The CEO wants to accelerate quote-to-cash and create in-account champions. Also at the top of the CEO's mind is a call to go deeper into the installed base... and build products that create competitive differentiation.
How would you say you're doing when it comes to aligning your marketing organization with the CEO's mandates? Are you getting there? Moving forward? Making strides?
As we see marketing organizations of every stripe and in every industry further align with the CEO mandate, as we watch them translate thought to action, we see a hustle and bustle in—and a prioritization of—activities for the following:
- Identifying and cultivating profitable customer relationships
- Accelerating sales with references and customer evidence
- Gaining strategic and tactical customer insight
- Building preference and rapport between executives and customers
Depending on the culture and inner workings of your company, you may also be prioritizing those types of activities, either informally or formally through various programs—perhaps through a customer reference program, an executive sponsor program, or a customer advisory board—all of which are prime venues via which you can touch your most valued customers to meet CEO mandates and gain respect for yourself and your organization.
In this three-part series, which we are calling the "Program-Builder Series," we offer proven concepts, innovative ideas, and common pitfalls to avoid when you're building or fine-tuning three customer programs: customer reference programs, executive sponsor programs, and customer advisory boards.
The insights, lessons learned, and experiences that we'll share here will help you build or turn your programs into effective and efficient machines that let you measurably gather customer voices to guide product development decisions, increase degrees of favorability with existing customers, and take customers public as thought leaders, promoters and advocates within their own companies.
Program-Builder No. 1: The Customer Advisory Board
We're here to tell you: The phrase "customer advisory board" is fresh on the lips of senior executives in boardrooms and conference halls across the country.
More so than feel-good meetings and "roundtables," a customer advisory board (CAB) sends a powerful message to customers and company executives. It creates a valuable funnel of knowledge that cannot be replicated in online surveys or documented in sales win reports.
When you know how to galvanize—in the right way—the intelligence from a customer advisory board, you'll help your company grow wider in the market and deeper in its accounts for greater share and consideration.
Why a CAB Makes Good Sense Most marketing executives would give their eye-teeth for the advice and perspective of their company's most treasured customers, as would your peer executives from sales, marketing, product development, and customer service. How about you? If so, you probably already realize how much more effectively your team works together when the voice of the customer takes center stage across strategic planning, product development, sales, marketing, and resource allocation decisions.
Executives at companies from all industries have confided to us that tapping into advisory boards for those critical processes provides a sense of comfort and security; they tell us they feel good when they know that their teams have investigated multiple options—not just those that have come up in their own minds.
A CAB helps you gain an intimate and invaluable understanding of the customer's world. It's a unique forum that delivers direct and ongoing dialogue to help your company better align itself with the needs and opportunities of the marketplace. In fact, in today's increasingly complex and competitive environment, adopting a customer advisory board just makes plain old good sense, because it's an integral step in strategic planning to help your company's organizational leadership...
- Identify profitable and sustainable opportunities
- Develop crisp strategies with clear and effective value propositions
- Transform customers into advocates
- Establish direct relationship with the market
The Three Foundations of a Sound Customer Advisory Board
A customer advisory board is not a focus or user group, nor is it a major account program. The former provides feature-function advice and a pulse-check on what you're doing right now; the latter provides specific account statuses and relationship-building opportunities. A customer advisory board, on the other hand, gives you a forum through which to address critical mid- to long-term issues facing your firm. Moreover, your company's CAB also validates the firm's direction and helps leadership identify course corrections consistent with the marketplace.
After looking at dozens upon dozens of CABs, we can tell you that the true power of this customer-facing program lies in three key foundational characteristics that are quite different from those found in other customer-type forums. If you structure your program to effectively manage these three keys, then your CAB will powerfully meet its (and your CEO's) mandates:
- CAB members are senior executives from your company's customer organizations.
- The CAB provides your firm with a mid- to long-term, strategic perspective.
- Members of the CAB are highly integrated into your organization.
CAB Foundation No. 1: The CAB creates and leverages direct dialogue with customer executives
The first key difference between a CAB and a focus group is the level of participant. Unlike the focus group, the CAB comprises key decision makers and influencers from your company's customer organizations. In most cases, CAB members are middle- to senior-level managers who understand the business issues around discussions and can therefore provide invaluable perspective on challenges facing the industry, the pains they feel, and the requirements of meeting the needs of their customers.
This level of thought is often where host executives from sponsoring firms are "blown away" with the CAB experience. One executive testified to the power of the CAB this way: "Our CAB actually helps us think through key initiatives, solve problems, develop plans, and ultimately make much better decisions."
Keith Hawk, SVP at LexisNexis has similar feelings about his company's Advisory Board: "We get the benefit of their thinking in an unfiltered way, and we get the opportunity to really build points of view that are well considered, probed, and polished based upon their ideas, advice, and brainstorming."
CAB Foundation No. 2: The CAB is with you (and customers) for the long haul
Your customer advisory board will not be a one-time meeting or interaction—which means that you'll need to formalize the process for collecting and managing the voice of the customer, if you haven't already. Over the course of the CAB relationship, members come to know your organization and its core competencies. They then use that familiarity to help you find marketplace opportunities and make better decisions.
Since your advisory board members are "living what you're selling," their insight provides a first-hand perspective essential in helping you develop a sustainable winning position and a sound go-to-market plan.
During one tech firm advisory board meeting, executives laid bare an upcoming marketing campaign featuring a "thought leadership" value proposition. Thankfully, CAB members shot that idea down when they told host executives that the company's competitors were doing essentially the same thing—and that "thought leadership" wasn't even what they wanted at all. Even better, CAB members shared what they really did want and how their needs could best be met.
The host firm took the members' advice, and with the board's help developed a plan to make it happen. Over the next two years, the long-term CAB members guided the board with advice and assistance; during that same time period, the firm moved from a distant fifth to a dominant second position in its space, realizing a 250% increase in stock price.
Coincidence? We think not. Furthermore, two of the players from which the firm took market share boasted R&D and marketing budgets that dwarfed theirs. Those competitors, however, had built their strategies and made their decisions based on "internal assumptions" of the market's direction; and they failed to include voice-of-the-customer input into their plans. As a result, those losing competitors spent much time sputtering, reacting, changing, and just flat-out losing ground.
This case illustrates how a well-built advisory board provides you and your company's executives with a direct link to the voice of the market, thus shortening the learning curve and empowering you and your business leaders to make intelligent, knowledge-based decisions.
CAB Foundation No. 3: The voice of the CAB is integrated into your business
During our travels around the customer block, we've heard one primary complaint about the things vendors do to gather customer data: For years, customers tell us, they've completed countless customer surveys, endured endless vendor interviews, and participated in multitudes of reference activities—all to effect change for their key vendors, but with little to no results. To address this key complaint, and to make sure that your CAB resources bring about a measurable return, it is of the utmost importance that you plan to—and do!—integrate the voice of the CAB into all aspects of the business. For instance, you can do that by...
- Creating internal visibility. Include statements and quotes from customer executives in the mission statements or charters of internal organizations such as customer support, sales or the executive leadership team, as well as on executive dashboards.
- Inciting external market-ability. Document and merchandize the success of a customer both internally with sales and marketing and externally to the press and analysts.
- Demonstrating accountability. Translate CAB outcomes into action MBOs (management by objectives) owned by an internal executive and a functional team; track and report on actions at the next CAB meeting.
- Communicating the possibilities. Frame CAB findings into functional FAQs and idea-memos for mid-level management and their teams. Also share relevant points with your strategic vendors and partners.
If they're not already doing so, senior executives within your company can gather great insight from your CAB—insight that can and should have an impact on how they're doing business. Most of the challenges with these programs are easily overcome if formal processes for managing these three foundational elements are in place. And once they are, you'll find that your marketing organization is making strides... moving forward... and meeting the CEO mandate.
Stay tuned for the second article in our Program-Builder series; in it, we'll be sharing a new, proven way to do an executive sponsor program. Through our experience, we've learned that the rusty, old model is riddled with challenges, many of which you may be facing in your current program or in the program you're planning to build.
In article two, we'll articulate for you the challenges with the old way of doing and thinking about an executive sponsor program; share with you a shiny, new model that works; and pose five potential actions you can take within 90 days to get your executive sponsor program running right.
The articles in this three-part series:
Part 1: Meeting the CEO's Mandates: Setting Up a (Really Good) Customer Advisory Board
Part 2: Meeting the CEO's Mandates: The 'New' Executive Sponsor Program
Part 3: Meeting the CEO's Mandates: Tuning Up Your Customer Reference Program
