ago. discover, nurture, activate, DNA. that is the framework for how to engage customers, how to learn about them, how to understand what’s important
[00:06:13] Deena: to them, and then ultimately, how to activate them around the, the metrics that are the most important to your business. That remains the same. The DNA model does not change. How to do customer advocacy or customer engagement really well, that hasn’t changed in the age of AI. We still need to understand our customers. We still need to know what’s important to them. We need to deliver on what’s important to them. We need to kind of, like, make that, that, um… We call it, like, an investment, into our customers before we start to withdraw, or activate, on that investment. That remains the same. That premise of the book remains the same, but of course now you can apply that DNA methodology in this new context. Um,
[00:06:58] Deena: so specifically when we think about the activation piece of that framework, it’s like, “Well, what are we activating our customers towards? why does it matter?” w- we had a session, earlier today with Ashlyn, from Amplitude, talking about how to be really precise in those activations around customer reviews, peer reviews. so, you know, that, that piece is evolving and, and Liz and I are working on a methodology now called precision advocacy, being very, very specific in, how you are looking to activate your customers. But yeah, that’s, that’s the piece that, that hasn’t changed, and, and the context in which it’s applied today is slightly
[00:07:44] Deena: different, but still s- the, the methodology remains.
[00:07:49] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. So I want to get back to what you were talking about earlier, which is, you know, when we think about influence orchestration that is something that is not a single role. There’s many, many within the org that, that play that. So, you know, you’ve got this, I would call it a challenge, of, you know, you’ve got unique voices within an organization that should have u- You know, marketing is gonna say something different from sales, and, and so on and so forth. But you’ve also got to standardize messaging because you don’t know what the AI bots are gonna pick up from where. So, you know, how does, how does an organization think about balancing that while still making sure that authenticity, which is also critical, is still paramount?
[00:08:32] Deena: I think it, it’s a new, like, strategic imperative, in my opinion. when we think about influence and thinking about those different pools of trust and who kind of owns those pools of trust, inside the business, there has to be some sort of connective tissue now. like, we’ve used the word silos in business for, you know, as long as I can, recall, and, we’ve also been trying to break down silos in business for as long as I can [laughs] recall.
[00:09:01] Greg Kihlström: Right. [laughs]
[00:09:02] Deena: the idea of influence, I feel it, it’s a forcing function. I- influence orchestration, pardon me. It’s a forcing function. We can no longer operate as silos and just kind of, like, take that message down from, you know, the, the top of the business and then figure out in our own little corner of, of the company how to get that out. the, the orchestration piece is key there. We’ve always been trying to influence, but the orchestration now is that imperative, that we have to come out strong and united with that narrative, because we’re, we’re, we’re s- we’re kind of beaming those messages out now in a whole new era, and that’s the era, era of AEO, answer engine optimization, which is going to look for those, cohesive narratives. so that, that, that’s Be really strategic about it. We’re, we’re seeing it a, a, a bit with some of the clients that we work with. We’re seeing it come through now as these tiger teams, people who are coming together from different parts of the org who are starting to tackle this new challenge. I think future state, and, and when I say future state, but the world is moving a mile a minute, this could be 12 or-
[00:10:33] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. [laughs]
[00:10:33] Deena: … or 18 months, you know, you would be looking, to see roles emerge in organizations that are, like, VP of Influence, Chief Influence Officer, people who have that remit now so that participating and collaborating cross-functionally and outside of your silos isn’t just, you know, a, a nice to have or a might, might do it if I have the time to, but it is that operating, operational imperative for the business. You need someone to guide that. I don’t think that influence orchestration, in my opinion, can just kind of be a, a grassroots movement. Everyone is busy in their roles, and has their own motivations, for the work that they do. So it needs to be, something that is, a, a motion that is supported, structurally inside the organization.
[00:11:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Well, and that, that orchestrator then, they probably need to know a little bit about a lot of things, right? Like, what is the… You know, what, what’s the ideal skill set or-
[00:11:38] Deena: Yeah, I think, I think the orchestrator needs to understand, the, how AEO works.
[00:11:48] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:48] Deena: I do think that at the core they need to understand narrative, and they need to understand, what, what that key message or the key messages are of the business, and they’re kind of like the, the keeper of that message. You should have all sorts of smart and capable people operating at a level below that. You should have smart and capable people who are doing customer engagement, influencer relations, analyst relations, or maybe it’s one person doing all three of those things. Those are the folks who really understand how to move the levers with that message, the- The person, at the top, whether that is a VP of influence, is the one who should be keeping an eye on, like, okay, like, i- is this working? And the cool thing
[00:12:33] Deena: about AEO is, yeah, you can measure that now. For customer advocacy folks, it’s kind of a big deal to be able to see the power and impact of customer voice in the market, and be able to measure, how that’s moving the needle or not, in the short list that, the, the machine is generating.
[00:12:56] Greg Kihlström: So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about the measurement part of that then.
And so certainly there are AEO, GEO tools out there that, that give you a sense of that. Is that… You know, what, what should that influence orchestration function, are they paying attention to those tool- Like, how, how do they communicate value to the CFO, let’s say, just at a high level?
[00:13:16] Deena: I mean, we saw a presentation, this morning, that was showcasing where are, you know, wh- when people are on their decision-making journey, their purchase journey, you know, what are the inflection points, for that decision making? We know that 80-plus percent of people now are going to answer engines to seek out that initial touchpoint of information. and then we also know a very, very high percentage of folks, are going to end up buying from the first vendor that, they reach out to, on that list. So you should be able, through win-loss, through surveying, deduce where, that influence is hitting the customer in their buying journey, and importantly, where it isn’t.here are some really great tools out there. I’m not gonna name-drop a, a bunch of tools, but there are some excellent tools out there. we leverage them, at Spotlight when we’re doing AI audits and, AI, visibility analyses, that will help to kind of track and mark, your movements, in, in, in the, the AI engines.
[00:14:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah. Well, and then, you know, there’s, there’s the getting mentioned and then there’s getting mentioned for the right things, [laughs] right-
[00:14:35] Deena: Yeah. Yes, yes
[00:14:35] Greg Kihlström: … as well, ’cause SEO, you can, you can show up on spot number one, but not necessarily the thing ou wish you were showing up under.
[00:14:43] Deena: That’s right.
[00:14:44] Greg Kihlström: So I think that maybe goes back to the, you know, there’s lots of these different motions going on.
[00:14:48] Greg Kihlström: And you know, I think marketing probably plays a big role in that, but they don’t play the only role in that. how, how do internal teams coordinate on, i, you know, ’cause we don’t get to choose what ChatGPT or Claude or whatever pulls.
[00:15:03] Deena: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:03] Greg Kihlström: you know, how do internal teams kind of collaborate and coordinate on what gets kind of the loudest voice?
[00:15:09] Deena: Yeah, yeah. We, we certainly don’t get to choose, what, the machines pull, but we can be educated and well-versed enough to know, what the machines are looking for, the formats that they’re looking for. I was at a conference recently with an excellent session, on video in the age of AI, and just some awesome pro tips from that session, like You- just having YouTube videos and a YouTube presence is not enough. So you can have a bunch of really great videos on YouTube, but f- for the practitioners, okay, what would you need to know about video for, for that right message to get picked up? Well, you need to have chapters. You need to have a transcript, right? You need to kind of look
[00:15:54] Deena: at your video through a sl- a, a new lens. you don’t have to greenfield everything. You can look at some of the stuff that you’ve already got and start to optimize it for the answer engine. But I think, you know, it is on us to get more well-versed. There’s so much out there. You could be super meta and just go to your AI engine and ask for advice, [laughs] on how to apply this, to your role. And I would say at a very baseline, ran a workshop in London recently and, in that workshop asked participants, to go through a series of really super simple prompts with the, it, we… not prescriptive about what tool to use. You wanna use ChatGPT, you wanna use Claude, you wanna use Google, whatever you wanna use. And the results were fascinating. Really
[00:16:39] Deena: simple prompts like, “Tell me about my company.” And we had, one guy in the class and, it came up and it was like, “Okay, that’s right.” And then it was just total untruths, in, in his mind, that popped up right in that first pass, and he was like, “Man.” We were like, “Okay, well let’s see where that’s coming from.” And so then it’s like, okay, let’s check the source, and you could zero right in on where that, that particular untruth, was coming from. And so then now you can have a plan of action for that. Like, how would, how would we kind of dissipate the impact of that, through our own actions? it is just endlessly fascinating as a practitioner. It’s a super exciting time, I think, to be alive,
[00:17:25] Deena: in business, to embrace some of what is going on and really embrace, kind of like a, a, an opportunity to learn and develop a new skill set within your practice area. So if you’re AR, within AR. If you’re in customer, within customer. Influencer, influencer.
[00:17:41] Greg Kihlström: Yeah. And so then, you know, I’ll… Certainly a lot of focus on, on the AI component of this.How does that change the focus on the human part? ‘Cause, you know, at the end of the day-
[00:17:53] Greg Kihlström: … people don’t, at least right now, they don’t go into ChatGPT and like buy a, you know, million dollar, software system. What does that change about… hokay. [laughs] what does that change, though, about the end of that process? The, you know, before it was maybe optimizing for the entire, you know, part of the funnel, but you know, what, what’s different now, or maybe what’s not different about, you know, optimizing for the human part of the connection?
[00:18:22] Deena: Well, the, the human part, of the equation I don’t think has changed.
[00:18:27] Greg Kihlström: Yeah.
[00:18:27] Deena: which is why I think, that that framework from the messenger is the message really seems to hold its own still in a completely different kind of technological and in, in some ways psychological, environment. people are still the ultimate decision-makers in their buying journey. influence orchestration is, attempting to influence, that buying decision, the same way that as marketers, as salespeople, as organizations, you know, we’ve been doing for decades, and decades, and decades. We, in my opinion, we should never lose sight of the fact that we are still marketing a- and selling, and trying
[00:19:13] Deena: to reach people. How we’re reaching them is slightly different, but never to lose sight and, and, I would, you know, kind of hate to see a time where we are just marketing to machines. I like to think that, we still keep people in view, care deeply about, you know, what matters, to the people, who are in our midst as our customers. think deeply about the people who may benefit from buying our products or services, and develop our strategies built for those people. the answer engine, is a channel to get there. but, you know, h- here at this conference this week, just being able to have interesting conversations with people, that doesn’t go away.
[00:19:58] Deena: I’m not pulling up my phone and, and, and, you know, consulting ChatGPT when someone is asking me a question about, “Hey, have you used this tool?” “Yeah, I have,” or, “No, I haven’t,” you know?
[00:20:08] Greg Kihlström: Right. Yeah. Love it. Well, I think that’s a great way to, to wrap up here. I got one last question for you before we do. what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:20:19] Deena: Oh my gosh, that is such a great question. I think I said from the start, I’m just, I’m a s- I’m a student. so although it is cliche, I think to be agile in any sort of practice that is always evolving, you have to remain highly curious, highly collaborative. that’s definitely a secret to my 20 years of success, is never, kind of going down the road alone, but surrounding myself with incredibly passionate, and smart, and open, collaborators. and, not being af- afraid to fail, so I try to not overanalyze what I’m doing. I’m one of those 80/20 people. I aim to hit 80% of excellent, because I know that my 80%, it could be someone else’s 100%, or, you know, could be someone’s 60. but when I get to 80%, then it’s go time for me and I’ll kind of ponder and worry about the details as I lay in bed. [laughs]
[00:21:22] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Love it. Love it. Well, again, I’d like to thank Deena Zenyk, VP Customer Engagement Service Delivery at Spotlight for joining me here and for joining the show.
