Are you on the “right stack” of mail?   

When you are doing something new, you fall into the classic “you don’t know, what you don’t know”.

 When you are planning your inaugural Customer Advisory Council you need to ask yourself….are we on the right “stack of mail”?  To set a Customer Advisory Council up for success long term you need to be focused on three main things:

1. Business Alignment – Alignment surrounding the priorities, content, members and outcomes gets the team focused around driving the results you desire.
2. Sponsorship – Who is your overall program sponsor?  If you don’t have one, you need to find one or you will not be able to keep the council headed in the right direction over the long-term.
3. Insight Execution – Gaining the right insight and executing on this insight is vital to success.  Insight execution is a lot like strategic planning.  You have to decide and communicate what you will and won’t do back to your members as well as internally within the company.  

I have observed several organizations spend valuable time, money and resources focused treating this like a trade show event.  They are more interested in the “glitz and glamour” then on making sure they have the foundation build for long term success.  Three of the most common pitfalls when setting up an inaugural Advisory Council are:

1. Finest Resort– Selecting a fabulous location is great to get your members to the first meeting, but it won’t keep them coming back.  You have to set the right environment in the inaugural meeting and execute on what you heard to keep them coming back.  There is no need to spend $450/night for a hotel room.
2. A/V and Travel companies- A successful Advisory Council meeting does take a lot of work, however, hiring an A/V company and/or a travel company to manage 14-16 people is not necessary.   If you plan for enough in advance, you will have the resources to handle the logistics for the meeting.  Your most strategic customers don’t want a production.  They want an intimate environment with you.
3. Expensive Gifts– Buying your customers expensive gifts is not necessary.  Companies waste so much time here.  Your most strategic customers aren’t coming for the gift or a fancy glass name plate.  They are coming to spend time with your executives to learn and share insight.

When you stay on the right “stack of mail” and focus on building internal alignment, sponsorship and insight execution you will set your council long term for success.

Back in September, Gartner came out with their rather controversial CIO Advisory:  Four Recession and Growth Strategies That Make Sense for 2012.  Though forecasts for growth in 2012 are modest, Gartner recommended that clients plan ahead and “avoid consuming time preparing for growth should growth opportunities suddenly arise” and that “however long a distressed economic climate may last, growth will remain a top priority of CEOs and boards of directors.”

Many organizations may prefer to wait and see what the economy does, but that would be a big mistake. I agree with Gartner that organizations must be prepared to take action when the opportunity arises.

Plan ahead. Get started by attending Geehan Group’s upcoming B2B Executive Summit: Navigating Growth & Transformation. Designed exclusively for VP & higher executives, the B2B Summit provides an intimate setting (attendance is limited to 50 attendees) for learning from a prestigious roster of speakers, including Paul Gottsegen, CMO at Infosys, Joe Austin, SVP Customer Experience at Juniper, and Brent Ahrens, General Partner at Canaan, as well as author Jim Hauden.

• Learn how Bill Fathers, President of Savvis, helped shape the company’s international presence, increased its market share, and developed leading-edge products for the financial services, media and telecom industries.
• Discover how John Schwarz, former CEO at Business Objects, doubled the company’s revenue to more than $1.5 billion, improved profitability, and oversaw seven strategic acquisitions.
• Hear how Joe Morgan, CEO at Standard Register, is transforming his organization from a document printing company into a provider of communications technology.

Click here to learn more and to receive your personal invitation.


“Rarely do you find an approachable business environment that invigorates your social senses with intriguing conversations, collaborative exchange of inventive ideas, fascinating speakers with applicable war stories, and the urge to network well beyond the two days that the Geehan Group brought us all together. What I gained out of this B2B gathering of like minds expanded my strategic thinking, opened new opportunities about how marketing can make an impact, plus enlightened me on similar management challenges with realistic solutions and results.”

Greg Jorgenson, SVP Marketing, VeriSign

To close the loop on assessing the mutual benefit of advisory board content, a major factor yet to consider is THE RIGHT PEOPLE. 

Productive discussion requires:

• the right discussion leader.
• the right company representatives.
• the right customer representatives.

Dialogue is not always easy.
Interactive discussion that capitalizes on strategic insight is an art.  Not all top customer executives will share openly.  Not all internal stakeholders will focus on the needed input.  Not all “facilitators” are created equal.  Choose carefully.

My teammate Karen Penney has previously blogged some great suggestions about selecting the right people.  For more detail, please read:

• Choose the Right Internal Team for Your Customer Advisory Board
• Selecting the Right Customers for Advisory Board Membership
• Six Best Practice Tips for Facilitating a Customer Advisory Board Meeting
• Meeting Facilitation

By providing mutual benefit:

1. Your management team is bound to rate highly the value of insights and perspectives uncovered in the meetings.
2. Your members are sure to score highly the value of the discussions.

Congratulations!  You are on your way to making your customer advisory board the sharpest tool for investment status. 

BE A STAR.  Invest smartly.  Wisely use precious resources.  Make your board a strategic initiative.

For those who already have a customer advisory board and are critically assessing content and its mutual benefit for your company and board members, agenda-planning is a critical component.  What priority issues loom?  What strategic insight can you capitalize on most with these select executives from your top accounts?

An effective agenda usually contains three to five successfully prioritized areas for discussion that are relevant to your company and your customers.  Make certain the topics address business goals or competitive advantage.  Consider:

• Discussing topics to be addressed at upcoming corporate Board meetings for broader understanding.
• Evaluating product planning ideas before committing deeper resources.
• Obtaining candid input about their perspectives of competitors to perfect that strategy.
• Learning about their major challenges and obstacles for overall strategic purposes.
• Walking through relevant market trends and brainstorming how your company can leapfrog with solutions.

It bears repeating:  These vital customers care about your organization’s success because they have a vested interest in it.  They get involved and give of their time because they want to offer strategic insight. 

BE A STAR.  Invest smartly.  Wisely use precious resources.  Make your board a strategic initiative.

As a business leader, how do you know if your Customer Advisory Council is yielding you the strategic results it should?   

An Advisory Council is a huge opportunity to gain insight on your strategic, marketing, sales, services, product and merger/acquisition opportunities.  This insight when executed properly yields companies Sustainable, Predictable, Profitable Growth.

If you are not getting this level of insight and results, you need to look at how you started the process.  I recently observed an advisory council meeting where the executives felt that their advisory council meetings were getting stale.   We did an assessment and discovered several things:

• Internal Alignment – Executive internal alignment was lacking. The Executives each had different ideas of why they had an advisory council and the results it should yield.  The result was the executives treated this like an event that happens twice a year
• Company Priorities - When we evaluated this meeting as well as went back to their first meeting, we identified that the agenda’s never tied back to the company priorities.
• Decision Maker Mix - They had technical and business leaders on their council – The decisions will always go to the lowest common denominator, which in their case went to technical discussions.

Based on what we identified, it was not surprising that the executives felt the advisory council was getting stale.     They were completely missing a huge opportunity to help them continue to transform their business to achieve the high growth they desire.

First of all, the executive team needs to understand the value that a decision maker council can have on your business.  Once you have alignment there, you need to look your planning process.   The executive team should look at their business priorities and align the agenda to drive outcomes that fit into those priorities.   Finally, once you have alignment, you have mapped this to your company priorities, it will become very clear who would be the right type of decision maker on your council.