Building a Successful Customer Advisory Board in the Enterprise | Mapistry VP of Customer Experience

Hi everyone, thank you for joining. My name is Maya Colato. I am the VP of Customer Experience at Mapistry, and I'm really excited to be able to talk to you all about building customer advisory boards together. Today, I'm going to be talking about 3 main sections. The first will be building the foundation of your customer advisory board or CAB. The second will be achieving mutually beneficial meetings, making sure you're getting as much as you can out of this and making sure your customers are having fun and you're having high retention rates throughout the year. The third will be bringing home learning. So taking it back home, what value are we getting out of CABs and what lessons learned are we gonna be— sorry, excuse me. What lessons are we going to be adjusting for the years ahead? Great. But first, I'm gonna start off by answering the question, what is a Customer Advisory Board or CAB? For today, we're defining this as a group of key customers or selected key customers that are gonna be providing strategic feedback on the direction of your product roadmap, emerging industry trends, and the general direction of the company. I do wanna highlight that a CAB is not going to be a product focus group only giving experience and feedback on existing features. Neither is it a board of directors giving you, uh, executive decisions on company policy. This is gonna be a forum for your customers because at the end of the day, they want to be heard. And if you're doing this correctly, you're gonna be able to show them that they're part of something bigger than the software contract with you. And that's gonna make you or allow you to grow as they grow too. 'Cause when they invest into your software, they want you to continually meet the needs as they develop their own company. And a CAB is a wonderful way to do that. When CABs are utilized correctly, you're gonna be able to do, yes, that open forum of feedback, but it even takes it a step further and allows you to create an opportunity to develop nurture-centric culture at your business. And this, as we are learning, develops in higher business growth for yourself. The second thing is building a loyal customer base. We're bringing these awesome advocates together to discuss your company and allow them to feed off of the energy from one another. So whether you have a group filled with legacy customers or new customers, you want to, at the end of the day, make sure that they, again, are feeding off of each other and starting that loyal customer base from day one of your CAB. At Mapistry, we first realized that our customers were invested in where we were going in our annual summits. You see, each year we pull together our customers, prospects, and experts in the industry to talk about environmental compliance. We talk about evolving regulations. We talk about best software use cases, not just about Mapistry, but any softwares that they are also looking at developing within their industry. In 2018, our CEO and design leaders held a conference or held a talk just about Mapistry and were transparent about the direction of where we wanted to go and the current status of the software. We saw that the attendees thrived off of this kind of interaction. Our discussion leaders ended up not having enough time to go around the room and, uh, listen to all the feedback and ideas that our key customers had. At the end of the conference, we realized that the level of feedback was invaluable because yes, of course we were doing discussions one-on-one with our key customers, but those were really just puzzle— pieces of the puzzle. This group dynamic allowed us to see the whole puzzle at once in real time. And that just saved so much effort for us internally. And the way that they fed off of each other on questions and ideas and brainstorms, it was just amazing. So we knew we wanted to continue that, but we also wanted to realize that we didn't have the structured forum to do that for us. So fast forward to 2019, our leadership, uh, The product team reconvened and decided that a CAB was where we wanted to go. But we do have limited resources as a small startup, so how were we going to do that? We needed someone to own the process and be able to organize ourselves internally. If you're looking at CABs from other companies, you may see these folks or these leaders coming from different teams. I've seen it from marketing teams, product teams, and customer success teams. I had the privilege of owning that role and organizing our leadership team internally to be able to drive goals forward. Fast forwarding again to 2020, we had our first round of CAB calls in Q2. We ended up with two subcommittees, which I'll dive into how we were structuring that, with 27 members total, about half each of executive and practitioners and a mix of industry industries, but the big chunk of the industries that we focused on were building materials, waste management, and transportation. And so we wanted to make sure that the makeup of our CAB also represented the growth areas that we also wanted to focus on. Cool. So I'm going to start by letting you know the breakdown of the processes and lessons learned, um, starting with the building of the foundation. And the first item that I wanted to talk about here is reaching internal alignment. Because even though this may seem like a simple task, it's super important to spend enough time here to ensure you understand what every internal stakeholder wants to get out of this initiative. It's easy to make assumptions. But for example, your product leaders may want to focus on the next best thing that will move the needle forward for bigger and better deals for you. Your customer success leader may want to strategize on the best are the most painful pain points during your customer journey that we're identifying and stunting customer growth. Your marketing leader may want to know more about the most meaningful content that's leading to higher quality MQLs. My point is here, you want to be actively listening. Start your foundation on the right foot because you don't want to end up a year from now with different ideas of the value that you provided to the company. If you are bringing your folks together for a couple hours of a brainstorm, you're able to dive into these baseline questions. Talk about the time and effort everyone is willing to invest into this program, so when you're engaging every quarter for new meetings, you know who to go to when you need to develop a demo for the product, or you need to put together slides for the marketing discussion questions that you've decided to focus on then too. And the money part of this slide was that in Mapistry, we wanted to do in-person cab calls, but with COVID obviously that didn't happen. We did have the discussion of we weren't at a place where we can financially compensate folks for joining the cab, but we wanted to reimburse them for travel and lodging to really encourage them to come meet us in person. Again, that didn't happen. We're hoping, crossing our fingers, that this year is gonna be our first in-person summit for our cabs, but we'll let you know. Great. So you've talked to your apostles. Now it's time to write your Bible. And what this means is taking all those missions, goals, and expectations that you outlined with your leadership team members and drafting it on a document that you can share internally and also with potential board meetings. This is going to allow you to be explicit. With the time, effort, and financial considerations that you want to be transparent with your board members. You're gonna be able to bring back this document throughout the year and say like, yeah, okay, we're committing to these 4 objectives and this is how we're fulfilling them throughout the year. Or you may find that you're summarize— or you're focusing on objectives number 1 and 2 and totally forgetting 3 and 4. It's gonna be super helpful to pull this up and say, okay, Let's move forward and provide more value by changing different parts of our processes. The other thing I really wanted to highlight here were your benefits. You've already talked about how all of this is going to be valued within your company, but how are you going to allow customers to be excited about joining you on this process? This is where your benefits really come in. So for Mapistry, we decided to highlight or summarize these 4 ones. If you're developing a CAB of your own, you might find something else that works for you. But just to go through this really quickly, the first one was creating a network. So we wanted to allow them to be able to join and build connections with other peers within their industries that maybe they would not have met without this customer advisory board. The second was building and sharing best practices for the software. So they're all using Mapistry in different ways. They're all solving different problems, but they find that they might have similar solutions. Creating this safe space to trade ideas allows them to increase the adoption of the software and also bring new stories back home. The third was being able to influence the product that they rely on. I already mentioned that when they invest in your software, they want to be able to to use you for as long as they can. And that only is going to work is if you are aligned with their growing needs and continue to change and adapt your software to be of value for them for as long as that they stay with you. And then the lastly is early access to new features and functionality. And I'll even throw in early access to our, our senior leadership. They love talking to executives. They love seeing the new exciting software that they can bring back home. And if you're highlighting this within your charter, they'll be able to see everything that they'll be getting from you. On the right-hand side, I just have a couple of quotes from some of our CAB members. One of my favorites just says, "Grand slams await." We got that right after we sent over the invitation and they read through the charter. That to me was just a great signal that they were seeing things the same way that we were and we were gonna be able to create a great partnership together. Cool. So we've made joining a cab seem so exciting. Everyone's going to be wanting to join, right? Well, they can't. And if you're leading this initiative, it's your job to identify and invite the most strategic customers. You can't invite everyone. And so the way that we did this at Mapistry was first talk about what customer segments we wanted to represent within our cab. After a lot of discussion and back and forth, we decided to focus on two things. One was industry type, because we were historically very successful with SMB companies, but we wanted to lean more into the enterprise deals because we knew that that's how we were gonna be able to grow faster. The second was role at the company. One we will call practitioners. These are decision makers that we had that could buy software on the regional level. And the second was executives. So they were able to buy software on the corporate level. Two different languages of power that we wanted to separate and make sure we both listened equally. Once we have this perfect profile, we went to our CX team and said, okay, look, this is what we're trying to do. These are the people that we want to invite. Who do you got? Who can we put on our draft list so we can consider to invite for our CAB members? And your CSMs are a great tool because they're in the front lines, they're talking to people, they're writing down your notes, and they'll be able to tell you who are advocates and who would be great players for this program. Lastly, it was— we looked at both legacy and new customers to bring diverse perspectives. Your legacy customers have been with you for so long, they'll be able to give you rich information of how you've grown already. They know you. And they'll be more than willing to join you here. But there is seriously some value by adding new customers to your CABS too, because their experiences with your sales cycle, with your onboarding processes are fresh on their mind, and they'll be able to put that perspective into the mix. And one great value out of that too is if your new customers are learning from your legacy customers, it just creates this positive feedback loop loop where they're feeding off of their energy and they can see how they can grow with us by just talking to legacy customers as well. Okay. So you have your draft list of key players. Now we have to get into recruitment mode. And I highly suggest pulling your lever with your CEO, your COO, whoever is your C-suite level sponsor to create personalized invitations to make them feel special because at the end of the day, they are. They're a great resource for you and you want to make sure that they understand how excited you are about being able to bring this program to them. So the way we did that was personalized emails, but our COO Ryan would also hype us up when he would visit sites or if he had calls with folks, really just hyping up the program and allowing them to see everything that they could get from it. I've also seen folks write letters. If you're in an older industry, some folks really would appreciate that. But whatever you do, highlight your benefits because if they don't read your charter, at least you can vocalize those benefits to them and really entice them to join you on this journey. And lastly, if you're starting to get yeses, follow up immediately. Let them know that the excitement continues and we're really looking forward to to the next steps of this CAB program with them. Okay. So you have your— you have your foundation, your charter, your goals, and now you have the folks that you want to invite to this board meeting. How are you going to achieve mutually beneficial meetings so that your retention levels stay high? The first thing that we did, or that I did, was pull together our internal stakeholders again quarterly so that we can identify all the amazing things that we were trying to do in every team. Now, a lot of things happen every quarter. If you're a startup, you're literally a speedboat changing directions all the time. What that means is there's too much to talk about in the allotted time that you have with your CAB members already. So what you wanna do is narrow it down to one, maybe two themes for each quarter, but make sure you're rotating these themes so again you can follow through with your objectives. I highly don't suggest going over 2 just because you're diluting the information that you're getting from your cab, and this is just going to be the best way to really focus on 1 or 2 things. The engaging part— so with COVID we've all learned that we'd have to adapt and to this virtual environment, that's hard for some more than others. So we try to leverage out breakout rooms for larger groups so that they can really socialize and network with folks to again fulfill that commitment of a network for themselves. We also used surveys to prep folks before calls to get into that mentality of a CAB. This is the first time for a lot of them that they were part of this kind of initiative, and so just introducing them slowly before even the meeting was helpful because we were allowed to start from the first minute of the call to the great— the content that we had scheduled for them. Uh, and then the last thing, maybe one of the more important ones too, is to follow up on the advancements from previous conversations. Because if I'm your customer and I, the first call, say, all my feedback that I have for you, and the next few quarters I never really hear anything back from it, it's very discouraging. I'm not gonna want to continue to give you all my feedback if I don't know what's actually happening to it. And so if you decide to make changes from feedback from your CAB, let them know. Show them how the software is changing. Show them how your strategies are changing. It's just gonna foster a great environment for them. And if you decide some things are, you don't wanna follow through with some things, still allow them to be part of that conversation. That way you're just following up with as much as you can. So now that you have your roles, responsibilities, responsibilities, you're ready to get into your call. I don't want you to forget that there are humans behind every screen. Pay attention to the dynamics that you have within your cab. Some people are soft-spoken, some people are a lot louder than others. Your soft-spoken folks might struggle with feedback during the calls, but that doesn't mean that their feedback is any less worthy. Take note of that. Next call, maybe encourage them a little bit more individually, pose questions to them individually and ask them by name. That way you can really encourage them to get involved into this program. Another thing that we learned was to open the floor to the members because we do have our agenda, but we also have blind spots. And if we open the floor to them, they're able to say like, hey, actually, I, I want to surprise you with this, it might be of value. And this is just another way to get as much as you can, as much feedback from your CAB members during that time. And I put this in the slide again just because it's so important, but close those feedback loops to maintain those high engagement rates. Want to make sure that you're building these partnerships throughout time, not just for the 1-hour, 2-hour allotted slot that you have with them. Okay. So if you got your first meeting down, I am so proud of you. You should be proud too. It's a great accomplishment. Accomplishment. But you don't want to forget that your work is not done. I'm sure you all know self-reflection is an amazing skill to have. It creates opportunities for you to adjust throughout the year to be better. And so 3 ways that we've done that in our own practice is one, create retrospectives with your leadership team after every meeting. So after a cab call, bring together your internal stakeholders ask them questions like, what went well? What did you love? What didn't go well? And what would you want to change off of that? If you're doing this right after the call, you're essentially creating a game plan for the next quarter. And just if you're doing that over and over again throughout the year, you're improving the quality of your customer advisory board. The second thing is to reevaluate your charter annually. You did it once, doesn't mean you have to let it go on a shelf to gather some dust, dust it off, bring it back, and even pull in some CAB members if they've been with you for the whole year. Try to get their understanding of what concerns they have, what questions, what adjustments that they may want to see off of your charter. And lastly, ask for feedback directly. It doesn't have to be at the end of the year. Do a pulse point 6 months and figure out if they're getting as much as you as they wanted out of this. And again, it's just another way to be better throughout time. Okay, so bringing home the learnings, we quickly realized that the cab wasn't just good for the cab itself, it also had a domino effect on the rest of our company, allowed us to be more customer-centric throughout the different teams. Oops, sorry. So going into the value derived that we got off of this, the first one that I'm gonna talk about is the product roadmap adjustments. This happened both short and long term. The short term being, okay, we scheduled out these 4 themes for the year, help us organize what should be going first. We did this with our compliance calendar. It allowed us to direct more conversations with prospects, and a long-term example would be like, hey, before our product team actually dives into this amount of work it would take to build this, help us figure out if this is a direction that we should be even thinking about. And if they validate that, you're saving a lot of time. And it also hypes up your dev and product team because they'll be able to hear from your key customers like, yeah, if we do this now, we'll be able to solve for "X, Y, and Z," and that's just very validating for the whole company. The second thing is internal onboarding resources. So when we hire a new AE, they have access to our recorded cab calls, and that allows them to learn very quickly how our customers are talking about us, how they make decision-making, or how they make decisions to buy the software, and how they want to see us grow. And that really helps us fuel the prospect conversations from the start. The second is customer advocates. So I mentioned before, CAB is a great way to build customer advocates. Our CSMs saw these kinds of changes in the relationships and conversations that we were having with folks. And if folks jump from company to company, they'll be able to bring those stories with them and bring your company with them too. Lastly, and maybe the one that we didn't expect the most, is a resource in the sales process. On the right-hand side is a screenshot of an RFP from a recent Fortune 500 deal. And in Section 6.8, they asked how they can actively voice, participate, and influence the products that they might buy. Excuse me. In our response, of course we highlighted our CS program, of course we highlighted QBRs, our quarterly business reviews, our NPS program, one-on-one conversations with our CSMs, but it was also a great opportunity to highlight our customer advisory board. So we were able to say like, hey, yeah, we got this awesome program that you can be a part of. These are all the amazing companies that are already part of it already that you can network and learn from. And this is how we're gonna change if you give us your feedback and you decide to join us. And that was really enticing to them. On the flip side, we did have a good amount of lessons learned. The first was members value knowledge from diverse industries. So I did mention before that we had two subcommittees. Originally, we structured them by industry type, but after the first round of calls, they are— customers vocalized like, Yeah, I really value all my peers from the building materials industries, but I see them all the time at conferences. I want to know what waste management is doing. I want to know what transportation is doing. Bring them here, combine us so that we can brainstorm together and we can learn from each other. And so that's what we did. We quickly diverted from industry-based subcommittees for it to be just only based on role. So now we have executives and practitioners partners with mixed industries involved. The second, which is kind of basic, but multiple subcommittees, schedule them with caution. Because meetings take so much energy from your internal team. If you do them back to back to back, it's gonna be draining. Space them out. That's what we did after a couple of rounds. The third was use homework more strategically. So at the beginning, we put a lot of importance on that to teach them what the CAB was, to teach them what we wanted to focus on quarter after quarter. But you got to remember these folks live very busy lives, especially your executives. And what you're asking from them may be a lot depending on what they have every day. So we changed the initiative off of homework and made it more optional, made it more fun. Demo videos, access to beta features, and just allowed them to play in there if needed. But we didn't really— need them to finish it to actually have really important conversations with the CAB. So it's a fun thing to use, but don't put too much importance into it. Lastly, turnover, acquisitions, and churn affect attendance. So I'm sure you all understand what all those three terms mean, but what this alludes to is that when— if you've drafted out your key players once throughout the year, continue to build that list of advocates on the on the other side because if you do see a champion loss, if you see acquisitions, you'll have holes that you want to fit and those are great opportunities to bring in new customers and allow them to join a great program. Cool, so wrapping up, I just want to give you 4 key takeaways. One, remember to invest that time with your internal stakeholders, build your foundation on the right foot. You won't be able to get anywhere without it. Two, write your Bible. Document it in a charter. Allow them to be— allow the charter to be explicit with your intentions and what you want to commit so that you can entice folks to join you on the journey. Three, ensure your meetings are mutually beneficial. You want this to be as engaging as possible so that at the end of the year you're left with CAB members that are excited for the next last year and then the year after that. Lastly, reflect and reiterate throughout the year. If you are focused on improving the high quality or the quality of your cab, then that, your company, company's quality will also improve. And if your company's quality will improve, it's gonna drive more business growth for you and your customers. And at the end, that's all what we're really here for, right? [FOREIGN]