Recently, we facilitated a session at the Customer Marketing Alliance (CMA) Summit in San Francisco about CABs. The session featured Lauren Johnson, Manager, Advisory Board Programs at Adobe and Rebecca Quinn, Manager, Events at Sunoco (formerly leading events at Uber Freight).
Lauren and Rebecca shared their best practices and lessons learned in leading their successful customer advisory board (CAB) programs at Adobe and Uber Freight. The session was full of real-world tips towards creating a strong program. And perhaps unsurprisingly, started at the top with establishing a strong program foundation from the get go.
Here’s how the CAB leaders from these two world-class companies did so:
1. Establish the why
Before initiating a CAB program, it’s important to understand and articulate why you want to start a program in the first place. Questions to answer here include what is the business purpose? What’s the program goal? What is the gap we’re trying to fill and output we’re trying to achieve? You must have solid, vetted and published answers to these questions. Or your program will fall apart with numerous factions pulling it in different directions. Your internal stakeholders will cease to understand the program value. And, worse, your customers will lose interest in not having a clear direction and purpose.
2. Get executive sponsorship
Strong backing and support from your executive leadership is crucial for CAB success. After all, you’ll be partnering with professionals who don’t report to you and who may exist outside of your direct organization in running your program. You’ll need a strong leader capable of pulling everyone together for a common goal, aligning stakeholders, driving influence and ensuring everyone is doing their part. A strong executive sponsor will furthermore ensure you’ll get the time, resources and budget to do your CAB program well.
3. Create a charter
Creating and distributing a strong CAB program charter will ensure everyone – your customers and internal stakeholders as well – are aligned on what your program entails. This includes not only your program goals, themes and topic to be addressed initially, but also (perhaps more importantly) participation requirements. These would include number of meetings planned, travel reimbursements, length of tenure, rules around attendance and substitutions, etc. Conveying and getting acceptance of all this in advance ensures optimal participation and limited issues down the road.
4. Recruit the right members
The speakers said that size of the account and revenue generated should not be the primary criteria used to recruit customer members. Instead, taking a wider view of industries and business verticals creates the opportunity for more diverse experiences and ways of doing business. In addition to the business account, the person targeted cannot be understated. While like titles can be a good thing, these can vary widely throughout industries, so look for similar roles and responsibilities. While it would be great to have all CIOs on your CAB, often, levels below this will have more direct experience with the daily challenges your product may help address. Finally, a diverse mix of ages, cultures and genders can lead to additional different ways of thinking and contributions of unique ideas.
5. Customer-driven agenda
Set your program up for maximum success by prioritizing your customer’s needs and let them drive the agenda and topics. Interview your members in advance of your meeting. Reviewing topics, prioritizing their responses and gathering insights and pain points of which you may be unaware. In addition, enable ample time and opportunities for customers to network with each other. Such activities are often the highest rated aspects of a CAB meeting. Members benefit greatly from learning directly from each other, often in isolated, informal discussions.
Focus on building a strong CAB program foundation first
In this session, experienced, successful CAB program managers stressed the importance of establishing a strong program foundation before even thinking of your meeting agenda and location to ensure optimal success. Skipping or skimping on these steps will only lead to program erosion and eventual failure. If you’re looking for help to set up your CAB and launch it effectively, contact us to talk to an Ignite CAB expert.
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.