8 tips for more successful Customer Advisory Boards
I was honored to be asked by one of my longtime clients to set up and run a Customer Advisory Board, or CAB. I’d been lightly involved in CABs in the past, but this was my first time getting one off the ground from scratch. I thought I’d share a few lessons:
1/ Plan for longer than you expect to get the pool of participants
This was a CAB where the participants were themselves other businesses (B2B), and it took us 2-3x longer than anticipated to pull together names, find the right mix, do the outreach and get hand-raisers. We were looking for a rich mix of customers from different industries and parts of the world.
2/ Lean on sales and customer success contacts
Again in a B2B context, it was far more effective to go through sales and customer success channels who already have personal relationships with the customers, than to rely on “cold” emailing customers who have opted in to take part in user research generally. The human relationship led to almost 100% sign-up, vs maybe 20% for email.
3/ Don’t just include the usual suspects
A potential downside to relying on sales and CS is that they will a) bring in the biggest customers who spend the most or b) bring in the noisiest customers who complain the most. You want some of those, but you also need to balance it with smaller and more recent customers who will have different perspectives.
4/ Stakeholder involvement is crucial, up-front and ongoing
Beyond the core team we had a lengthy list of cross-team stakeholders, and it seemed to grow each session! (Which was a good sign, as people saw the energy and wanted to get engaged.) To start with I ran an orientation meeting with stakeholders. Then 2+ weeks ahead of each session I would convene stakeholders to solicit topic ideas (captured in a shared Mural, and then on a wiki), which I would then work with them on to get into a good format for discussion with the group. Stakeholders could listen in live, and I set them up with their own internal-only notes taking Mural. We then debriefed afterwards, and planned for the next session.
5/ Get the session size, timing and format right
We settled on 90 minute sessions with 8-10 participants to give a balance of breadth of perspectives, and enough time for each person to contribute. 90 minutes allowed for 3 topics in decent depth, without feeling like too huge of a time commitment. The usual good practices for facilitating any kind of group session still hold. For example, when starting a topic we would typically get people to do individual inputs on a shared Mural first so as to reduce one person having too much sway over opinions.
6/ Make it a routine
We ran sessions on about a monthly cadence, so between the prep, running the session, and post-session follow-up, I was doing CAB-related activity almost every week. So I had to get good at automating and templating what I could!
7/ Encourage peer-to-peer sharing
Yes, you want to hear feedback from customers about your product ideas, roadmap, pricing, and so on. But one of the most powerful things to come out of the sessions was when customers would spontaneously start helping each other with advice - I heard from several who said this was one of the most valuable parts of it. At the end of the day, you as the company still look good for having provided the forum.
8/ Follow-up and broadcast: post-session, wiki, newsletter
After each session I sent out a summary of the findings and inputs from the session, both to the customers who’d attended that session, and also to the core team and stakeholders on the client side. Additionally I tracked the status and documents for everything on the corporate wiki, and we did a broader, higher-level recap email that got sent out to the whole CAB so they could get a view into sessions they hadn’t participated in.