Foreword

A note on this edition: this is the second edition of a book I first published in March 2026. I've updated it for changes to LinkedIn's advertising products, added a chapter on program architecture, and tightened the writing throughout. One thing has not changed: Kindling is still early, and I still won't invent results we haven't produced. Everything I said about that in the first edition stands.

Let me tell you about a deal I lost in 2014 that I think about all the time.

I was selling enterprise HR software. Big deal, seven figures, and I'd run a textbook sales process. Executive sponsorship. Technical validation. A business case built with the CFO's team. I had internal champions and the competitive advantage on features. I was confident.

We lost. And when I did the loss debrief, which I always did because losing teaches more than winning, the buyer told me something I've never forgotten. They said: "Your product was probably the better fit. But we talked to three people who use [Competitor], and they were all enthusiastic. When we tried to find people who use your product, we couldn't find anyone talking about it. That made us nervous."

Read that again. They chose the inferior product because the other vendor's customers were visibly enthusiastic and ours were invisible. We had happy customers. We had high NPS and great case studies on our website. None of it mattered, because none of it was visible in the places where the buyer was looking.

That deal haunted me for years, and some version of it was happening across the industry. Great products losing to louder products. Companies with happy customers losing to companies whose customers were simply more visible.

I kept asking myself: why doesn't someone build a system for this? Why are we leaving the most credible marketing channel a company has to pure chance?

I spent 25 years selling enterprise software. SAP, Medallia, Cornerstone, ADP. I closed north of $250 million in deals across those companies, and I can tell you exactly how most of those deals actually got done.

The demo didn't close them. Neither did the ROI calculator, or even the sales process, though I'd like to think I ran a good one. What closed those deals, more often than I'm comfortable admitting, was a phone call the buyer made to someone they trusted. A former colleague. An ops leader at another company who happened to use the product. Someone in their network who could say, with no agenda, whether the thing actually worked.

I watched this pattern repeat for two decades. The buyer's internal reference call, the one my sales team didn't schedule and didn't know about, was almost always the moment the deal tipped. The best salespeople I worked with understood this instinctively. They invested in making their existing customers successful enough, and visible enough, that when the next prospect asked around, the answer came back positive.

What always bothered me was that nobody built a system for it.

Companies would spend millions on paid advertising, content marketing, SDR teams, trade shows, and all the other machinery of B2B growth. Then when it came to the single most credible channel they had, their own happy customers talking about them, the best they could do was an occasional case study and a reference request that made the customer feel like they were doing the company a favor.

I started Kindling because I believe there's a better way. Better in the way that product-led growth was better than the enterprise sales model it disrupted: a structural shift in how B2B companies grow, built on the simple observation that your customers are more credible than your marketing team, and the technology now exists to turn that credibility into a real channel.

This book lays out the framework for that shift. I'm calling it Advocacy-Led Growth, and I believe it represents the next real evolution in how B2B SaaS companies build pipeline.

A few things I want to be upfront about before you read further.

First, I'm building a company around this thesis. Kindling is the platform designed to operationalize what this book describes. I'll reference it where it's relevant, but this book is not a product pitch. The ideas here are bigger than any one tool, and they'll work whether you use Kindling or build the systems yourself.

Second, I don't have a library of customer case studies to share with you. Kindling is early. We're in the market, the product is live, and we're working with our first cohort of companies. I won't invent results we haven't produced. What I do have is 25 years of pattern recognition from the buy side and the sell side of enterprise software, a real command of the research that supports this thesis, and a conviction that the market is ready for this shift. Where I cite research, it's real. Where I share observations, they come from direct experience. Where I speculate, I'll tell you.

Third, this framework is designed to work alongside everything you're already doing, not replace it. If you're running a product-led motion, advocacy makes it convert better. If you're sales-led, advocacy gives your reps air cover. If you're doing content marketing, advocacy gives you content your team cannot produce, because it comes from people who use the product and have no reason to lie about it.

I wrote this book for founders and marketing leaders at B2B SaaS companies who know something is broken about how they grow, who have happy customers they aren't using, and who want a framework that's both intellectually honest and practically useful.

I hope this is that framework.

Brian De Groodt Boulder, Colorado July 2026