Whether you’re starting or improving a customer advisory board (CAB) program, the commitment and participation of your executive team will be crucial in ensuring the success of your initiative. The same goes for planning your initial or upcoming meeting – your executives should be informed and clear of what’s going on and their needed responsibilities to ensure meeting success.
Here are seven tips for preparing your company executives for your upcoming CAB meeting:
1. Charter
While creating a program charter document is needed for recruiting CAB members and ensuring they understand participation expectations, the additional benefit in creating this is to ensure your own company executives understand why you have created the program, and its mission and goals. As executives are (understandably) busy and distracted, having this document available to answer the inevitable question as to “why we’re doing this program in the first place” will ensure your initiative in always in constant motion forward, and not stopped and questioned along the way as meeting planning progresses.
2. Executive sponsor status updates
It’s important to have a strong executive sponsor to ensure your CAB is resourced adequately and other departments are contributing as needed. This sponsor should also keep the rest of the executive team updated as to program progress – customers recruited, member survey results, meeting plans, etc. This will ensure ongoing support and awareness of your program – and that there are no surprises when the meeting date comes.
3. Session template and instructions
When creating content for your meeting, be sure to give session leaders all the information they need to deliver optimal content for your members. This means providing them all the presentation instructions they need, including review deadlines and ideally a template they can use to include best practice information – why this session is important and the questions we want members to answer. Make sure your session owners don’t use “canned” presentations or those they have presented widely before or during other events (e.g. investor conferences or user group meetings).
4. Meeting content
While all session content should be reviewed with session owners before the meeting, be sure your executives are aware of what you’ll be presenting at the meeting. This will, again, eliminate any surprises and confirm previously agreed to content – such as reviewing your product roadmap, pre-viewing new products, announcing new messaging or marketing campaigns, etc.
5. Be clear on who should (and should not) attend the meeting
While it’s imperative to have the key, relevant executives attend your CAB meeting, it’s not necessary to have all of them attend. Be cautious of having too many sales leadership in attendance – your CAB is not a sales meeting. Be sure to communicate needed attendees ahead of time so everyone is clear and there are no surprises on site or afterward. Anyone attending a CAB meeting should have a role – those who don’t need not attend and can learn from the created meeting report.
6. Account Reviews
Your executives will want to know all the people and accounts attending your CAB meeting. In addition to providing this, proving more details, such as account status, renewal dates, account “temperature” (e.g. how happy are they), or any recent issues or incidents will ensure all CAB meeting participating executives are aware of each account’s situation and sensitivities.
7. Onsite prep meeting
Hold a mandatory on-site prep meeting for all executives attending the CAB meeting. Doing so just before your welcome reception ensures everyone is present, knows where the meeting room is, and the meeting goals and ground rules. In addition, this meeting is the last opportunity to review meeting content before getting in front of the members. Finally, you can also review ongoing meeting timelines, meeting outputs (meeting report and action tracker) and plans for the next meeting.
Set Your Executives Up for CAB Success
Being proactive in ensuring your executives understand your CAB program mission, progress, meeting plans and their roles in participation will ensure they’re on-board, don’t take the meeting in the wrong direction, what will happen next and, most importantly, create an ideal experience for your CAB member attendees.
At Ignite, we specialize in helping companies design, managed and facilitate impactful Customer Advisory Boards that drive results. Whether you need guidance on executive preparation or end-to-end support for your CAB, we’re here to set you up for success. Contact us to connect with an Ignite CAB expert for a CAB strategy call.
Ignite Advisory Group is the leading global authority on Customer Advisory Boards and Customer-Led Boards. Ignite’s proven methodology for managing and evolving Customer Advisory Boards includes a 4-stage process, encompassing 48 deliverables and measured by 20 metrics to deliver a clear ROI. To learn more about Ignite, visit our website, read our blogs, and follow us on LinkedIn. To find out how your company can benefit from Ignite’s CAB methodology and process, contact us today.