Eyal Danon, President and Founder of Ignite Advisory Group.
One of the more popular attendees at customer advisory board (CAB) meetings is the customer speaker, or more accurately, customer “session owner” as they will (hopefully) do much more than merely speak. CAB members—as evidenced by their post-meeting surveys—like to learn and benchmark how their colleagues’ departments are set up, fit within their organizations, resourced and measured by their management. Most of all, CAB members are especially keen to hear how a fellow CAB member attacked and solved a similar challenge they all face; the lessons learned can be taken immediately back and applied to their own companies.
As such, I recommend considering customer session owners for future meeting agendas—especially if they support the CAB theme and meeting objectives and have some innovation to showcase.
Here are nine tips for having a customer spotlight at your next CAB meeting:
1. Make Customer Speakers A Part Of Your Program
It’s ideal if you plan to include customers as speakers at your meetings from the initiation of your CAB initiative and include this in your program charter. That way, your members will not only be aware and look forward to such sessions, but they also will consider being a speaker themselves some time. In turn, host companies should ensure they have successful customers who are willing and able to communicate details of their successes with their colleagues.
2. Send Them The Invitation
Select the best, most timely customer to speak at your next CAB meeting, and send them a private invitation requesting they do so. You might also encourage them by pointing to their innovative success with your solution that the other members would find insightful. Do so a few months in advance so they have ample time to prepare. If they decline, be prepared to invite an alternate.
3. Provide Some Guidance
Let the customer know what you’d like to see—typically an overview of their company and department, the products they are using, the challenges they’ve faced and how they’ve overcome them. But try not to assign them an onerous project; encourage them to use materials they already have that they can repurpose. Let them know how much time you’ve allotted for their session (at least an hour), and allow ample opportunity for a Q&A.
4. Give Them A Good Agenda Slot
As your valued customer is volunteering to support your meeting by presenting, make sure they are given a good time slot to do so—ideally on day one in the early afternoon while everyone is still relatively fresh. Conversely, do not have them present last on the last day when everyone’s energy may be running low.
5. Review Their Content
Ask your customer whether you can review their slide presentation before the meeting to make sure there are no surprises or potentially negative aspects and to ensure it is engaging for your CAB members. In addition, procuring the slide deck in advance will allow you to have it pre-loaded on the meeting laptop computer, eliminating the need to swap them out. Lastly, ask whether they are comfortable sharing their slide deck with their fellow CAB members—this is not required, but members may ask for it.
6. Make Sure They Get To The Good Stuff
Make sure the customer doesn’t spend too much time on corporate highlights or history, and that they get to the good part—their successful use of your solutions. Hopefully, they will have some quantifiable figures (i.e., numbers) behind their successes—dollars saved, customers gained, etc. To ensure this, it’s a good idea to review their presentation in advance if possible.
7. Ask Them To Be Interactive
Don’t just have your customer present PowerPoints for an hour—ask them to engage the other CAB members with questions (e.g., how many also use this solution, have the same challenges, how are you addressing differently, etc.). Allow plenty of time for Q&A and recommendations to fellow CAB members. Get people moving and out of their seats—compare department sizes, budgets and resources (who has the most and least?), other systems in place, shared internal management objections, overcoming roadblocks, etc.
8. Thank Them
Be sure to thank your customer session owner for taking the time and effort to present at your meeting. You should do so at the meeting and perhaps send a follow-up email as well from your CAB executive sponsor afterward. You might also consider giving them a small token of appreciation for doing so, but this is not required and should never distract from the overall meeting (or other members) at all.
9. Ask For Volunteers In Your Post-Meeting Survey
When surveying CAB members at the conclusion of your meeting, ask for customer session owner volunteers for your next or future meetings and the topics or challenges they could convey. Doing so will allow you to uncover the best candidates and create a pipeline of speakers for future meetings.
Your CAB members will always be keen to learn from their colleagues (not just your host company) and gain actionable insights they can bring back after the meeting to improve their own operations. Make customer session owners a part of your CAB meetings, and your members will further engage with each other—even after the meeting ends.
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