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Jon
Ashley
Senior Manager, Customer Advocacy
Equinix
Jon Ashley is Senior Customer Advocacy Manager, EMEA at Equinix, where he is building the region's advocacy function. He brings over 25 years in B2B technology marketing, having held senior roles at Cisco, Sage and Elastic, along with short term consulting work earlier in his career, advising on advocacy programme setup. At Sage he built the Sage Champions community from scratch to over 6,000 members and was named Advocate Marketer of the Year. During this time, he also wrote regularly on customer advocacy, including pieces on rethinking voice of customer content and what separates a real advocacy programme from a stories archive, and appeared on The 414, a leading UK B2B marketing podcast, discussing why customer advocacy is vital to business success. At Elastic, Jon spearheaded customer advocacy, launching its first customer programme, The Acceleration Zone, exceeding content targets by 154% in the first year and contributing to more than $100 million in influenced pipeline, alongside 175 plus Gartner Peer Insights reviews that drove Elastic's Visionary status in the SIEM Magic Quadrant.
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02 December 2026 16:15 - 17:00
Workshop | Confessions of an advocacy programme builder: How to avoid the common pitfalls
Building a customer advocacy programme looks simple from the outside. Get some happy customers, collect a few quotes, call it done. The reality is messier, and most programmes stall in the same handful of ways, regardless of company size or sector. Drawing on building advocacy functions from scratch at three very different B2B technology companies, from a global community of over six thousand members down to a single region rebuild, Jon shares the pitfalls that show up again and again. Starting with the platform instead of the people. Chasing volume over commercial relevance. Measuring the wrong things, or worse, measuring nothing at all! Or simply, losing executive buy-in the moment the programme gets questioned. Expect practical, occasionally uncomfortable honesty about what does not work before we get to what does, along with a clear-eyed look at how to prove advocacy's value in numbers that hold up to scrutiny rather than numbers that just sound good in a slide.