5 Tips For Partnering With Your Sales Team On Your Customer Advisory Board Program

Eyal Danon, President and Founder of Ignite Advisory Group.

When initiating your customer advisory board (CAB) program, one of the key stakeholders will be your own company’s sales team. Their involvement in your program makes sense—they often take point on the key relationships with your customers, may meet with them regularly and may have long histories and deep knowledge of their experience (both good and not so good) with your products and services. As such, your sales team may be eager to participate as your program gets going.

But while enthusiasm from your sales team toward your CAB can be a good thing, sometimes their interest can hinder or even derail your program if their involvement is not proactively managed and if their expectations are not set early.

As such, here are five tips for partnering with your sales team on your CAB program:

1. Communicate that CABs are not sales engagements. Your sales team may get excited about the notion of trapping your best customers in a room for two days and subjecting them to presentations about your products and a demonstration of your latest version. As such, it is important for the CAB management team (and executive sponsor) to communicate early on in its formation that your CAB is not a sales engagement. CABs are instead opportunities to address and solve shared challenges that may (or perhaps may not) involve your company’s offerings. However, while revenue opportunities may emerge organically, sales should never be an externally stated goal of an overall CAB program.

2. Enlist their help with recruiting. As your sales folks likely know your customers the best, enlist their help with nominating potential CAB members. Give them a list of criteria you are looking for and provide a form for them to complete with all the information you need to consider for membership. Assuming your sales folks own the best relationships with your customers, provide them with all the materials they need to conduct recruiting outreach for your program. (If they don’t have relationships with your customers, it may be easier and more successful for invitations to come from your executive sponsor.)

3. Keep them on track. In line with the above, provide the helpful training, CAB communication plan and deadlines to your sales team so they know what to do and when. They are busy professionals, after all, focused on generating revenue for your company. Procure their executive management’s buy-in on their roles and responsibilities, and check on their status regularly. If deadlines get pushed back (or ignored), have your CAB executive sponsor raise the issue with his sales peer. Falling behind on recruiting will create more work at crunch time for you later.

4. Don’t have representatives attend meetings. Another instinct that your sales representatives may have is to attend any meeting at which their accounts are present, mainly to “hear what they have to say.” But sales representatives’ presence at CAB meetings is not necessary—be sure to assign a meeting note taker and create a post-meeting report containing discussion points that will be shared with everyone who’s not there. Plus, your CAB members will be able to speak more freely about issues and suggestions if their representative is not present at the meeting. Feel free, however, to include senior sales leadership (senior vice president of sales, chief revenue officer, etc.) in your meeting. But remember, you want as few host company people in CAB meetings as possible—ideally you should have a 2-1 ratio of customers to host company folks there.

5. Encourage member follow-up. After your CAB meeting is over, debrief your sales team with the meeting notes and meeting report (when available) and highlight direct CAB member follow-up opportunities. This is especially vital for customers who during the meeting expressed that they are struggling with an issue, have questions, need communication or guidance, or just could use some “love” from your company. Just as important, CAB members may have expressed interest in testing your new solution or seeing a demonstration of it at their site with their own team—this is where CAB meetings can turn into real sales opportunities and deliver net new revenue.

Salespeople should be part of your CAB program but in specific ways. Let them know your plan and where they fit in, keep them on track and updated about your progress, and communicate the results of your CAB meetings that can lead to new engagement—and revenue—opportunities.

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