The CAB Playbook: Structure and Follow-Through

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome and if you're a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present today's episode, I am beyond thrilled to announce that our second in-person CMO Super Huddle is happening November 6 and 7th, 2025. In Palo Alto last year, we brought together 101 marketing leaders for a day of sharing, caring and daring each other to greatness, and we're doing it again! Same venue, same energy, same ambition, to challenge convention with an added half-day strategy lab, exclusively for marketing leaders. We're also excited to have TrustRadius and Boomerang as founding sponsors for this event. Early Bird tickets are now available at cmohuddles.com. You can even see a video there of what we did last year. Grab yours before they're gone. I promise you we will sell out and it's going to be flocking awesomer!

You're about to listen to a recording from CMO Huddles studio, our live show featuring the flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders of CMO Huddles. In this episode, Melanie Marcus, Marca Armstrong and Marina Ilishaev reveal what it takes to run a customer advisory board that earns trust, surfaces insights and drives the business forward. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You'll be supporting our quest to be the number 1 B2B marketing podcast. All right, let's dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand and just plain cut through proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: I'm Drew Neisser live from my home studio in New York City, and we're turning this spotlight today on customer advisory boards. This won't be a debate on their value that's been proven over and over again, from product feedback to messaging testing to testimonial gathering and reference securing. CABs can do all that and more. But what if you've never set up a CAB? Where do you start? What's a minimum viable approach? What kind of staffing, budget and resources does it take to do them well? And speaking of that, how do you measure the success of these programs? That's a lot of questions. Fortunately for you, we've gathered some seasoned CAB drivers. See what I did there. Okay with that, let's bring on Melanie Marcus, chief marketing, customer experience officer, Surescripts and a returning guest who has previously graced our stage to discuss the CMO, plus getting organizational buy in and structuring the ideal B2B marketing department. Hello, Melanie, how are you and where are you this fine day?

Melanie: Hi Drew, it's great to see you. I'm in the middle of Washington, DC today.

Drew: All right? Well, nothing going on there. Not much kind of day. Well, we'll just keep moving on. So let's talk about you were before Surescripts. You were at McKesson for 10 years, and you have a cross segment council at Surescripts that's been going on for six years. Let's talk about getting those initiatives off the ground, and what it takes.

Melanie: I've done this a number of times, and a critical component is making sure that you understand why you're doing it. And you know for us in both cases, it had to do with establishing deeper customer relationships with some critical customers feeling like they had some engagement in our strategy and some ownership of our strategy and setting ourselves up for those customers participating in pilots at some point. Now, that doesn't all happen in the first, you know, meeting, or even two or three meetings. It happens over time, and a critical component of all of that is that you have complete support of your CEO and your colleagues on the executive team, because everybody will be engaged in this program.

Drew: And so let's see we're starting from a retention standpoint, but also a learning one right where you're in a sense, saying, hey, come in and join us on the inside. And we're inviting them. And it in theory, you're giving them a chance to shape what it is that you deliver for them, so that the two of you or two organizations can do better together. I get that, and that makes a lot of sense. And that is a sort of fundamental to the why question. Let's talk about the CEO support. And why is that so important, and how that actually plays out.

Melanie: Actually, the CEO support is important because part of this is that the senior leadership of the company, in this case, Surescripts and prior McKesson are going to be at the table with these customers, so including the CEO. Now this is your chance as an organization, in a cross segment setting, for the CEO to also hear what you have to say.

Drew: So you're basically saying to your CEO, you got an opportunity to listen, and is your experience that they do?

Melanie: Yes, yes, absolutely. Now there's some schedule issues we can't get around. But even in the schedule issues, you know, we set it up so the CEO helps open, provide some perspective on where the company is today, and what we really want to hear from them over the course of the meeting and then stays for as long as possible, and absolutely is there for the networking at the breaks and at dinner and at meals, which is also a critical component of an advisory Council, is not just the actual meeting. It's the networking that we have and that the customers have with each other, where they might not have actually been able to have that access to other organizations, any other place than here.

Drew: Yeah, I've just sort of, I'm thinking of so many CEOs who I've seen go into this with, in theory, open ears and then not necessarily have been able to deliver on that. So lucky you, because they're just so full of what they want to say versus what they need to hear. So that's, I just want to put a full punctuation point on the importance of that in the listening and then the networking part makes so much sense, because they don't always get to talk to their peers in a safe environment.

Melanie: I laugh and say, you know, we know, and I'm very open about this with the advisory council members themselves. And like, you know, we know you're coming for us sure, but we also know that you're coming for each other, so we get it, and we're going to make sure you have plenty of time with each other.

Drew: And are there something things that you do to other than, hey, we're having drinks or dinner or anything that you do?

Melanie: I mean, well, when we open the Advisory Council, you know, the intros are a little more elaborate. They're not just, like, name, you know, company, serial number, they're something personal. Sometimes, like, you know, where are you going for vacation? Because we've got to get these people to talk with each other and to be open with each other. But no, the breaks are, like, we have half hour breaks in the middle of the morning and in the afternoon and lunch. You know, we could do something more orchestrated. We seat people. That's what we do. We orchestrate the seating of the Council for the meeting, and we orchestrate the seating of the Council for dinner so they don't get to choose where they sit. We orchestrate that. That is one thing.

Drew: And then that's a lot of good matchmaking. And that's it's really, it's an interesting challenge, because you really are thinking, Oh, they're in the kind of similar space, or they're doing this, they might bond over that, and if they do, you've really done a wonderful thing, because you've helped them professionally. You've helped them personally, and, you know, help them grow their own networks, which makes a lot of sense. So what's your strategy for choosing members? I mean, if, again, if you were starting from scratch, where would you start? In order to sort of look at who do you want to bring together.

Melanie: Right. So first you have to have a good cross section of your customers, probably your more strategic customers, that is important. So who, what customers do you need to be in these conversations, and that is based back on the goals of the conversations. But it's not just about the customer. It's about the person you actually have in the room. That person needs to be, you know, in our case, strategic-minded, open, ready to speak. We want controversy, because controversy in the Advisory Council is way better than controversy in the market. So we want to hear where there's that, and we want people to be open about it. So we've put in place, and it's been really hard, but we've kept it. We've put in place a requirement that to be on the Advisory Council, you have to have a title of vice president or above, and plenty when they, when somebody leads a company, they go, "Oh, the senior director, they're like, they're the people you really need." And we say, sorry, no, because as soon as we do that, then, you know, 10 other directors—we lose the senior ability. So it's been hard, but that is one of the requirements that we've been successful in keeping.

Drew: And are there other requirements that are pretty clear that you lay out for these folks?

Melanie: Yes, they have to attend. We do have an advisory council program charter that they review and sign, and you know, they have to attend the meetings and make every effort to attend them. We give them the dates a year in advance and participate, and we give them the agendas a month in advance so they have what the topics are, and they can do the research that they need to come prepared to talk.

Drew: And they do come prepared.

Melanie: We have had executives come with like a three-page memo from their teams of all the things that are on a particular topic that they are ready to talk about. I mean, yes, when it's important to them, they come prepared.

Drew: Yeah, amazing. Okay, there's just so many good stuff in there. I just want to ask you one last question. Then we'll move on, which is, is there a size of the CAB that you found is particularly effective?

Melanie: This is such a great question. I think having 12 customers in a room is a great number. To get 12 people in a room, you end up with like 15-17 people on the Advisory Council, and then it's a question of like, well, do you have the right mix who are attending this time. It is constant. It is nurturing the attendees and nurturing the members of the advisory council is a job you cannot underestimate what it means to and what it takes to nurture the Advisory Council membership itself.

Drew: It's so funny, because I want to think of a huddle like 12 is the perfect number. When it gets more than that, it's very hard to manage the conversation, make everybody feel a part of it, and it's also just a good dynamic, because you're likely to have different perspectives at that size. And it's funny, there's maybe less group think. All right, that's awesome. Thank you, Melanie, you've got us started on this now. Let's welcome Marca Armstrong, head of marketing and customer success at Sensera Systems. Marca previously joined us on the show to shed light on the intricacies of leadership strategies, customer marketing and building and nurturing marketing teams. Hello, Marca. Welcome back.

Marca: Thanks Drew. How are you?

Drew: I'm great. Thank you and so. And where are you this fine day?

Marca: I am enjoying a gorgeous, snowy day in the front range of Colorado.

Drew: Snowy Day. I mean, it's in the 70s here on the East Coast, and it's snowing in the mountains. Amazing.

Marca: Certainly, we're like Mount Fuji. We finally got our first snow of the year, so we're excited about that.

Drew: All right, all right, get those skis waxed. So let's talk about your role in setting up a CAB at Sensera.

Marca: Yeah. So I think innately, as the head of marketing and CX, it falls very much in my purview to lead this. Now we are a startup, only been around for 10 years, so I'm going to come at this from a different perspective than Melanie just did, and the core is back to prioritizing the feedback from customers. I know you said that in the outset, but when you are, or have traditionally been a transactional business, like Sensera has been in the construction industry to project managers, and you're moving towards more of an enterprise sales motion, it's really important to realize that customer feedback is the only way you're going to ultimately succeed there. And so we also know right that the B2B sales motion is such that, especially at the enterprise level, they're looking for reference customers and they want to talk to each other. We've had a bit of inertia historically that, you know, we think general contractors don't want to be in the same room. However, I've been to enough events now in my year at Sensera to know that they're actually friendly to one another, and they like to talk. So we're at a point right now where it's all about setting up that initial part of the customer marketing program, getting those referenceable customers, like Melanie spoke about, getting them to tell us their story and their use cases and what they're willing to share, and then from our side, at Sensera, it's what are we willing to share with them. And I think that's probably the biggest hurdle that I have currently is just making sure product and engineering are aligned with this, because at the end of the day, you got to, you know, give something in order to get something back.

Drew: So that's so interesting. So talk about this process, because I do know that with a lot of CABs, that these folks are invited in to see the road map, often before others get sort of an opportunity for them to weigh in. But it is both a risk and it's something unusual. If you've never done that before, your engineering team may go, "What do you mean we're doing that?" How have those conversations gone?

Marca: Those conversations, I'm going to call it dynamic—extremely dynamic on both sides of the table—and where we've gotten to because Sensera is both a hardware and a software company, so it's like a cell phone, your camera doesn't work without the software. So what we've started to do is turn on some features behind the scenes with our customers before they even know that they're there, and then bring them into the fold and say, "Hey, did you know we just added a benefit for you" without them knowing? So that gives the customer something that they didn't know they had, and that gives the engineering team and the product team comfort that we're not unleashing something to customers sooner than they're ready to share it.

Drew: And is that something that you do more likely with a customer that you want on the advisory board as a sort of early thing, or is that a thing like recently Spectrum here just said, "Hey, congratulations, we've upgraded your, you know, internet speed from 400 to 600" it just sort of showed up.

Marca: Yeah. So it's actually a combination of customer profile based on the use case. So for example, if they're a security customer, we might launch a security feature to them. If they're a customer that's looking at just monitoring of their site, we might launch that. If they're a customer that has used an AI functionality, we might launch additional AI functionalities, so it's very much customer dependent. And then, you know, we'll take a look at how they're using the software themselves, and say, "Hey, this is a great user base. These are people that actually might take advantage of this." And then to your other point, layering on, who do we want to have as a customer, part of a customer advisory board that will actually carry some heft and some weight in the conversation. You know, we don't always go to the top tier clients necessarily, but we'll go across the spectrum to get a top, a middle, and a lower tier customer. And when I say tiers, I'm talking revenue size, right? So it will vary, and we're being very prescriptive about it, because we want to make sure that the feedback that we get is usable, and that the clients with whom we engage are actually ones that are going to give us that feedback.

Drew: Right. And that's a tricky part of this. So as you're looking at so far, what I've heard is, in building out your advisory board, you have a mix of clients in a mix of industries, where you're sort of delivering some products to them in advance for them to sort of give you feedback on. And as you get that feedback, you get to know them better. And then there's this ongoing loop happens. What else are you thinking about in terms of this give to get part of customer advisory boards?

Marca: Yeah, so I think, again, part of it too is I mentioned CX. So what we've realized is that the customer success or customer experience conversation can't sit in the CX or technical support teams, and that's just something that we have acknowledged, and we're trying to pull that conversation out into more of a larger discussion across the organization. So it's not just technical support with heads down trying to solve problems, but it's, "Hey, wait a minute. Is this a feature, a function, a systematic issue, what have you?" So that they all feel like they're part of a larger conversation. I think with customer advisory councils, part of it too is getting them to engage in events, not just your own. So whether it's an industry event, it's a panel event, it's an opportunity to provide thought leadership. We've had some success, you know, on webinars, for example, applying some of our large customers. When you say, "Hey, would you participate and tell your story?" Again, historically, there's this inertia of, "No, they won't talk," but you'd be surprised when you ask. So, yeah, they'll actually step up, and they'll talk quite a bit.

Drew: It's funny, you give them the stage, and all of a sudden they're ready to do it. But you have to ask. I think it's really interesting about the structure and where this sits, because some folks might say, "Oh, well, we've got customer service. We'll just put our CAB right there." And what you're saying is that's not ideal, but they have to be involved somehow. So how do you sort of balance that, whereas this is a marketing slash retention initiative that we're also going to get product feedback on? How do you, for the folks that are in customer service, make sure that they feel that there's value in this for them as well?

Marca: So I think that goes back to the success metrics, right? You asked that at the beginning, is how would you measure success? And so from a product side, success is being able to get a clear understanding of where your roadmap needs to go. From a customer success or technical support side, if you can reduce the number of tickets and the number of calls and the number of inquiries, let's say, on said issue or said product, then all of a sudden you're really giving them time to go work on other things. So you have to tie those different metrics together and make sure that at the end of the day—and I had this conversation with our Technical Support Manager a couple of months ago—they're spending 90% of their time on technical support and only 10% of their time on customer success. And I said, "Hey, if we can actually go spend 50% of our time, or even 40% of our time on outbound conversations with customers, I guarantee you that inbound tech support flood gate that you're feeling right now is going to go down." And so you have to kind of think about it from that perspective. Is what are their metrics, and what are they feeling every day? And then, what is product feeling? What is engineering feeling? What is sales feeling? And I think as the head of marketing, you know, it's our responsibility to bring all those things together.

Drew: And I think some companies just say we can't have customer support in the same group, because exactly like you're describing, the tech support are dealing with the problems and solving it on a technical basis and customer success are sort of working with the customer to make sure they're using it to the fullest capability. And in software, at least, that's often the case. They pull those two out. It's a problem in the sense that those groups then don't end up talking. But they are very different agendas, and the measurement of success is different, right?

Marca: The measurement of success is different, and that's part of my purview right now, is establishing the difference, because I've got both teams under my leadership, but making sure they have to be tied at the hip. There's a lot of process, and especially for a company like Sensera that's 10 years old, we've grown organically so quickly, and it's a lot of just establishing what those processes look like. And so I've spent a lot of time kind of in the weeds on that, and I know I'm veering off the topic here, but if you can establish what your process looks like, establish what your metrics are, and then when you go back to this, you know, CAB discussion that we're having, making sure that they're very much a part of this conversation. And also the ones recommending, "Talk to this customer. Don't talk to that one, right? You know, we just had a really unfortunate experience here," or "By the way, we turned this customer around, we sent people on site, we troubleshooted what they needed, and they're actually kind of jonesing on Sensera right now. So even though they're a small fry, you might want to put them in the mix of a customer advisory council to make them feel more important, and then they become a repeat and renewable customer." And there's another success metric.

Drew: Yeah, it's such a good point. I mean, it really is. Part of this is you're finding who are the brand champions out there for you. And they may not be your largest clients, but they could be great references. And that's all part of this. The other part I heard very much so was that this is a team sport, that you can't do these things in isolation if you want to do it well. You've got to bring in a number of parts of the organization, which makes it more challenging but more worthwhile. All right. Well, we'll be back, Marca, but right now, we're going to bring on Marina Ilishaev, who I probably just butchered your name, and I apologize, who's the Chief Marketing and Operating Officer at Boardstream AI, an advisory boards as a service firm, and a CMO Huddles partner. She's an industry expert who's joining the show for the first time. Hello, Marina and welcome.

Marina: Hi Drew. How are you?

Drew: I am great. Thank you. Now, so and where are you this fine day?

Marina: So, I'm actually nearby Melanie. I'm in Maryland, outside of the district, enjoying the beautiful day today.

Drew: All right. Well, we've got everybody's happy with the weather on this show, which is great. All right. Well, look, you've heard Melanie and Marca, and I know you only think about advisory boards. So did you, is there some things that you want to sort of double click on that they said or add? Let's go there, start there.

Marina: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I love the insights that both Melanie and Marca had shared on the topics of customer advisory boards. I 100% agree that the priorities here are key, especially as they relate to corporate strategy. Before I joined Boardstream, I actually did manage CABs at various organizations, and depending on which organization it was, they focused on either five strategic goals, like the ones Melanie highlighted, but also more product specific, like the ones Marca was talking about, but in all of these situations, the outside perspectives that CAB offered was so invaluable. But the challenge we kept encountering was how to maximize the value from our advisors beyond the meetings themselves. I know Melanie mentioned networking opportunities, and that's definitely huge. What we found was in-person meetings were so incredible from engagement, participation, right? So the advisory members were there, they were talking to each other, and everything was happening organically, but what was happening in between, that was the challenge. How do you keep your members engaged? How do you leverage ongoing opportunities? This is one of the biggest pain points that we address at Boardstream, and why so many companies do come to us because they don't have a dedicated support and therefore don't want to start a CAB, or even worse, they do start one, and then they don't see the value in it. So by offering to facilitate the management of their boards, we help companies truly maximize the value.

Drew: So the companies that have advisory boards, and most of the ones that I know do this in-house. They assign someone to it who sort of learns how to do it. And they obviously, it's not a profession. It's something that they do as part of another job that they have often and you all are dedicated to this. So I guess where I'd want to go is, how do you optimize an advisory board?

Marina: Absolutely. So we actually propose a structure we work in partnership with our companies, where we ask them to provide an executive sponsorship. So it has to be somebody, one or two people at most, that are part of the executive sponsorship team, that are bought in, into the vision of the advisory board. And then there's got to be a manager or a dedicated support person from the company that would work with us to run the meetings, to essentially guide the advisory boards throughout the year in terms of strategy development and things like that. On the Boardstream side, we assign a dedicated resource for this company that is their board manager. Culture that manages that entire relationship, and that continuity is what keeps the CABs going, what keeps the engagement and what ultimately drives success of these boards.

Drew: And is there a size at which, because, I mean, I think about some advisory boards, and there might be as Melanie, and we were talking about, you know, 10-12 people, it's sort of ideal for an in-person meeting. So maybe you have 15. Is that a full-time job to manage 15 people?

Marina: Well, I think it goes to the size. I would say you want to have the size where you can have a conversation, right? So if you have four to five people, that's too few, they're not as encouraged to speak up. If you have too many, then the conversation can become too engaging. I will say, sometimes similar to Melanie, we do recommend eight to 10, but up to 12 people that creates the most organic, efficient conversation around the table. The job comes with maximizing the value outside the meetings, which is what we offer. Marco talked a little bit about webinars, but what we try to do is we match KPIs, or rather, expected performance for each of the advisory boards that extends beyond the meetings. So for example, if you have a marketer with experience in the industry, we would be asking them to participate in the webinar. Or if you have somebody with a product background, they might focus on providing strategic guidance to the Chief Product Officer, on building a roadmap or a partnership, a background for someone who has a pretty big referral network, right? So we look at the advisors and their profiles, and why, what contributions they're expected to make, and then we set specific KPIs or expectations. I mean, we're not going to call them KPIs, because they're very specific, but expectations in addition to attending the meetings.

Drew: So, I mean, eight to 10 people, if you're a large company and you have a large contract with people, you could have a number of levels. You could have 1000 users in a company, and you could have some managers, and people who end up making the buying decision or business decision. In some cases, do companies have multiple advisory boards built up on these different levels and interactions with a product or service?

Marina: So we look at advisory boards in two ways. You have your strategic advisory board, right? And that's focused on the strategic goals of the company, that could be industry expansion, that could be acquisitions, that could be potentially getting ready for an IPO. And those types of boards are made up of clients, as well as non-clients. So it's a mix of more senior leaders within the industry. And then there are more specific CABs, or we call them product advisory board sometimes, that are really focused on evaluating the product, the features and functionalities. Where should we go next? They are a lot more roadmap specific, and you could have both, right? I've been in companies that had both where strategic advisory board was really guiding the company structure and the strategy that they were going for where the product advisory board was very specific. "Hey, we're about to add this feature. Do you find it valuable? How would you use it? What's the use case? Would you be willing to do a case study once we give you access to it?" Etc., so it's a lot more tactical and a little bit easier to manage.

Drew: So I guess I want to make sure I'm clarifying, because, like, CMO Huddles has what I would call a strategic advisory board, made up of about eight of our members, and we get together every quarter, and it's incredibly helpful for me as someone who is managing a community. It's invaluable input. And I think of that as a strategic advisory board. I feel like what Mark and Melanie were talking about were customer advisory boards, which are a little bit different, but not necessarily just they're sort of, they're both the product and the advice, but they're not advising on business. So can we separate out some of these and just make sure we're clear on the swim lanes?

Marina: Absolutely. Within the strategic advisory board, they're still—the way we are defining strategic advisory boards, they're still advising the business, but they're advising the business on the next step in their strategic growth, right? So for example, when I was at Sisense, one of the challenges we were looking at and having our advisory board help us with is, which industry should we be expanding in next? We had two industries that we could potentially go after, and we would present the pros and cons for each and then ask the advisory board to help us guide with that decision, right based on the information that they had. So it's very much specific to the business. However, we relied on their expertise within those industries to let us know what the state of the market is, what the expectation should be. Does that clarify things a bit?

Drew: I think so. I think so. I'm still sort of in this little mode. And we'll get back to Melanie and Mark in a second, because there's what I'll call business advisory boards, which are, you know, really the executive committee. There are customer advisory boards which have these multiple things, and there still could be this other one, which is just, I'm almost going to call it product advisory board. It's slightly different, where you're down in the weeds with the users of the product. And I may be trying to slice this too thinly, but anyway, we're going to take a break here for a second, because it's time to talk about CMO Huddles. We launched in 2020. CMO Huddles is a close-knit community of over 350 highly effective B2B marketing leaders who share, care, and dare each other to greatness. Given the extraordinary time constraints on CMOs these days, everything about CMO Huddles is designed to help leaders save time and empower them to make faster, better decisions. I want to call back Melanie and Marca. You guys are probably busy and members of our program, anything you want to share, recent examples, or anything that you've gotten value out of CMO Huddles?

Melanie: CMO Huddles has been wonderful. I wish that I could spend more time. I wish that I could do the actual Huddles a bit more. Sometimes my calendar doesn't accommodate, but Drew, you are a master connector, so you connect, you know, CMOs with other CMOs who have like challenges. I mean, we were just emailing about one for me this morning. The other thing is, you know, I've used it for some benchmarks. So when I'm looking for benchmarks and dashboards, I look at what other CMOs are doing, and that's been really helpful. And when we redid our website a few years ago, I got great recommendations for vendors. So those are a few things. It's just all about how you engage in the program. But it's really a wonderful resource.

Drew: I love it. Thank you so much for that. Mark, anything new on your front?

Marca: So just to reiterate what Melanie was just saying, I think the networking opportunity is probably one of the best that I've had in the CMO community. So kudos Drew for bringing us all together. I started at Sensera about a year ago, and I think the first 90 days, it was easy to start picking things off and then go back to the board and say, "Hey, here's what I've done." It's the second 90 days that are harder, because you need to continue to drive that momentum. So I reached out to you and to Melissa, and I said, "Who's really good at the second 90 days, and who's done this and has a playbook?" And you were able to put me in touch with some fellow Huddlers to kind of help me continue. So there's always a resource available. Just to reiterate what Melanie has said. And recently, you and I connected, Drew, one-on-one on just CSAT scores, and who does it well, and tools that people use. And you know, I've got some follow up with some other Huddlers on that specific topic. So name the topic, you'll find a resource.

Drew: I love it. Yes, it's about networking for answers, folks. So if you're a B2B CMO and can Share, Dare, and Care with the best of them, take a second and join our free starter program at cmohuddles.com. Okay, let's get back to this topic. I'm so eager to dive into some of these specifics. So we've talked a little bit about frequency. I think we're all sort of at this quarterly kind of thing. No. Melanie, you're shaking your head. What frequency works for you? For your advisory board?

Melanie: Well, we've been doing twice a year in person, and this coming year, we're going to shake it up, and we're going to do one two-day meeting in June, followed by virtual meetings in a more agile approach, because we're in an innovation cycle, so we think we might need them in a more agile way.

Drew: Interesting. But one two-day meeting, that's a significant investment in bringing, as we talked about, 12 people together and taking care of them. So that's interesting. And okay, Marca, what kind of frequency are you looking at?

Marca: So a frequency that's worked well in my past, Drew, has been three times a year, two of them virtual and one of them in person, and the in-person is always tied to some kind of event that we've hosted as an organization, not necessarily at Sensera, but my former life. And so then you bring the advisory council together prior to the start of that event, and then they're part of that event along with a larger cohort of clients. So that's worked really effectively, and then a cadence of about two other meetings virtually is just about enough in order to keep people engaged and not make it too much.

Marina: Yeah, we've been advising quarterly meetings alternating between virtual and in-person, and I stress the fact that they're usually about a day long, and the virtual component is about four to five hours. But when we do advise to have virtual meetings, we really want to make sure that it's an interactive meeting. So we think about the types of agendas that you want to have on virtual versus in-person, because virtuals are a lot harder to facilitate. So quarterly with a very engaging agenda for the virtual meeting.

Drew: And with these virtual ones, are people doing what they often, or we're doing during the pandemic, or they're also doing like a wine tasting, and they ship something to people? Or anything sort of more entertaining to try to loosen things up and get conversation, or is it just sort of, "Hey, we got an agenda. We want to hear from you." It's asking questions and giving information.

Marina: We haven't done wine tasting because they've all been during the day, but definitely workshops, definitely breakout groups, a lot of conversations, right? So no presentations, unless they're for about five to 10 minutes to set the stage for discussions. That's kind of been our advice.

Drew: Okay, so we're talking in this... funny. So two times a year, three times a year, four times a year, somewhere in that minimum, two times a year, ideally, at least one time a year in person. Of course, there's a lot of cost to that. And so the question then, I'm just going to prematurely jump on it. So how do you, as you're putting together the budget for this event, sit in front of your CFO and say, "Okay, the ROI on this is X," and that's got to be a difficult conversation. Melanie and Claire. I figure I'll go back to you on that, because it's a two-day event.

Melanie: Yeah, it's a two-day event. And we've done, you know, and plus, we have been doing another half day so in the year. So you know, this is where I go back to what I said at the very beginning about being aligned with your CEO and your executive team and all in on the goals for this program. And there is no Advisory Council that's going to pay off, probably, at least not in a business like ours. That's going to pay off in the first meeting or the second meeting or the third meeting, it's going to be over time. When we first put ours together here at Surescripts, we had a product coming out to market that was incredibly... it just captured the imagination of the market and of our advisory council. Like we couldn't put another topic out, but it would go straight to this. It was about prescription price transparency. And like every time we tried to talk about something else, they somehow magically brought it back to that. And it was great, because it was giving us what we needed to be able to bring this out into the market at the right pace, in the right ways. Now we've gone—that was a few years ago. We've gotten to a next step where, like, this is an example, not an ROI. You could have necessarily said, this is exactly what's going to happen, but you have to be patient, you know. We had a customer present with us last year, an idea, and we just brought that idea out with the class report points of light. And it's like, it's a massive upgrade in the way that prior authorization is done in pharmacy. So for example, and it's going to be, you know, and we're bringing that to market. So those are just some examples that you can't like, you can't say this is what we want to happen. You have to set the stage in a strategic council so that things can happen over time. And you have to have your executive team agree that that's okay.

Drew: Right. It's like you have a list of good, positive outcomes that could happen. A, we could have retention. They could stay with us longer. B, we could get product ideas that could help us later. C, we could get product adoption faster. Or, D, we could find out that a product we were thinking about isn't going to work. Those all have business value, but they're all outcomes that could be positive. I'm wondering, is there another outcome that I missed, Marina, in that list of things, because we've got retention and higher customer value, we've got product input, we've got sort of... obviously another thing, I would imagine, is that they're more likely to be references, which could also result in new acquisition. What are these other outcomes as you're selling in a program like this that other CMOs could use to justify the investment?

Marina: Yeah, I would say that references are huge, and the commitment to leverage your network right to share the webinars, to share some of the content within your network, to essentially endorse the company that you're with and be proud that you're making contributions to that, to that organization. So that's another thing that I would say, is it's kind of in terms of a customer advocacy program, right? API assigned to that.

Drew: Okay, I'm switching gears slightly, but we're... part of this goal of these things is to really listen. I talked about that earlier. We're going to take the wax out of their ears. We're really going to listen to their input. And I've told this story on the show before, but Dell decided they were going to really listen to their customers, and the customer said, "We want a Linux-based laptop," so they went out and produced a Linux-based laptop, and nobody bought it. Nobody... didn't sell a single one. So my question is, as you are... and but there's a tricky part of this is when you want someone's input, and they give it and then you don't do it, you know, they might be upset. So how do you manage the input that you get? And Mark, I don't know if you've gotten any product input yet, but in past experience, how do you make sure you know that you still have responsibility for sorting these things out, right?

Marca: Absolutely. And I'm chuckling a little bit because, you know, there's customer advisory councils, there's also analyst advisory councils, and you know, both of those communities want to know that they've been heard and that your product reflects their input. And I think it just goes back to the business case and what the ROI is ultimately going to be. I can't speak to the Linux laptop example, but certainly at my time previously in that space, that being the laptop space, it was all about like, what actually is meaningful to the customer, and what's the use case and what's the ROI on that. That's the analysis that, as we have at Sensera a product steering committee, or in my former lives, similarly, that we had to come to the table with the numbers. I mean, at the end of the day, you can't just do it because the customer said so.

Drew: Yeah. Melanie, anything on that?

Melanie: Prioritizing what the customers... you know you need to... I'm right there, Mark. I still need a business case. Like, there's... you can't... you can't just walk out of these advisory councils and say, because they say, I go do it. You still need a business case and to do the market research. Twelve people is not a market.

Drew: Right. This is qualitative input. This is not quantitative input. Talk a little bit about engaging in between meetings, because I know we put so much energy into the meetings, and they really do happen, but I'm finding, particularly in our advisory board, that the more that I casually engage with them at critical moments, as opposed to the quarterly meetings, the better. So talk a little bit about your engagement strategies between these meetings and in particular, Marca, you are twice a year, three times a year. So that's, you know, that's... how do you make sure that you're engaging with them on a regular basis and manage that?

Marca: Yeah, so I think it's all part of your overall comms plan. So I'm just going to take an example of a customer newsletter that might go out to tens of thousands of people, and you might do that on a monthly basis. What is that communication? That's a subset of that, for example, that might be specific to this cohort of call it 10 to 20 individuals and customers, that might be more specific about, "Hey, we had this conversation. Here's something new." Or, "What would you think about or take a survey?" Or, "You know, here's something interesting that we saw in the industry." So it's probably a monthly... I wrote down. We're anywhere from four to six weeks in between that we're continually trying to engage. And then naturally, you have your... if these people are folks that your customer success team is talking to because they're on their top list, then you have a touch point there as well, and then your sales person. So I think it's like you've got three layers of communication between what a marketing communications team would do, a customer success team, and then your account team. And you just need to make sure that every handful of weeks you're touching them in between meetings, and then obviously you're giving them the info, I think, as Melanie was talking about and Marina for that matter, of what to expect coming up to the next meeting and making sure they're prepared with their memo, which I love that example, or whatever it might be, so that they're engaged when they get there.

Drew: So and I'm imagining, just like any other communications to your customers, that this all has to be coordinated, because you don't want to get three emails from the same day, one from tech, one for support and one for marketing, so that all has to be orchestrated. Fascinating. Melanie, anything on that?

Melanie: Yeah, I would just add that I've been in CMO discussions before, where I've actually been, like, been asked, "How do you stay in touch with the customers," which is amazing, but you know this advisory council like the way to stay in touch with customers beyond just surveys, and like seeing them at trade shows and seeing them at customer meeting, this is staying in touch with in a deeper way, the senior leaders in our case of key customers. So I mean, as a CMO, I... these are amazing tools for you, in particular in the organization.

Drew: I love it, and I've told this story, perhaps on the show. But if you are a CMO, and you're presenting to your board, and you start the sentence with, "I was talking to a customer the other day," boom, all eyes turn on you. You have their attention. It's an amazing moment. So okay, love that this is a way for the organization to stay close, but it's a way for the CMO to stay even closer and be the champion of the customer in the boardroom. Anything else on that?

Marina: Melanie was talking about gaining ownership of the strategy. I think, you know, having them understand the business on a deeper level, leading them to more thoughtful and impactful participation. That's kind of what you're looking for during those in-person meetings, and if you are engaging with them throughout the year, they are a lot more invested in the success of the business, right? And you mentioned coordinated approach, and that is so true. I think that's why I talked a little bit about the board manager, or having somebody on the team if you're not engaged with, you know, on that company, if you're doing it alone, having somebody who's assigned to managing these advisory boards, that there's one person that's coordinating all these efforts. Because, as you said, it could be a newsletter going out, a request from a CS team, or an A team, etc.

Drew: Real quick on this one—term limits. And if so, if yes, how long have you had them? And are they written down? Mark, what about term limits for boards?

Marca: I've always done it on a 12-month commitment and then an opportunity to renew, but look for people to either come off or be added.

Melanie: I've had term limits, and I would say that the tenure of advisory council members can be tricky, because these are our key customers, and as long as the customer is there, we need them engaged in the program. So what we found, I think, beyond that, like the pro here, is that when a senior leader decides to leave one of our key customers, we are actually one of the first calls, or we're at least in the—I don't know if we're the first call, but we're at least on their list that they have to figure out who's going to take on the advisory council seat, and they need to talk with me to make sure that's going to be good before they leave. And that's happened like repeatedly, which is phenomenal, because we now get a new senior leader contact right away. But in terms of term limits, you know that is just a trick and part of the nurturing of the Advisory Council. I can't say there's a firm rule.

Drew: No, but that's such an interesting sort of moment in that, in that you talk about retention, and you have this, all this energy you put into the relationship at the senior team, and this is a big ticket customer, and they're leaving to go somewhere else. Now, obviously if they go somewhere else where they can buy you, we'll get—but right, for to be blessed by them and say, here's the person, and you're going to get invited to do this thing right away. What an icebreaker.

Melanie: It's unbelievable. It makes me so happy. And just like, excited about the customers who are part of this. They're proud to be part of it. We're proud to have them part of it. They're on our website.

Drew: And so it really is in some ways—it was funny. We talked about measurement and ROI a little bit, and we've talked about it. You could look at it from a retention standpoint, but it's an insurance policy. In that moment when this person leaves, how do you ensure that you keep the business? Boom! The Advisory Board is yet another piece of this thing. So that sort of adds a different level of value calculation. Just before we sort of sign off on this thing, do you have any form of tracking that you do, or sort of ongoing measurement that you look at to help know your program is healthy? So what would those measure? I'm not looking at ROI necessarily, but just sort of, we'll call it the brand health for board advisories. What's on that list, and are you sort of doing it, you know, checking in? Is it an annual kind of thing? Or how do you track the health of the program?

Marina: From our perspective, we provide a scorecard, a template for our clients, of all the advisors and the goals, or the KPIs, or however you want to define that terminology that we set forth for an annual review. Have they been engaged during the meetings? Have they offered additional value outside of the meetings? And our clients go through this evaluation period to see how the board member is performing, and that's the way we really track success.

Marca: Drew, we've always done surveys at the end of meetings, so at the end of every meeting, we've put—and again, not at Sensera but my former life—we put surveys in front of the participants, maybe 10 questions, and just ask them, what worked, what didn't work? What do you want to see? How engaged are you? Do you want to continue? And it's been super successful, and I—and you know, the boards that I've worked with historically have been folks not as senior as the people that Melanie's referred to, just based on the nature of the industry that I've worked in. So people move around a lot, and so when you're dealing with project managers in the construction industry, you know they could be working for one GC one year and another GC the next. So it is important to keep track of them, to Melanie's point, but getting their commitment for a year is a lot, because they're managing a project that's got multi-faceted things going on, and they're in the meat of the business daily.

Drew: Yeah. I wanted to sort of frame this. I'm looking for—is there sort of one measure that kind of gets you that, you know, yeah, it's we're killing it with that person?

Melanie: There isn't one measure. We do surveys too. There isn't one measure. I'm going to give you a money piece in addition to like, did they come? Did we get enough of the Advisory Council to come to the meeting? When we get a meeting, a two-day meeting, and every advisor attends for the entire time, that is success, and they're speaking. Not everybody speaks as much as we'd like, but speaking, and then this is going to be a funny one. But are they sitting on their cell phones while they're in the meeting, or are they actually engaged? And when we look around and we'll see everybody engaged and not on their cell phones, and we're, you know—then, we've had a great meeting, and that usually happens when we've got them to—to Marina's point, when we've got them deployed in some facilitated like workshop approach.

Drew: Okay, so there it is. The magic formula here is, if you've done a CAB and they're not reaching for their cell phones every second, you've got a highly engaging thing. If they—but, you know, we're all allergic to the phones. I mean, you gotta, it's like we need to put them in bags and make them check them at the thing. But if they're checking their email every five minutes and they're looking for things, you don't have them. All right. Well, the amazing conversation we come to range again, I don't think there is any doubt you should have a customer advisory board. You may need several of them. All right, I want to thank Melanie, Marca, Marina, you're amazing sports and so helpful in understanding this. Thank you audience for staying with us.

To hear more conversations like this one, and submit your questions while we’re live. Join us on the next CMO Huddles Studio, we stream to my LinkedIn profile—that’s Drew Neisser—every other week.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!