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

As the roller coaster economy of 2011 comes to a close, I offer perspectives I’ve observed over the last year to plan and provide insights to B2B marketers for 2012 and beyond.  Here are three critical trends for B2B marketers to consider… and the related impact to the senior B2B marketer.

• All companies are technology companies
• Time is the critical constraint
• With senior leadership…social media is not social

All Companies are Technology Companies. 
With the unprecedented access to development tools, platforms and new technologies – IT is ever present in products and services delivered by all organizations.  Take for instance a century old company in an even older industry - Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).  Their CIO, Heather Campbell, is recognizing that technology can have a profound impact to differentiate the business and provide competitive advantage.  In her role, she is propels CPR to “Drive the Digital Railway” by deploying new technologies to monitor and control train movement, managing systems that provide safer railways for all.  The focus in providing insight to transportation information and rapid development cycles for customer specific solutions today is the differentiator of CPR from competitors.
 
Every industry today is experiencing technology innovations that include how products are made, how they are used, and how they are delivered.   Customer engagement is equally being impacted by technology throughout the customer lifecycle.  Development cycles are much more rapid, further enabling an organization to respond to demands of customers in a manner that can differentiate you from competitors.

Impact to the Executive Marketer:  Lead the company in customer engagement to understand the levers of differentiation that can be developed to separate your organization from the competition.  Recognize that your customers are technology companies who need your products or services to differentiate them in the market.

Time is the Critical Constraint.
Today, the most precious element in our lives is not money, it’s not our family, it’s not our job.  It’s the time we have to spend and balance the demands on our lives.  The choppy economy has organizations pigeonholed and reluctant to hire.  The global workforce requires late night conference calls and early morning start times to keep up with the world around us.  Consequently, the pressure to do more with less takes time away from all the other balanceable facets of our lives.  The demand on time is true for the B2B customer as well.  Time especially becomes more precious as you move up to more senior roles in an organization.
  
Take Michael Petrisko, CIO at Hill International.  While on east coast time, Michael frequently takes late night calls with Australia and early morning calls with India.  His day is booked solid for weeks in advance.  To gain access to his time and his calendar requires advance planning and a compelling reason for anyone to meet with him.   A vendor approaching Michael has limited opportunity to gain access to his calendar, capture his attention, and win over his business.   Michael quotes:  “What’s important to me is that a discussion with a vendor has purpose and is relevant to my business – anything short of this is a waste of my time.”

Impact to the B2B Executive Marketer:  With a senior executive, your objective must be to win them over and to have them want to spend time with you and your organization.  Realize that every encounter must have a compelling business cause and reason to engage.  The more time you seek, the stronger the value proposition of your encounter must be.  Over prepare for your engagement and be sure your contact leaves the encounter with the sense that time spent with you and your organization was a valuable use of their time.   

With Senior Leaders, Social Media is Not Social.
I recently had the opportunity to host a CIO Advisory Council meeting with a large, well-recognized technology company.   Before the meeting, I thought I’d check the LinkedIn profiles of the 14 executives scheduled to participate.  I found that four of them don’t have a profile and three have less than 50 LinkedIn connections.  Hardly grounds for thinking these executives are social media junkies.  And these are CIO’s who live and breathe technology!   For a senior executive, the social media experience isn’t proving to be beneficial to their role, responsibilities, and networks.  More and more, senior executives are becoming aware and concerned about privacy and security.  Because an executive’s time is so critical, they tend to disengage or not engage in personal efforts to extend their networks and share their opinions.  Many public companies have social media rules and regulations limiting engagement and disclosures in public and even private forums.   The reality is that senior executives remain somewhat “Old School” in terms of how they engage socially and prefer a real conversation.
 
Impact to the Executive Marketer:  Think about the audience you are trying to reach and balance your budgets and portfolio investments accordingly.   If you are targeting a senior executive, don’t expect your answer to be social media.  Think about the encounter and the engagement… and invest accordingly.

Have you ever experienced a “moment of fame” when everything you need for your business to succeed comes together perfectly?   It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s “golden!” 
What if you were able to take those “moments of fame” and make them a consistent practice within your organization?  Customer Engagement Programs provide the opportunity to do just that.

Recently, my client experienced one of those moments.  After conducting an Advisory Council meeting with the decision makers of his most strategic customers, he gained invaluable insight into the market, learning what his customers need, and what they are looking for from his organization.

As a member of the executive team, he walked into a strategic planning meeting with the CEO and his peers, armed with information no one else had—even better, it was validated by his most strategic customers:

• Sunset a core product in mid-term development – a savings of $8 dollars in future development, marketing, sales, and service, not to mention resources that can be devoted to high impact products.
• Eliminate a new solution from the product roadmap – a total savings of $3 dollars, six months in development and valuable resources.
• Get positioned to make an acquisition – of an innovative services company.

Gaining insight from your top customers provides a tremendous amount of confidence to participate in your organization’s planning process.  Sharing this information among the leadership team was a “moment of fame” for my client.  His CEO responded, “I’m so impressed by your knowledge this early in our planning process.  You are months ahead of your peers.”

When it comes to internal planning make no mistake—you are competing with your peers for resources and dollars to make the best decisions for the organization.  As you prepare for 2012, part of your plan should include gaining market insight at a decision maker level with your most strategic customers. 

In Sean Geehan’s book, The B2B Executive Playbook, he explains in detail how the market can provide insight, and help validate the following four areas (see diagram below):

• Your “Exploit Solutions” – those areas that align to your business model and for which you have a core competency – in other words, what you do well.
• Where you should “Evolve” – the market is telling you they want something that is in your core competency, but it is not part of your business model today. 
• What you should “Acquire” – the market is telling you they want something that would fit into your business model, but you don’t have a core competency for it.  This is an opportunity to gain additional insight for potential companies to acquire.
• Areas to “Evaluate” – this is something that is part of your business model and it is a core competency, but the market is not willing or interested in buying it.  This is an area you should look to eliminate or sunset the solution or product.

Validate Your Plan with Your Most Important Customers

My client learned that the best way to capture the areas outlined above was through his Advisory Council.  The value of a well-managed Advisory Council is that they can help you capture strategy, marketing, sales, service, product, and merger/acquisition information all at the same time.   

At their inaugural Council meeting, members were presented three specific initiatives for feedback.  The first was a legacy product they had for years—a “me too” in the market. The second was a new product they were getting pressure from sales to develop.  And finally, the third was to look at potential acquisition targets that would fit their business model, but for which they did not currently have a core competency.

The result of the feedback is what my client shared with his leadership team outlined in the beginning of this article.  And it saved his company over $10 million … all from listening to his customers.

Make 2012 a great year by seizing your Golden Opportunity.  Engage the decision makers of your most strategic customers to gain valuable market insight to help drive your strategic planning.

Recently, I attended the annual ISBM Members Meeting at Penn State University. ISBM is short for the Institute for the Study of Business Markets and is a center of excellence in Penn State University's Smeal College of Business Administration. They are comprised of a global network of researchers, educators and day-to-day practitioners in the field of business-to-business marketing, and led by Executive Director Ralph Olivia. Their mission is to expand the research and teaching of business-to-business marketing and sales in academia and to improve the overall practice of business-to-business marketing and sales in the industry.

This year's meeting was themed, "Reinventing Innovation: Driving Growth Beyond the Product" in Business Markets. Ralph and his team assembled an outstanding agenda that included speakers from Wesco, USG, Lord, and United Technologies to discuss innovation, value creation, driving growth, and best practices.  I was particularly intrigued, and energized by, the first keynote speaker Larry Keeley, President & Co-Founder of Doblin, Inc. (a Chicago-based think tank). Larry's discussion focused on INNOVATION FUNDAMENTALS (how innovation drives growth), which talked about the need and the process to driving organic growth. It was an outstanding (and highly entertaining) presentation, followed by many questions from the audience.

Larry's key take-away was that innovation is the key driver of growth. Companies that are able to simultaneously innovate across multiple "innovation types" will develop offerings that are more difficult to copy and that generate higher returns. Those innovation types can be grouped into a logical framework comprised of 4 key areas: Finance, Process, Offering, and Delivery. Within each key area, are the more detailed, structural drivers known as the "Ten Types of Innovation":

1. Business Model
2. Networking
3. Enabling Process
4. Core Process
5. Product Performance
6. Product System
7. Service
8. Channel
9. Brand
10. Customer Experience

Mr. Keeley provided detailed explanations along with excellent examples, to drive home his theme that these methods should be engrained in your culture to best position your organization to develop the next "Innovation Frontiers." The closing stressed three things organizations "must do":

1. Systematically develop sophisticated offerings (using at least 6 of the 10 Types of Innovation)
2. Identify "what's coming next" 
3. Reinvent your enterprise so innovation is "not optional" - engraining these concepts into your cultural DNA

The second "must do" is by far the most challenging and the one many companies struggle with. Essentially, it is the fuel that will propel the vehicle. So how do you do this - and not just once, but consistently and iteratively? It's a tough task but, in my experience, the companies that excel in this area, are the companies that have a methodology and consistent process to gather, synthesize, and act on CUSTOMER INPUT.

You can have an outstanding business model, established processes, world-class product development, great channels, and strong brand but still miss the mark by a mile without customer input (can you say "New Coke"?!). Do you want to consistently create true market alignment with the most impact?

• Leverage the voice of the customer
• Obtain your customer's input EARLY AND OFTEN 

Your customers are on the cutting edge of their respective industries, and will gladly lead you to "what's coming next" - provided you ask. You'll also find that, as you deliver on their inputs, you will move up the value curve and become positioned as a trusted advisor.

I enthusiastically agree with Larry as he has described engraining the innovation types into your corporate culture. Additionally, you need to engrain the concept of regular customer dialog and input. So, how do we do this? What are the best ways to obtain customer input and feedback? There are numerous methods but you must start with the foundation that this WILL NOT be a one-time "event". It needs to be an on-going, committed conversation with your customers. Create a regular forum, along with a sense of "community" that includes internal resources and customers, and you will have the "fuel" to take your innovation vehicle and your company, anywhere you want!