Editorial
The Gist
- Lead with customer needs to boost engagement. Prioritize customer needs over your own to ensure engagement and participation in your customer advisory board programs.
- Steer clear of sales pitches to keep customer advisory board meetings collaborative. Avoid turning customer advisory board meetings into sales pitches; focus on collaborative discussions that resonate with your customers.
- Follow up on action items to maintain customer interest. Ensure meaningful outcomes by following up on action items, keeping your customers informed and involved.
When managed well, customer advisory boards (CABs) provide a valuable opportunity for your best clients to collaborate on solutions to shared challenges, help host companies prioritize their products plans and corporate strategies and engender deeper relationships with customers to create loyalty, increased renewals and expanded revenue opportunities.
On the other hand, if managed poorly, customer advisory boards can put your company in a bad light, expose your flaws and cause your best customers to sour on your products, business and future.
How can customer marketers make sure this doesn’t happen? By learning the five worst mistakes their colleagues at other companies have made in managing their customer advisory board programs, and applying these lessons to their own customer advisory boards — and all their customer-facing marketing programs, messaging and events.
Make It About Your Customers — Not You
Any and all customer programs should focus on and lead with how your company can help them overcome a challenge, do their jobs better and make their lives easier. Any communication that puts your own company needs first, on the other hand, can be a turnoff and lead to disinterest and lack of participation.
Thus, if your customer advisory board program charter describes front and center all the benefits your host company will get from the program and little about what your customers will enjoy, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot.
Related Article: Why We're Thankful: Our Favorite Customer Advisory Board Social Activities
Is Your Customer Advisory Board Meeting a Glorified Sales Pitch?
Any customer meeting that is all about your own company, your awesome new product capabilities or (shudder) is led by your sales team will come across as a glorified sales pitch, and you will quickly lose the interest of your participants.
That means if your customer advisory board meeting agenda (or your customer webinar or user meeting) is all about your own company, marketing messaging and new products, features and services, your customers will feel they are being sold to, and either suffer through it or go away.
Boring Demos, Feeds and Speeds = Poor Customer Experience
Know who you your audience is at all times. Are these product users who understand the intricacies of your solutions, or purchase influencers with a business problem or perhaps even executives who don’t even use your solutions regularly, if at all?
If your customer advisory board meetings (or other customer forums or communications) consist of long, intricate and boring product demos by your product engineering team with nth level review of each and every capability and screen — or “feeds and speeds” — to a mixed audience who may not understand your products very well, you will likely create disengaged customers.
Related Article: Are Your Customer Advisory Board Meetings Worth the Travel?
Death by PowerPoint
If your plan for your customer advisory board meeting (or customer webinar or user group meeting) is entirely a series of PowerPoint presentations with a captured audience with a small amount of time for questions at the end, your engagement will almost certainly go south.
Marketers need to get their customers engaged — and moving and contributing — with polling questions, breakout groups and stimulating games to determine shared desires and priorities.
Related Article: PowerPoint Detox: Fresh Ideas for Engaging Customer Advisory Boards
Unclear Outcomes for Customers
The conclusion of your customer advisory board meeting (or other customer engagement) should initiate a process in which you and your team review all the input, ideas and desires you received, and create a prioritize a list of action items that your company plans to undertake. Assign a leader (by name) to each one and a date that is targeted for completion. Be sure everyone is making progress on their assigned action items by holding status calls throughout the year until the next meeting — don’t wait until the week before to investigate whatever happened to them.
Most importantly, plan to get back to your members in subsequent meetings with what you heard and the actions you have agreed to take as a result of their input. Provide updates on these at each meeting, and highlight those completed and the changes your company has made as a result of their input.
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Marketers who do not report back to customer advisory board members with what happened to their input will lead to members either asking about it (and not providing very good answers) or just them losing interest in the program. Apply this concept to any engagement in which a customer asked something of your company — get back to them or risk losing them.
Mastering Customer Advisory Boards: The Key to Positive Engagement
Engaging with customers is always an important and delicate endeavor. Marketers should pledge — and be given the time, budget and resourced — to do it to the best of your abilities, or risk creating a negative experience for their customers that can have a resulting negative impact on your bottom line.
As such, you should always pledge to do any customer engagement or meeting well, or perhaps consider not doing it at all.
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