A customer advisory board (CAB) is the group of critical customers that the company invites the meeting.
And it possibly have additional periodic meetings to offer feedback on the product and the company’s overall impressions.
And businesses assembled customer advisory boards with several common objectives in mind, including:
It creates champions for their brand
To validates product ideas and guide the product roadmap
And to help shape their marketing messaging
Also, gather market intelligence
Since the customer advisory board should serve as a representative sample of the company’s broader market.
Its board includes a cross-section of customers representing as many different market segments as possible.
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What are the Benefits of Customer Advisory Board(CAB)?
- Businesses that assemble customer advisory boards find many benefits from the gatherings they host with the CAB members. And some of the most frequently cited benefits include:
1. It helps Guide the Company’s Strategic Direction
- It creates an open forum where key customers speak candidly and at length about why they chose your company over the competition.
- They like products and what they want to see next. It helps our team get a better sense of where to focus your strategic efforts and resources.
2. They help Guide the Product Roadmap
- A customer advisory board provides insights into how customers are using your products.
- And what aspects of individuals’ products are most important or beneficial.
- And what extra functionality or tools they believe complement or enhance your offering.
3. They Increase Customer Loyalty
- One essential benefit of having a customer advisory board is that the advisory members will likely spend more with your company due to participating in your CAB.
- And B2B businesses with customer advisory boards experience is average of 9% more in new business from CAB members than from the broader customer base.
- Extra benefits of customer advisory board include:
- And understanding the buying triggers of the company’s market
- It is providing beta users for the company’s new products
- And helping the company identify new markets.
How Can Product Team Effectively Leverage the Customer Advisory Board?
- Assembling and running the customer advisory board. It requires strategic thought and planning. Here are the few best practices the product team can use to get started.
1. Set Specific Goals for your CAB
- A customer advisory board consists of a carefully selected customer representative group gathered with your team to discuss specific topics.
- With that in mind, it needs to both think through which customers you’ll want for these discussions and what your customer advisory board plan will be.
- It through the strategic planning stage, it might discover you have several objectives for your CAB.
- If so, it might be better off assembling several advisory groups and each representing a specific market segment (large customers, small customers).
- And to discuss particular topics (product direction, company positioning, the competitive landscape, etc.)
2. Seek out your Ideal Advisory Board Members
- Some customer company representatives will thrill and ask them to join your advisory board and eagerly do so.
- But many committing to participate in a CAB is problematic because it requires time and effort.
- We want to create a list of ideal candidates for your advisory board.
- And probably a plan far more significant than the number of actual participants we will wish for your CAB.
- Then it needs to content individuals people with your invitation.
- And CIO Magazine has written, there are several benefits to joining a customer advisory board.
- It is a good idea it includes some of these in your invitation.
- So your potential CAB members know what’s in it for them. Some of the individuals benefits include:
- It takes the chance to influence the vendor’s roadmap
- During CAB meetings and learn best practices from your peers
- And get an opportunity to beta-test new features and new products
- And also, CAB meetings are a great opportunity to network and to increase your profile as a thought leader in your industry.
3. Prepare a Detailed Plan
- A customer advisory board forum, is an excellent opportunity to let your advisory members speak freely about their product and your company experiences.
- But that prepares not to mean you want the wholly unguided and directionless meeting.
- Suppose you are going through the trouble of assembling a group of critical customers.
- It can help if you planned for that time to derive the most strategic value from it.
- That means preparing a customer advisory board plan that will keep you on track.
- It is introducing your team to your advisory board members
- They ask advisory board members for an overview of the own companies’ strategic goals and plans.
- And discussing the challenges your CAB members face in performing their work .
- Also challenges related to the solutions you offer.
- And discussing how your advisory members view the competitive landscape for your offerings.
- You share the product roadmap, backlog, or other team’s plan and development work elements.
- And you are opening the discussion up to your advisory members’ thoughts about your products.
- And what they’d like to see prioritized, any issues they have with your solutions, etc.
Also Read: How Client-Facing Businesses Can Become More Efficient
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