1. Attendance and level of participation in Advisory Council functions, such as regular Council meetings and interim conference calls.
2. Willingness to be an advocate for your company or provide a referral.
3. The member continues to provide a perspective relevant to the strategic direction of your company.

I recently attended a breakfast briefing, Street Smart Secrets for Change Management, where Jeff Cole, co-author of Driving Operational Excellence, shared nine tips for changing behavior throughout an organization. I found it intriguing. In less than 90-minutes, Jeff managed to get me thinking differently about how customer advisory boards impact an organization.

I’ve seen first-hand how customer advisory boards provide strategic insight, focus marketing direction, and promote leadership team alignment.  My clients have leveraged their customer advisory boards to acclerate sales, improve customer retention, and advance product innovation. Customer Advisory Boards are proven to drive sustainable, predictable and profitable growth (SPPG), as outlined in Sean Geehan’s book, The B2B Executive Playbook. So I know how customer advisory boards can truly impact an organization. I did not consciously realize, however, that an organization’s inherent resistance to change can make transformational impact extremely difficult, or kill it altogether.

Launching a Customer Advisory Board often implies that change needs to happen in your organization.  After all, that’s why you are investing in it!  Savvy leaders see the need for change (a new direction, increased sales, improved relationships, etc.) and realize customers can provide the guidance to make it happen.  In fact, organizations that utilize advisory boards to their fullest potential have made them synonymous with continuous improvement and drivers of transformation.  But, you have got to get everyone on the same page.

To achieve truly impactful results, consider the following when developing your customer advisory board.

• Stakeholders inherently resist change, so communicate progress, both big and small, early and often.
• Culture impacts an organization’s ability to change, so build a tolerance for ongoing change into your corporate strategy. 
• Change doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes time and requires a certain set of skills, so designate a change agent/architect to manage the process.    

As you can see, I had a few “Aha” moments during Jeff’s presentation. So much so, in fact, that I immediately ran out and bought his book.  I recommend it to all who aspire to be the agent of change and transformation in their organization.

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.

The Engagement Expo in Dallas this past week was a big hit!  Tracy Cole, Vice President at Standard Register and I presented how in the Business to Business (B2B) world, customer satisfaction does not create loyalty.  

A major aspiration for companies today is to be in ‘high growth’ mode, which can be challenging given the current economic climate. In the B2B world, high growth can be achieved through sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG), for which many factors come into play, most importantly customer loyalty.

One aspect we talked about as you create loyalty is how to engage Decision Makers.  Engaging Decision Makers is a lot like when I first started meditating daily in my yoga practice.  It’s all about:

• Insight
• Relevancy
• Relationships

Meditating has given me tremendous insight about myself.   You have to sit quietly and breathe deeply.  As a “type A” personality, this is not easy for me to do.   When you engage decision makers in the right way you will be amazed at the insight you can gain around strategy, marketing, sales, product, services and merger/acquisitions.

If you walked into a conference room and saw a group of people meditating, most people would think this is very strange.  If I saw this, I would say, “Is there room for one more?”  It’s all about being relevant. This is relevant to me and when you are engaging decision makers you have to make it relevant for them.  They need to have common challenges and a common goal.

When engaging Decision Makers the final piece is the relationship.  When you get a group of decision makers together and you are gaining their insight and having relevant conversations, you start to build trust which leads to a relationship.  Just like when I go to my weekly power yoga class.  There is a core group of us that attend every Saturday, which makes it even more enjoyable.