Today I was in San Jose and had the opportunity to meet with the Bay Area Reference Group hosted by Valerie Stephen of Amdocs.  The group consisted of a dozen professionals representing some of the largest and most successful Silicon Valley high tech companies.  The members of this group are tasked with responsibility to manage the customer references for these global organizations in the fast paced intensively competitive and constantly changing high tech market. 
As we started the meeting, I asked the group to identify the challenges they face in their role as the owners of customer reference programs.  I found that there are 2 “buckets” of issues they face:  1) Getting the right customers at the right level to reference the right products/solutions with meaningful ROI, and 2) managing the references once you have them.  We spent the majority of the day discussing point #1 – through programmatic  voice of the customer and market alignment approaches that we’ve found successful through many of our clients.
We first talked about the different levels of relationship between companies and their customers – executive relationships, operational and functional level, and user level.   The group felt that today they are balancing their programs between the various relationship levels.  What I’ve found is that companies like Harris Broadcast Communications gets a bigger bang for their buck by shifting investments in customer programs from user levels to executive levels – building executive relationships to drive sales and loyalty with decision makers.
We then discussed advisory boards and the keys to building loyal advocates.  Most of the group already had advisory boards in place and we spoke about a few best practices.  Rhett Livengood from Intel explained that they are taking their advisory board “virtual” with in-between working groups and on-line communities that focus on issues and topics relevant to the advisory board members.  Dave Eoff from Fortify mentioned that they are doing a great job in building customer programs within their organization, and the executive team is highly engaged in their programs.  These are two critical success factors for executive level customer programs.  Engaging your executive team in the programs provides the organization with the passion for the customer and provides real life examples of reaching out to customers to engage and learn.  And keeping customer advisory council and other disproportionately important customers engaged throughout the year in relevant dialogue and meaningful business issues engages strategic customers to drive loyalty and passion for the sponsoring organization.
Finally, we discussed ways to take advocates from a customer or executive advisory council program to do two different things:  penetrate accounts through executive sponsor programs to accelerate sales and 2) leverage those advocates to act as “spokespersons” for your company through executive summits and other advocacy programs.   While the group has made great strides in the work they’ve done to date, my sense was that most organizations haven’t yet totally linked the customer advisory council programs and those members to other programs and fully leveraged the power of what they’ve created.  In the end there is more marketing ROI in engaging these important customers to further penetrate, cross sell, and engage them as advocates to reach broader audiences.