Customer Advisory Board

“Like everyone wants to go build their customer advisory board, talk to users and say like, what do you need? What do you need? We just built to our like opinion about the world that we wanted to build and basically just shut everything else out for quite some …”

“Let's say that you're still on your way to product market fit and you're a strongly enterprise oriented product. I think that you have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening, like even smaller circles of ideal fit users. And …”

“In fact, in one of our last cabs, we used what we call the dollar bill exercise, where we gave our customers fake dollars and asked them to help invest in our roadmap. How much would they invest in various features?”

“At the end of the conference, we realized that the level of feedback was invaluable, because yes, of course, we were doing discussions one-on-one with our key customers, but those were really just puzzle pieces of the puzzle. This group dynamic allowed us to s…”

“Fast forwarding again to twenty-twenty, we had our first round of cab calls in Q-two. We ended up with two subcommittees, which I'll dive into how we were structuring that, with 27 members total, about half each of executive and practitioners, and a mix of ind…”

“In Mapistry, we wanted to do an in-person com, or in-person cab calls, but with COVID, obviously that didn't happen. We did have the discussion of, we weren't at a place where we can financially compensate folks for joining the cab. But we wanted to reimburse …”

“There is seriously some value by adding new customers to your cabs, too, because their experiences with your sales cycle, with your onboarding processes are fresh on their mind, and they'll be able to put that perspective into the mix. And one great, ah, value…”

“So what you want to do is narrow it down to one, maybe two themes for each quarter, but make sure you're rotating these themes, so again, you can follow through with your objectives. I highly don't suggest going over two, just because you're diluting the infor…”

“Three ways that we've done that in our own practice is one, create retrospectives with your leadership team after every meeting. So after a cab call, bring together your internal, ah, stakeholders. Ask them questions like, what went well? What did you love? Wh…”

“When we hire a new AE, they have access to our recorded cab calls, and that allows them to learn very quickly how our customers are talking about us, how, ah, they make decision making, or how they make decisions to buy the software, and how they want to see u…”

“CAB is a great way to build customer advocates. Our CSMs saw these kinds of changes in the relationships and conversations that we were having with folks, and if folks jump from company to company, they'll be able to bring those stories with them and bring you…”

“On the right hand side is a screenshot of an RFP from a recent Fortune 500, ah, deal, and in section 6.8, they asked how, how they can actively voice, participate, and influence the products that they were, ah, that they might buy. In our response, of course w…”

“The first was members value knowledge from diverse industries. So, I did mention before that we had two subcommittees. Originally, we structured them, ah, by industry type, but after the first round of calls, there are customers vocalize, like, yeah, I really …”

“Lastly, ah, turnover, acquisitions, and churn affect attendance. So I'm sure you all understand what all those three terms mean, but what this alludes to is that when, if you've drafted out your key players once throughout the year, continue to build that list…”

“I think us getting into the enterprise was what triggered our creation of a customer advisory board, and that has been so valuable for us.”

“So at Box, we had both, and they're very, very different. So the audience or the population of your customer advisory board are really what you would expect to sell to, right? So in, in Box's case, it would be the CIOs of big companies across different vertica…”

“When you're starting out, even though it's a customer, you call it a customer advisory board, ah, none of them are your customers, and actually turns out to be great because you're getting a lot of feedback from the customers, as you said, on the use case, on …”

“From a CEO perspective, The customer advisory board, the biggest one is validation of the problem statement.”