Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
What is a Customer Advisory Board (CAB)?
Imagine having a direct line to your most valuable customers, a platform where they can share their insights, pain points, and desires directly with you in the Product Team. This is exactly what a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) offers.
A Customer Advisory Board is a group of hand-picked customers who meet regularly to provide feedback, suggest improvements, and discuss their needs and expectations. CABs are formed by organizations who want regular access to a selection of representative customers with which they can build deeper relationships and rely on for consultation about their needs.
CABs usually engage with the organizers through regular meetings. These meetings are a golden opportunity for you as a Product Managers to listen, learn, and collaborate with your customers, ensuring that the product planning process is in perfect harmony with what users truly want and need.
What a Customer Advisory Board is not
If you’re interested in setting up a Customer Advisory Board and leveraging it in the right way, it’s useful to understand what a CAB is not for you to avoid making any awkward mistakes.
A Customer Advisory Board is not a focus group
While focus groups are typically one-off sessions aimed at gathering quick insights about a particular topic, Customer Advisory Boards are ongoing, strategic partnerships. The commitment from both sides is greater – but the rewards can be more valuable too. Whereas focus groups set out to answer very specific research questions, CABs are established to forge strong relationships with important customers for ongoing insight that can benefit both the product planning and customer engagement long-term.
Also, importantly, all the members of a CAB are your own customers – they are users of your product and purchasers of your services. With focus groups, especially when you’re using them for early-stage validation or exploring market needs, you should be recruiting from a wider pool of relevant people – both from inside and outside your existing customer base.
A Customer Advisory Board is not a sales pitch
That’s not to say that establishing a CAB won’t and shouldn’t help your sales effort – far from it. In fact, having a CAB is a great way to get greater engagement from important customers, which can (whether organically or through subtle efforts) lead to expansion revenue and lucrative renewals.
What is important to remember is that the primary goal of a Customer Advisory Board isn’t to sell new features or upgrades but to gather genuine feedback and build stronger relationships. The format of the meetings should not be a Sales Person standing up in front of your customers and presenting a slick sales pitch. That is not what your CAB members signed up for. They’re here to have fruitful and interesting discussions about their needs and your ability to solve their problems.
The way to get your CAB members to buy your new features and offerings is to work closely with them over time to develop the proposition and refine it until it’s a no-brainer for them. After all, if they’ve invested the time and energy to talk to you about their needs, when you have something that answers those needs, why wouldn’t they buy it?!
A Customer Advisory Board is not a complaining opportunity
Although you will be asking your CAB for their feedback, and that may sometimes highlight issues, the intention should be to engage your Customer Advisory Board members in constructive, forward-looking discussions.
You should not pitch CAB membership to your invitees as an opportunity to air their grievances or relay their dissatisfaction – there are other channels for that. This is an opportunity for strategic conversations and exploration of their general challenges and priorities.
A Customer Advisory Board is not an event
The objective of a Customer Advisory Board is not to sink a load of money or exhaust huge efforts in hosting an extravagant event. If you have chosen to have your CAB meetings in person, of course you don’t want to shove your important customers in some dingy room without refreshments or bathroom facilities. Make sure they’re comfortable and the setting is pleasant enough. Even feed them if you think it’ll be beneficial. Just don’t lose sight of the purpose here – this isn’t a big brand showcase, everyone is here because they’re invested in the product and want to see it succeed.
If you’ve done a good enough job of recruiting your CAB members, they should feel incentivized enough to get involved without needing expensive goodie bags or world class entertainment laid on.
A Customer Advisory Board is not about user testing
Try and keep the focus of your CAB meetings high level. Remember, these are not for the nitty gritty of user testing. You shouldn’t be using your Customer Advisory Board meetings to understand the minutiae of their usage. That’s not the point of these sessions. Don’t ask your CAB members to run through test tasks or scenarios and observe them. These should be strategically focused and higher level discussions on their challenges, problems, objectives and priorities.
What are the benefits of having a Customer Advisory Board?
Why bother assembling a group of customers in this way? Is it worth the effort? In short, yes. The benefits of having a Customer Advisory Board are manifold.
Ongoing, easy access to customer insights
First and foremost, a CAB provides you as a Product Manager with direct access to a ready-made contingent of customers from which you can glean insights and acquire feedback. This is benefit numero uno for you as PM.
Once you’ve done the initial work to recruit your CAB members, you don’t have to do it again. You can then rely on ongoing access of a committed group of customers who can give you a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and what needs they have. And these are people you can be confident understand the context of your product and won’t need much initial scene setting. You can get fast responses and enjoy easy access.
This access to high-quality insight will help you better your product-market fit and therefore reduce churn and increase acquisition. Nice.
Validating product plans and new ideas
Another major benefit of having a Customer Advisory Board is the opportunity it affords to validate your product ideas and hypotheses. CABs can act as a sounding board for new ideas, providing an important source for your discovery work.
Having access to a CAB means you can take any new ideas you are exploring to these customers and test your assumptions and hypotheses before you sink investment into development. A CAB is a great way to help you validate concepts before investing heavily in development.
Perfecting the sales pitch
Although we have said a Customer Advisory Board is not a sales pitch, when you’ve successfully built up strong relationships with the members of your CAB, you can consult with them about your value messaging and positioning. This can be invaluable when it comes to nailing your sales pitch.
This isn’t about pitching to them and trying to make them buy, it’s about testing your propositions and getting feedback on what resonates most and speaks to their challenges and pain points in the most compelling way.
Building a community of loyal advocates
A CAB helps in building strong customer relationships. By involving customers in the product development process, you show them that their opinions matter, which fosters loyalty.
Why are Customer Advisory Boards useful for Product Teams?
Product Teams don’t typically have sole ownership over Customer Advisory Boards. They tend to be collaborative affairs, founded by a multi-functional team and utilized by different areas of the business. However, there are a number of ways in which CABs can be uniquely useful to Product Managers and their teams.
Easy access to feedback and research
CABs offer PMs a structured way to gather feedback, ensuring that the voice of the customer is heard throughout the product lifecycle. CABs can help identify unmet needs, uncover new use cases, and validate product roadmaps.
New case studies and proof points
Although your Marketing Teams will also be thrilled to get these, for you as a Product Manager, building strong relationships with these Customer Advisory Board members means you can craft some far more in depth and illuminating case studies to help close new sales deals and convert new customers.
Roadmap validation
Alongside validating specific product ideas, your CAB can help validate your entire product roadmap. As ProdPad CEO and Co-Founder Janna Bastow says, “your product roadmap is like a prototype for your strategy.” You can therefore use your Customer Advisory Board to give feedback on your overall product strategy, by presenting your roadmap to them and asking for their feedback on the priorities you have set out and the order you plan to tackle them.
Motivate the Product Team
Hearing actual customers talking about the product and what difference it makes to them can be extremely motivating for your Product Team. It’s one thing to read a review or a case study, but to hear first-hand from these customers directly just hits differently – it hits with more impact.
Why are Customer Advisory Boards important for B2B SaaS?
In the world of B2B SaaS, where customer needs can be complex and varied, CABs are especially helpful. B2B relationships are often long-term, and the stakes are high, making it essential to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction and needs.
CABs can also help in navigating the intricate dynamics of enterprise sales, providing insights that can shape not just the product but also the go-to-market strategies. Additionally, the feedback from CABs can be instrumental in making informed decisions about pricing, packaging, and positioning.
Who should own a Customer Advisory Board?
As we mentioned above, CABs are usually a cross-functional endeavor and resource. Their creation is typically a collaborative effort involving Marketing, Customer Success, Account Management, Product and Leadership teams. Each of those teams will have different reasons to engage the CAB and different benefits to having access to such a group.
When it comes to recruiting CAB members and first establishing the Customer Advisory Board, it’s best to work collaboratively. Customer Success and Account Managers are important collaborators when it comes to identifying the people in the customer base who are most valuable (in terms of contract value) and most engaged (in terms of communication with those teams). The Marketing Teams can help craft the invitation and make the proposition of joining the CAB seem compelling to the customer. The Product Manager should be looking at the usage patterns and behaviors and identifying the most active accounts (if not actual users – since you should be looking for the most senior stakeholders in your customer accounts rather than the most active day-to-day users).
In terms of who should put the actual ask into the customer and send them their invitation, that would depend on who has the strongest relationship with the customer. Alternatively you might want the invitation to come from the most senior person involved to add a degree of gravitas to the request. This is an especially good idea if the customer you are inviting has a senior position in their organization.
When it comes to ongoing management of the CAB, that job most often falls to the Product Manager. After all, you are the people looking for the most detailed and frequent customer feedback. You are also the person responsible for the product planning. Having the Product Manager as the main point of contact for the CAB will reinforce the idea that being a member of this group gives you direct influence over the future development of the product.
How can you make the most of a Customer Advisory Board?
Set specific goals for your CAB
To leverage a CAB effectively, it’s important to start with clear objectives. Know what you want to achieve from these meetings. Be sure to capture the goals of every team involved. Marketing might want to use the group to generate new case studies, Account Management might want to understand their customers more deeply and get an idea of how to support them, and you in Product will want to understand customer challenges, pain points and priorities to help you improve product-market fit. Whatever your objectives are, make sure you’ve outlined them before you start forming your CAB.
Recruit the right customers
Think hard about who you want to ask to join your Customer Advisory Board. Getting the right mix of customer is essential to getting the most value out of this venture. You want your CAB to be as representative of your customer base as possible, so be sure to invite people from the full breadth of your customer types.
At the same time, when it comes to the type of person you explicitly invite from each customer account, try and aim for the most senior person that is still involved enough with your product.
Remember, a CAB isn’t for detailed user testing (for which you’d want your day-to-day, active users), it’s for higher level strategic insights and considerations.
Be well prepared for each Customer Advisory meeting
You’ll want to run regularly scheduled meetings to maintain momentum and keep the dialogue going with your CAB. Prepare agendas for these meetings well in advance and focus on specific topics or challenges. Circulate the agendas ahead of the meetings so everyone comes along knowing what to expect.
Be sure to follow up on action items from previous meetings so there’s a sense of continuation and progress to these meetings. Also, spend some time at the start of each session making everyone feel comfortable with being open and honest. Let your CAB members know that you are open to criticism and ready to act on the feedback provided.
How can a Product Manager effectively leverage a Customer Advisory Board?
Once you have formed a Customer Advisory Board, what should you do with them? What is the best way to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by having a CAB? Here are some of our suggestions for ways to leverage your Customer Advisory Board to help you improve your product and grow your business.
Ask your CAB members to:
- Give feedback on particular initiatives, ideas or hypotheses
- Answer your discovery and research questions
- Feedback on your entire product roadmap and overall strategy
- Take part in beta programs of major new features
- Look at high level designs or prototypes of new concepts
- Provide details of their use case and case studies
- Help you spread the word by writing reviews, referring others and sharing your content
When should you leverage a Customer Advisory Board?
CABs can be leveraged at various stages of the product lifecycle, to help you better understand customer needs and how well your product answers those needs.
During the early stages
Customer Advisory Boards are a great idea when you’re first starting out – whether that’s an entirely new business, or a brand new product launch within an existing organization.
CABs can help you validate the initial product concept, identify the key problems to solve and assess how well your different feature ideas will work.
When you attempt to scale-up
CABs can also make all the difference when you’re looking to progress into larger scale growth. Not only can their feedback and insight help you improve your product-market fit and appeal to as broad a customer base as possible, but as invested advocates for your product they can also help you drive growth with word of mouth promotion.
The members of your Customer Advisory Board can help provide proof points to reassure new potential customers, at a time when you might not be able to achieve a huge volume of reviews. CABs can help you develop a high quality of case studies at a time when it is hard to produce a high quantity.
As the product matures
As you move into the maturity phase of the product lifecycle you’ll be looking to maintain your market share for the longest possible time and mitigate against disruption from a competitor coming from below. Your CAB can prove very useful during this phase, helping you to stay on top of evolving needs and not miss an opportunity that a younger competitor might spot and capitalize on.
During major product pivots or entering new markets
When it comes to making significant shifts in your strategy your CAB can be a valuable sounding board to sense check your plans. You’ll want to rely on their insights and feedback even more when you’re looking to take a risk on a diversification, market development, or market penetration strategy – not just a product development strategy.
Essentially, whenever you need deep, strategic insights from your customers, a CAB can be your go-to resource.
What are the goals for having a Customer Advisory Board?
As we mentioned earlier, if you’re thinking about establishing a Customer Advisory Board you should think, up front, about what it is you want to achieve by doing so. The primary goals of having a CAB are:
- Enhancing product-market fit
- Improving customer satisfaction
- Fostering customer loyalty
- Increasing word-of-mouth marketing
For each of those goals, have a think about how you will know if that objective has been met. This way you can measure the results of your efforts later on.
On that subject….
How do you measure the success of your Customer Advisory Board?
Measuring the success of a CAB can be challenging as it’s not an activity you do once and see instant results. Having a Customer Advisory Board should help you drive incremental improvements over time. The key metrics to monitor in order to see the influence your CAB efforts are having are:
- Customer Satisfaction Scores: Are your efforts to better understand your customers helping to keep more of them happy?
- Churn Rates: Is participation in your CAB meetings correlating with less customer churn?
- Product Adoption and Usage: Does feedback from the CAB lead to higher adoption of new features?
- Engagement Levels: Are you seeing better engagement from your CAB members?
- Action Implementation: Are the suggestions from your CAB meetings being implemented?
CABs sound like a good plan, right?
Customer Advisory Boards are a powerful tool for Product Managers, providing direct access to customer insights and helping you engage more stakeholders in your product planning. By effectively leveraging CABs, you can ensure that your product meets the needs of customers, leading to greater satisfaction, loyalty, and success in the market. Pretty useful right? So what are you waiting for?
