The go-to-market playbook we’ve known is cracking.
Outbound is drowning in AI-generated noise. Paid is pricey and losing punch. Organic is volatile and impossible to fully control.
And yet—buyers still ask the same question when it’s time to make the call:
“Do you have a customer who looks like me…and won?”
Here’s the problem: Most GTM teams are facing a massive Evidence Gap. More than half of sellers say a deal stalled because they couldn’t find the right proof in time.
Why?
Customer proof is still a fire drill—last-minute reference requests, exhausted advocates, and deals stuck in limbo because the one relevant story is buried in someone’s Google Drive. Meanwhile, buyers are sniffing out the fluff. They can spot cherry-picked case studies and gamed G2 reviews from a mile away.
In this new era, proof isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the deciding factor.
The winners will treat proof as an always-on engine—customers front and center, proof at every stage of the funnel, a living library of real, specific wins. Not just the three shiny stories marketing hand-picks.
GTM teams need proof at every moment of the funnel. And while the tooling in customer marketing has gotten more sophisticated, no one solution is able to put that proof front-and-center.
Until now.
The News: UserEvidence Acquires Zealot
Today, we’re taking a bold step to help customer marketers own this moment.
We’ve acquired Zealot, the advocacy and reference management platform built to activate customers at scale. Alongside this acquisition, we’ve secured an additional $7 million in funding, bringing our total funding raised to $21M, to fuel our product innovation and market expansion.
This isn’t about changing who we are—it’s about completing the picture. UserEvidence has always been the customer evidence platform that makes your best proof easy to collect, curate, and share. Zealot starts where UserEvidence used to end: the tools to build, manage, and grow a thriving base of engaged advocates who are ready to speak on your behalf, provide feedback, or be a 1:1 reference. Combine that with our longform original research offerings and you get a marketing team equipped to tell the exact compelling stories they need to win a competitive market—in every part of the funnel.
Together, we’re delivering customer proof across the funnel like no other vendor can.
UserEvidence + Zealot: Built For The Full Funnel of Customer Advocacy
In a world of longer sales cycles, bigger buying committees, and greater buyer skepticism, you can’t afford to hope the right proof shows up at the right time. You need to engineer it. This means deploying customer proof through every part of the funnel.
With our combined platform, customer marketers can now:
- Identify and activate advocates—know exactly who’s referenceable, who’s at risk of burnout, and who’s ready to help.
- Deliver the right proof at the right moment—from top-of-funnel quotes, to 3rd-party verified ROI stats to bottom-funnel peer-to-peer calls and competitive evidence.
- Build programs that scale—dynamically segment by industry, role, or product usage, and run targeted activation campaigns that get customers engaged without over-asking.
It’s not just about making it easier to find a good quote. It’s about creating a system where your customers are your most active, most credible growth channel—without the chaos.
The Zealot Product: Two Core Engines for Customer Advocacy Activation and Reference Management
1. Advocacy Activation
Zealot gives you the infrastructure to turn happy customers into active champions:
- Engagements & Segments: Create targeted missions and campaigns to get the right customers involved in the right activities.
- Rewards + Recognition: Thank your customers with gifts or with a full gamified system of points, badges, and leaderboards. Keep advocates engaged over time based on what will actually motivate them.
- Embedded Advocacy: Integrations that bring advocacy opportunities right into the tools customers already use. No need for another hub to log into if you don’t want it.
- Community: Discussions and forums for customers who want to connect and share.
2. Reference Management
Never scramble for a 1:1 reference call again:
- Requests in Slack or Salesforce: Sales can quickly request the specific reference they need where they’re already working.
- Reference Pool: Centralized view of all available references, with filters for industry, role, product usage, and more.
- AI Matchmaking: Instantly connect the right reference to the right deal.
- Burnout Scores: Protect your best advocates from overuse.
- Reporting: Report on deal impact directly in Salesforce to see where references are involved in deals, win rates, and direct revenue attributed to reference usage.
By bringing these capabilities under the UserEvidence roof, we’re making it possible for GTM teams to operate like customer proof is the most important part of their strategy—because it is.
Why This Matters for Customer Marketers
For too long, customer marketing & advocacy has been a reactive, request-driven role. Sales asks for a reference, you scramble to find one. Demand gen needs “a story from a customer in X industry,” you dig through old decks or folders. Content marketing needs a customer willing to speak on an upcoming webinar, you ask customer success if they have ideas.
Customer marketing & advocacy is a strategic role that should be at the center of every great companies go-to-market strategy. It provides the fuel for your GTM fire.
With the combined power of UserEvidence and Zealot, you can finally get off the hamster wheel and run programs that:
- Influence pipeline and accelerate deals
- Protect advocate relationships and prevent burnout
- Give sales and marketing exactly what they need, without constant fire drills
- Prove the impact of your work with measurable engagement and revenue outcomes
This is the shift from “case study manager” to strategic revenue driver. This is how customer marketing & advocacy becomes the steward for the most valuable asset to your company: your customers.
"We’ve been utilizing the platform for 3 weeks and we’ve already moved into active advocacy activities. By combining UserEvidence and Zealot, I’m able to see advocate activity populating in real-time, and immediately activate those new advocates and references. You’re instantly winning."
The Road Ahead
Our mission remains the same: help B2B marketers build trust with their buyers.
But now, we’re doing it with the most complete platform in the market—one that doesn’t just capture proof, but activates it, connects it to live deals, and scales your advocate relationships across the customer lifecycle.
The GTM landscape isn’t getting easier. But with always-on customer proof, it can get a whole lot more winnable.
To learn more about how we’re helping GTM teams build trust and win competitive deals with advocacy and reference management, visit userevidence.com/advocacy
