Well, welcome, everybody. Thanks so much for showing up. This is a new topic for us. So really excited to discuss something that we haven’t discussed in this kind of format before. So for those of you I don’t know, Megan Dubofsky, an operating partner and CMO at Ten Eleven, all that means is basically after we invest in your companies, you should let me know if there’s something we can do to help you. And I will try to figure out what we can do. This topic has come up a lot in various ways.

We have a really great, actually, group of people who are at different stages of the CAB journey. So we have some people who are just thinking about putting one on.

There are some people who have started early.

There are some people who have been doing it for a while and are looking to get better leverage on it.

So we really hope we can just make this a safe space to talk about it.

We are recording it just for everyone’s awareness.

But this stays internal at Ten Eleven Family. And I think we all know that these things are, we can all get better if we share ideas. And so hopefully we can do that today.

To help guide the conversation, if everyone, if it’s not too hard, could put their name and then their company and parens, that would be awesome.

If it’s easy, it’s not a big deal if you can’t or whatever.

And then to guide our conversation today, we have Mike Gospe. I’m looking for him on the screen.

So this is an expert we have through OneGuide, which is a company we look at to get really tight domain specific experts in to talk about different issues that our portfolio is facing. Mike has a ton of experience, both advising and putting on how to put together cabs and facilitating these meetings. Justifying the investment to the person you may be trying to justify the investment to. And just thinking about ways to get the best leverage out of the organization.

I will say also, some of you know this, but we at 10. 11 have been working, trying to get better and better about our own advisory board, which we call STAR, just so everyone knows what we’re formally calling it, Security Trust and Resilience Leaders Network. Grace Cassie, who is based in the UK, is helping us formalize that and really owning those relationships. We have about 50 of those people right now throughout the US, UK, Canada, Europe, and South America.

It’s about 80% CISOs right now and about a third women, which is exciting and something we feel really passionately about. So I just offer that because some of those people are interested in advising companies and it’s more of a matchmaking process, I would say. But if there are areas of expertise for the smaller companies who don’t really have customers yet and are looking to build that, let me know maybe there’s a way we can connect with Grace and I’ll get on the call on what you’re looking for and do a little matchmaking there.

So just want to take that opportunity to update the portfolio on our own internal efforts to build that part of the 10. 11 offering.

With that, I’m going to push it over to Mike.

Please, yeah, feel free to jump in. We want to be as discussion oriented as possible and we love having your feedback both now and after the session. So thanks, Mike.

Excellent, great. Thank you, Megan. And hello, good morning, good afternoon, everybody. My name is Mike Gospi. You can affectionately refer to me as the CAB guy. I am a CAB strategist for the last 25 years. I’ve been helping executive teams to design and then execute a world class CAB program. And so we’re going to be talking about some of the best practices, some of the way cabs are changing, have changed through COVID and now in 2024. And you guys were great in providing some really good background questions that were forwarded to me earlier.

And we’re going to try my best to kind of weave in discussion and answers on all of those. My company is KickStart Alliance. For the last 25 years, we’ve been bringing CEOs and executive teams closer to their best customers. And I run the advisory board practice. So 20 years, 250 CAB meetings. There’s a lot kind of to talk about on this.

To get us started, I want to ground us in a couple of realities. I’ve got a few slides, but I think I’m going to try to stay away from them if I can. First, when I say the words Customer Advisory Board, let’s start with the definition.

Customer Advisory Board is a strategy level focus group, where you and your executive team are looking as much as three years into the future to find out how your customers’ businesses are changing, what they’re worried about, and of course, you want to find out what you can do to stay relevant and provide value to them three years from now.

That’s where you discover, if you properly integrate the CAB and the other dimensions of your company, which we’ll talk about, this is where you discover additional revenue streams, and it is more than likely that you can fast- track growth and is even as much as doubling the size of your ARR. We can talk about, that’s the brass ring, that’s the goal. The sad reality is most of the cabs that I’m invited to come and coach people on is to get them out of trouble because they’ve made mistakes, their programs are mediocre, they’re not properly integrated.

What I want to share with you today is some tips and some perspective that will help you make your investment payoff as best you can. I saw from the little survey question we asked earlier, and Megan or Catherine, would you show those results again? We asked you just to get a sense of how many of you were familiar with cabs, and I think it was 30 percent, you’re starting your first one, and 50 percent have some level of, Mary, you’re nodding your head on that. Here’s what I’d like to do.

I’d like to start by asking you, by the way, within my 25 years, I’ve done, thank you, a ton in the security space. I’m going to tell you something you may already know. The top two topics that keep coming up in advisory boards for security, cybersecurity- related companies are, how do you secure the proper talent to deliver those services, and what the heck is going on with AI? Those are, I’m sure I’m telling you stuff that you already know. Anyway, thank you, Mary, for that. Here’s my first question to you.

For those of you who have been running an advisory board for your company, for at least the past year, would you mind sharing what you’ve learned or gathered as to the value that the advisory board program has brought to you? Because I’d love to hear, and I’m sure this would be a good starting point for us. Anybody have something you’d like to share as to the value that you’ve got from your CAB so far? Heather, not to cold call you, but I would mind.

Yeah, of course. We’ve been running our CAB for just coming up a year, actually. We started it in May last year. It’s definitely one of the most important initiatives on our CEO’s mind at the moment. We’re just reaching that point at Sempris where it’s equally as important to keep our customers and delight our customers, as well as finding new customers. The CAB has definitely been one of the best ways for us to do that because it makes our customers feel important. It makes them feel heard.

When our executives are taking a week out of their day jobs, if you like, to speak to them and listen to their opinions, it means we know that we’re going to have customers for life then, because they know that they feel appreciated, and it helps with things, as you mentioned previously, helps with upsells and things like that because they trust us, and they know that we will listen to their opinions. It’s been a great tool for us over the last year, and I know that over the next few years, we’ll just want to continue to grow our CAB.

At the moment, we have about 30 members.

Sorry, how many members do you have?

30, but we split it into much smaller meetings than that. Yeah, I think the CEO is so keen to make sure we get as many of our key customers involved as possible.

All right. Heather, this is great. You mentioned some really key words that are really important that I want to make sure that everybody else is touching in on. Providing a venue where customers feel like they’re heard, and that your executive team is listening. Listening is the hardest skill for most executives to get comfortable with.

Listening

It is so much easier to talk. In fact, one of the death blows to a customer advisory board is when the agenda is a parade of product update presentations and there is zero question for customers to share what they’re thinking about where they want to go. But if you turn it around, you follow the 80- 20 rule where 80% of your agenda time is for customers to respond to carefully crafted questions, you’ll be surprised what they can tell you. So Heather has really tapped into feeling like they’re heard, the trust factor listening that is really important.

And we’ll talk about the three reasons why your C- suite people are going to join. But I want to echo that because that’s really important. Not all cabs have that. And if you do, you’re on the path to success. Let’s see, Brad, you sent a comment here. You’re in stealth mode. Do you want to add to this for the group?

We just came out less than a year. And we’ve got a handful of customers. We haven’t run a CAB yet or tab. And maybe focus group is the right answer for us. So there’s our existing customers that are paid right now. But then maybe like others, we have a freemium model. We have a community group. We let people join and use the tool. So I’m very interested in getting feedback from them in an appropriate format, which could be similar but different than paid customers. And I can’t wait to see what it’s like in three years.

But Colin’s a client who runs product. He’s probably going crazy. We’re going to plan three years out.

So Brad, you are raising such an incredible point. And this speaks to one of the biggest trouble spots. And I summarize this to be use the right tool for the right job. So in fact, I’m going to share a slide in a minute that talks about product focus groups versus CAB versus survey. Cab is not a one size fit all. You shoehorn everything into it. That’s another death blow. You have to use it strategically.

But before I get there, anybody in addition to Heather have some positive experience as to the value, the affirmation you’ve gotten that said, wow, this CAB investment is really paying off. Does anybody have some real life insights to share? Julie, you’re nodding your head. Does that mean you’ve got?

Yeah, I can share. So yeah, I echo a lot of what she said. I mean, the relationship building with our team is invaluable and also helps in my role because I’m customer advocacy focused. But also, we’ve been working on some new developments of getting strategic feedback on whether that aligns with their goals. But to also customer education around how others are using our solutions. Like last year at our CAB, one of our customers was really genuinely talking up one of our solutions.

And another customer basically said, wow, you’re making a really good point of I need that. So I think that’s another really valuable thing is having the customers share the value they’re getting from our solutions together and exploring different use cases. So just wanted to add that one.

That is a really good point, Julie. And what you’re saying is so incredibly valuable. But there’s a caution there. The CAB might or might not be the best venue for doing that. It comes back to the right tool for the right job. So we’re going to talk about that because it can be a slippery slope. And if you try to turn the CAB into a customer reference program, if you try to use it to promote and sell, if you use it as a marketing gimmick, it totally backfires on you. But yet there are ways you can finesse it.

Or if you surround the CAB with other touch points, you can accomplish that. But I do want to exercise caution on that because the worst thing that you can have is if during a break, a customer comes up to you. And I’ve had this happen to me for a CAB that I was facilitating. And they’ll say, Mike, so is this now when you’re going to sell me something? And that just deflates the whole. It takes the whole wind out of the balloon on that. So I just want to offer that as a caution.

And to clarify that, that was not part of the program. I’m just saying it naturally occurred because we really structured our CAB this past year, learning from the year prior to be more customer- led and talking about their own experiences. So yeah, I definitely agree with you. Don’t want it to seem like selling. It’s just more the benefit is the natural conversations that happen between customers when they start talking about their businesses and how they’re running things. So yeah, I just want to clarify that.

Very good.

I think that’s spot on, Julie. And that’s been my experience as well. And to something you said, Mike, I’ve run a bunch of cabs, usually at somewhat larger companies than I’m currently at. But, but,

We did two things: we didn’t allow sales to come, except the CRO to come and say hi builds trust. But then also- and these were always the customer the most appreciated sessions- that they said make that longer was we would do a panel where somebody from the company would facilitate a discussion. But it was really about customers talking with each other about how they solve business problems. Great when they were talking about problems our products solved.

But they sometimes went into areas that were tangential and customers were just thrilled to get that opportunity to spend time with their peers and we were thrilled this product people getting to actually be a fly on the wall for those conversations.

So, Cory, I’m so glad you mentioned that, because that is. There are three reasons and there’s always. These are always the same three reasons why C- suite people are willing to make the time to come to your advisory board. And it doesn’t matter what industry- and it’s certainly true for the cyber security- it does not matter what industry you’re in because it speaks to human nature and human psychology.

And the number one reason, Cory, hit the nail on the head: they value coming together with their peers to talk about strategic issues they care about and when you provide a venue that says, hey, we’re talking about XYZ and we want to get this discussion. We’re gonna make this conversation happen. That is differentiating to all the many vendors out there that simply want to sell stuff and it makes a difference. And so when you say, hey, I’ve got this venue, we’re gonna hear from peers talk about this. We’re saving a seat at the table.

Would you like to come? I’ve never had problem filling seats around the table, so that’s always number one. The second reason they come is because they do want to hear what your CEO’s value proposition is for your company, your vision and where you’re investing to solve the problems that impact your customers. Now they want to know what that is so they can influence it, so you can help them. Now, this is not. I want to be clear. This is not anything that they any information they could read on a press release.

They’re not going to get this in a can presentation. They’re not going to find it on the website. What I’m suggesting is a Roosevelt Ian fireside chat where the CEO comes up and says: let me tell you what really excites me in the morning about where the industry is going and here’s how we’re responding. And these are the three initiatives and these are the problems that we’re solving for you. What do you guys? How does this align with your expectation of where you need us to be to help you solve your business?

Future customers eat that up, because you know what most CEOs- again human nature- are uncomfortable putting that out there because, God forbid, what if the customer doesn’t like what you said? And my response is: wouldn’t it be great to find that out now? So that’s the second reason. The third reason Heather already told us about, and that this one is esoteric, but if you miss it, your CAB would fall apart.

And that is because your executive team is genuinely, sincerely interested in listening and the reason that I point this out, having done this for many years. There are a number of CEOs who are actually good friends of mine and I will never recommend that they pursue a CAB, and it’s basically because their egos are too damn big. They think they know all the answers. Their body language is not opening to listening, they just turn off customers.

But for those who say- and in fact, the best, the most successful cabs I’ve ever participated in were actually driven by the CEO- it was one of the initiatives for the company, so when it’s top- down, it’s a whole lot easier than trying to push it uphill, but when you had all three of those things together, you’re having a strategy related conversation. It’s not about product feature ranking.

If you’re talking about future visions and allowing C- suite customers to kind of participate and collaborate together to help you hone them, and if you’re interested in sincerely listening to that, you’ve got the three magic ingredients that are going to make your conversation just really, really exciting and powerful. What I want to do here is pause. I want to share one slide with you. This is my pyramid model slide of cabs and it’s going to touch on some of the points that Brad mentioned earlier.

I’m going to share this, walk you through it and we’re going to talk about it.

I

Right here, here, and hopefully you’re seeing my pyramid slide, where do cabs fit in the larger voice of the customer? OK, let me walk you through this really quickly. And in my role of CAB coach, this is probably the single most often used slide by companies everywhere. So I welcome you to kind of make use of this too. Let me describe it. On the y- axis, you’ve got tactical topics versus strategic topics. This does not mean to imply that strategy is more important than tactics. It’s not. Remember, it’s all about the right tool for the right job.

So a tactical topic would be, Brad, I had a crappy experience with your company on, sorry, is somebody there? Ah, somebody was on the phone. Brad, I had a bad experience with your company on Tuesday. What are you doing to fix it? A strategic topic would be, hey, how do we wrestle with all of these new and expanding priorities around AI and this rapidly growing space? And how do I apply that best to the cybersecurity needs that your customers have? And that’s a strategic topic. And how do I do it when talent acquisition is becoming harder and harder?

It’s a great strategic topic. Now, my world of customer input, I’ve simplified it to three levels because my brain can only handle three different segments of this. But let’s start from the bottom and move up of customer input. The broadest level, tactical and operational feedback, is intentionally broad to indicate that you have many people in marketing, sales, customer success, talking to many customers on any given day. And that’s all goodness. So there’s lots of interchange.

Typical, that focuses in a real- time element and social media, customer feedback form. If you’re using net promoter score, that kind of fits down at that level. And that’s important kind of groundswell kind of conversation. When you move up the stack is where life gets a little murky. So under product direction, you’re not going to be dealing with every single customer you’re going to have. You’re going to cherry pick, I don’t know, maybe a couple of dozen, maybe a couple of hundred, but certainly not the universe of everybody.

The focus tends to be more on the product. And how can you help them take full advantage of the product you have today? How can you maybe tweak the use case a little bit? How do you ensure that they’re learning all that they need to know to apply it to their best advantage? So you might be willing to make some changes that would affect certain elements of your service, but you’re not going to reinvent it. This is honing something you already have. And so the focus is what I call short to midterm. This is 12 to 18 months into the future.

This is where a traditional product focus group would fit, where user groups fit, and where online forums fit. Now, so a question would be, if you’re running a focus group and you wanted to, or if the questions you wanted to ask would be, gosh, everybody’s asking for two dozen features, and we need to figure out what the three most important are, use a product focus group for that, whether you use it as an in- person dialogue or through surveys. There are some great tools and interaction to get that kind of feedback.

If you want to have customers sharing how they’re using your specific tool or product today, a user forum or user group is awesome for that, where you can have more of that tactical in the trenches kind of sharing on that. That works great at the product level, not so much at the CAB level. And I’ll describe that in a minute.

Now, when you go up to the CAB under strategic direction, as I mentioned earlier, you’re looking as much as three years into the future, not the problem that you’re solving today and the product you have today, but what do you need to have next? How can you leapfrog your competition? How can you, if you’re Wayne Gretzky, how can you skate to where the puck is going to be? And you want to get the insight.

And the insights come from how your customers are dealing with problems today and where they’re thinking they’re going to invest and how do they view everything from partnerships to technology. There’s a lot of strategic elements on that. And that’s where the magic of a customer advisory board fit. Heather, I think you said you had 30 people in your CAB program. Every company should have one global, and you can define global however you want, even if you’re just a US- based program. You’ve got one CAB program.

But your CAB meetings are going to be executed regionally. It’s not a good idea to mix Europe and Asia Pacific or Europe and US, and there’s reasons we can go on if you want for that. It’s not as effective.

It’s not as effective. It’s not as effective.

But 12 is as many years as a facilitator in dealing with human interaction. 12 is the magic number of customers for an in- person meeting because human dynamics get in the way if your group is too large and people can hide. So that’s 12 customers, one individual from each customer. We can talk more about that if you want. But for now, I wanted to paint this picture of this triangle because one of the areas I see a lot of companies struggle with is they ask the right question to the wrong group of people.

And there’s nothing worse than doing that because it taints the feedback that you get. You may not even realize it at the time. And the flip side of that, and I’ve had this happen so many times where I’ll talk to a CMO after they’ve run their cabin. I will say, Jeff, how did your customer advisory board go? He said, Mike, it was great. We had customers talking to each other. It was awesome, a lot of good energy, but I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t already know. And my response was, well, you just wasted everybody’s time.

You, as the sponsor of your CAB, need to be totally selfish to answer two key questions, and it relates to this pyramid chart. What do you want to learn and what are you prepared to do with the information you collect? Now, with that, I’m going to pause here and allow folks to respond or ask questions, thoughts, comments on what did you share?

Mike, you mentioned the ideal size of 12 people or 12 companies, and someone had asked, first of all, how do you limit, or should you be limiting to only one person per one company? Like, how do you decide the seniority of those people?

Is it more junior, more senior?

That was another question. And then thirdly, how to handle asking different people to attend year over year and not damage the relationships?

Oh, those are great questions. I will touch on each of those, but first, what do you guys think of the model? Does that make sense to you? Have you struggled with what are the right questions to ask or does it make total sense? It’s like, yeah, Mike, we totally get it. We’re going in that direction.

Where are you at?

Olly, Colm, Colm, what do you think?

Just a quick question on that, actually. So this sounds like an 18 to three- year, 36- month period you’re talking about in advance. So for smaller startups like yourselves, it almost sounds a little bit like a luxury in terms of planning that far ahead. So how do you balance that with your CEO to say, look, we’re going to start thinking about three years ahead with this talking shop and commit resources to that, while obviously the focus really is on the next 12 months to build out the company?

You know what this, I know this is a little off topic, but let me address this, Colm, because cabs are not appropriate for every company at any given time, and you’re raising an excellent point. So I always think that there’s some minimal level criteria that must be met before you even think whether a CAB makes sense. Have you been in business longer than a year where you have been able to see consistency in how customers are engaging with you and using your product? Do you actually have paying customers?

I like to say, you know, hey, do you have at least 50 people who are not friends and family, who are paying for your service and using them the way that you want? So you’ve got some history. You can actually see if the dots are connected and you’ve got enough of a baseline to expand on. So if your business is so early that you’re still testing a very early hypothesis and you don’t have enough market confidence that you’re ready to expand broader, cabs may be premature for you.

Now, that’s not to say you might, you would undoubtedly find value in hosting an executive round table, which does not have the expectation that a CAB has. If you’re using the three words customer advisory board, that means you’re committing to a program. That means you’re going to be interacting with these customers multiple times during the year. You’re going to be spending money and time on this. Maybe that’s too much. So you can do an executive round table, which can feel cab- like, but you can position it, hey, it’s a one- time meeting.

We’re going to get together for a couple hours over the phone or in downtown London or wherever you are to have this, just to have this put the finger on the pulse of where you’re going. That’s perfectly fine. So again, right tool for the right job. And if it’s too early, if you don’t have that repeatable cadence of business, and if your infrastructure isn’t well- structured out that you’re actually able to catch that feedback and take action on it, CAB may be premature. Does that help, Colm?

Yeah, absolutely. I had one other question, if you don’t mind, I’ll just fire at you.

You got the floor.

In terms of the freemium model that we have with community users coming in, we won’t necessarily have a relationship with those guys. So it’s not like you can pick up the phone and say, look, we’re looking to have a talk. And there’s always the risk that these guys see it, this is potentially a hard sell. So how do you get around that issue of saying, we’re looking to talk to you guys, we want to engage you guys in feedback, and it’s not a hard sell. Do you have to specifically say that to them? Or how do you manage that situation?

Oh, boy, we could spend all day on this. This is one of the most common conversations I have in my coaching practice. And it’s hard to give you a short answer on this. But it all comes, if you go back to the three reasons why C- suite people want to come participate in CABs. And let’s just take reason number one that Corey talked about. You want to talk about strategic issues that they care about, and they value talking with their peers about it. If you were to host that, you’re not there to sell anything.

You’re there to be an advisor before you become the seller. You say, hey, I’ve got a topic. We’re bringing some executives together to talk about X, Y, Z, a small mini peer group session on this. Would you like to come? I think if you play it with words to that effect, that talk to an issue that they care about, you don’t have to worry about saying, oh, we’re not going to do a hard sell. It’s not even going to be material to them. That would be the way to do that.

Now, if in the freemium model, which is a totally different can of worms, what I would suggest is maybe you think about doing an online survey and reaching out to a very broad swath of people to see if you can get some trend- like guidance on this. We’re skimming the top of a very deep conversation. I don’t want to take us too far offline, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of help on that.

Yeah. Appreciate that. Thank you.

Let’s touch base after, too, because we have some people in the portfolio, I think, using some online tools, too, that might be interesting.

Right.

It all comes back to the right tool for the right job.

I mean, this idea of repeatable process, that’s a luxury that some of our bigger companies have, for sure. But we have a lot of companies, I think, that are maybe without a, what I would say, growth equity repeat sales process in place yet. How do you incorporate or think about getting strategic feedback even if you don’t have that repeatable sales motion yet?

It’s a really good question, Megan. And you’re going to hate my answer because it’s going to be kind of, it depends. I mean, I need to know more about what the company priorities are. What are the expectations? What are the initiatives for growth? Where they’re coming from?

Again, what do they want to learn?

Because undoubtedly, there will be some tools that will be applicable to help get that information. But it can maybe be a bridge too far. You may be setting yourself up for something you can’t deliver. So, and let me ask this question to the group. What do you think the number one customer complaint is on failed caps?

No follow up or follow through.

Very good. Chrissy, explain, talk more. You got it.

People want to make sure that if they’re investing their own time, especially if it’s a higher level executive from our customer space, they want to make sure that it’s actually worth it, right? They’re going to spend their time, effort, and energy in providing feedback and thoughtful commentary and their opinions and their perspective on things. They want to make sure that there is some type of action. They want to understand how their feedback translates into where you’re going as a company or not.

I think that addressing both sides of that’s really important to say, hey, that’s great feedback. That’s just not where we’re focusing on or where we’re heading. I think that clarity is really important so that there isn’t that kind of like, are they actually going to take action? Are they not taking action?

I think the biggest reason that CABs fail and that you kind of lose interest in CABs from your CAB team members is because they feel like their time was not well spent or invested and they don’t feel like they’re getting value back for the time that they’ve put in.

You’re the voice of wisdom, Chrissy. So again, and before I lose complete track of this, back to the pyramid model. I’m just looking for either does that, do you think that model is helpful? If you have not set up a CAB before, let me ask the question to those folks.

I imagine one of the problems, one of the challenges you might have is, you may not know how to take full advantage of a CAB. And I’m hoping that the pyramid model might give you some options to either clarify where a CAB would fit, or where perhaps other tools might work better. Did anybody share any kind of feedback or input on that model that relates to your current work and priority? No? Okay. All right, we’ll switch. Mary, you had raised some other questions, and if you remind me, let’s just take them one at a time.

Yeah, so I think there are some themes, like themes of questions, and there were a lot of questions about how do you choose, what’s the right number, how do you choose, and if it really is only 12 companies per year, and let’s say you want to switch companies each year, how do you not offend people if you invite the same ones? Okay, so let’s talk about this. So everything comes back to the two key questions I shared with you earlier. What do you want to learn, and what is your company prepared to do with that information?

Now, those two questions seem easy to answer. I guarantee you they’re not. And many times, it is not unusual to take three to six months to plan for your advisory board meeting. One of the reasons why, and I always kind of advocate take a little bit longer to plan, is to allow your executives to change their mind on what questions that you want to ask.

So somebody, when I have a kickoff meeting with customers, we could easily straw dog out what an agenda would be, and the only thing I can guarantee is the agenda is wrong, because the following week, the chief product officer is going to call me up and say, Mike, you know, I’ve been thinking about the agenda, and I think there’s a better topic I want us to talk about. And folding that into the process is really important. Iterative nature works to your advantage.

Now, based on those questions, the following would be, who are the best people in your customer base who can actually answer those questions? So one of the trouble spots companies have is, and it comes down to human nature as they’re planning their cap, the thing that keeps people most up at night, going to be able to fill the seats around the table. So you start worrying about your invitation list as step number one. It should actually be step number three. So when you do it as step number one, you think who you have your relationships with.

Those tend to be lower level people. Maybe they’re users. You’ve got a relationship. What you want to do is get their boss or their boss’s boss, but you don’t have a relationship with them. So you aim lower, and that then dictates what questions you want. But that may not be the questions that you really want to know the answers to. So what I advocate is that you create two lists. You create a tier one list and a tier two list. Tier one list is, in an ideal world, if you could have the top CSO at these 12 awesome customers, they must be customers.

You do not invite prospects to your CAB. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s a customer advisory board. So your tier one list is going to have the 12 ideal name. They’re going to get your first invitation. They’re going to get first right of refusal. Then you’re going to have a tier two list. If Tom on tier one, oh, we really want to have Tom, but Tom’s not available, then you’re going to pull the first name off of your tier two list, and you’re going to invite that person.

So the question might be, well, why don’t we let Tom delegate to somebody else? It’s like, no, no delegation is allowed. The last thing you want is chief strategy officer, chief security officer, sitting next to chief security officer, sitting next to chief security officer, sitting next to new college intern, sitting next to… Now I’m being facetious there, but I think you get the point. The minute one of your executives sees somebody who’s not the same quality and caliber of them, it hurts you and you’ll lose control of this. So what does this mean?

You need to be, I am granting you the privilege to be totally selfish in who you want to invite. And you aim for the gold, because if you aim lower, you can’t go up, but you aim high. And with the right wording and the right objectives, you will be successful.

He’s successful.

You allow one person per company because the conversation gets instantly slanted if some people have two voices in the room as opposed to one. And you’re setting this up as an executive level peer group to talk strategic things. It’s important you aim for the one. Now, let me share with you an advisory board with a company that I worked on recently. We ran the advisory board conversation on technology topics that was really interesting, which started to lead into a conversation that was more tactical and operational.

And I did a timeout, and I said, hey, let me ask you guys, would you, because we want to keep the conversation at the strategy level, but would you be willing to send a delegate to attend a product focus group in a couple of weeks to actually come out and have this more tactical operational feedback? A dozen people in the CAB room raised their hand and said, oh, yeah, I’m going to sign so and so on. So now we’re capturing both strategy conversation at the top of the pyramid, and we’ve greased the skids for product level.

And now it instantly became super easy to get enough people to have that product conversation. And what you were able to do when you had the product conversation, which happened like a month after the CAB, you prefaced the product conversation with what you learned at the CAB. Then you run your product focus groups. And when you get next back to the CAB, you summarize what you learned at the product focus group, share what decisions it’s helped you make. You go back to the CAB, say, here’s what we’ve decided to do. Here’s what we’ve decided not to do.

Your customers think you’re magic. It’s like, oh, my God, you’re totally listening. And this, you use this connected dot format. This is where you learn new revenue streams. And to, I think, Julie’s point, where customers were sharing now at the product focus group said, I didn’t know you were using your product in that way. I want to use it, too. Let’s have an offline. And now you’re starting to sell more licenses to stuff. So hopefully that adds a little bit of color to that question. One person per company. Don’t let them delegate.

Tie it into a product focus group to capture that product feedback. If over time, I think the next question was, well, what if you want to do if you want to change participants? Happens all the time. Usually, how many of you who are running cabs have a CAB charter statement that’s… CEO and executive team? Way to go, Corey. Okay. You need one of those because if you don’t have one, you lose control of your CAB. This is for internal purposes. And it’s also for external purposes and setting expectations.

Part of your CAB charter statement is, well, what’s the tour of duty for your CAB members? Typically, it’s 18 months. 18 months, you’re going to participate in one in- person meeting, maybe a virtual, a couple of surveys. They call you up to have what I call CAB pod discussions, small group discussions. And we expect you to participate. Now, having said that, real life gets in the way, and you never get 100% of the same people going meeting to meeting. You might get 75, 80%. But there’s always some new blood. That’s not a bad thing.

So you have to plan for that. But you’re in control of the agenda. And if you find that the next topic is irrelevant for certain members of your CAB, you exclude them. You delicately, diplomatically, have a whole offline conversation of how you do that to take them off and then invite others on it. You must be selfish because otherwise, if you run it because you think you’re beholden to them, you’re not going to get anything out of it, and your company is going to lose interest in the CAB. I’ve thrown a lot at you. Fire back.

Agree, disagree, follow on questions. Corey?

I think I disagree with you with two things.

Okay.

We’ve had a lot of success with strategically chosen prospects who have something to say or to contribute to a conversation that our customers are really interested in. So I agree with you. I would much rather, I don’t want to short a really good customer to make space for a prospect to close a deal. But I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say only customers.

Okay. So we’re going to agree to disagree because the Customer Advisory Board nomenclature has three requirements. Customer means that they’re a customer and they share some perspective with you. Advisory is they’re going to advise you on how to grow your business. And board means you’re going to treat it as seriously as you do a board of directors. What you’re talking about, Corey, is what I call an industry advisory board, which would allow a cross- section.

If you wanted to have customers, prospects, you want to invite a guest speaker, other ways to position what you do that can accomplish that goal, but not dilute what you’re doing. Because even though you may have had good success, even though you may have had good success.

I’ve seen lots of heartburn where it turns into a very uncomfortable sales meeting and it loses control. And I just want you to avoid that. So if you think you’ve avoided it, then good.

I think I agree with you. You don’t want to be a sales meeting. You’re not inviting a prospect to close them. I guess what I would say is at the number of the companies have been at, especially in cybersecurity that you can have longer deal cycles and like, I’m going to use my current company as example. We do not yet have Nvidia as a customer but they have a lot to contribute to our customers. And we feel good that that’s going to occur. And so that whole customers want to talk to each other and understand how they’re solving business problems.

Sometimes somebody who’s not actually your customer can still provide tremendous value to your customers. I understand what you’re saying about industry advisory board, but with a long sales cycle, you might find you miss a lot of relevant opportunities if you’re really hard and fast there.

Right, well, very good. You’ve made a calculated business decision and I would say great, but I would still exercise caution but if that works for you, awesome.

Yeah, the other thing, I think I agree. I’m just, I’m more interested in how you chose it. We have done, we have had cabs where we weren’t sure if some of our CAB members where it was really going to be valuable for them. And so we did offer the opportunity for them to not be there. But also, especially in those customer panels, sometimes even though something seemed to be not relevant, that CAB member who is really engaged and enthusiastic was able to provide a perspective and kind of an outsider’s eyes that was really valuable.

So I certainly can see, especially if you’re constrained by space or things like that, politely asking some people, hey, we’re going to take a pass on you. But what’s your thought on being more prescriptive on that versus being more collaborative?

Well, I think, again, it comes to depends because obviously you’re nurturing a relationship and it’s a very strategic and special relationship you have with them. I would say it’s rare that people actually actively disinvite. What’s more like if people don’t respond and they’re not on your tier one list, you don’t actively go and push them. Now your companies are nowhere near the point where you need to blow up and totally reinvent your CAB, but every four or five years this happens.

And to avoid customer heartburn, there’s what I call the CAB alumni program, which you put in place, which is a way to graduate CAB members out of the program, thank them for their contribution, allow them some special connection to continued executive round tables, but then to refresh your CAB. And every time I’ve done that with companies, the CEO or the chief product officer, the CRO would be, oh my God, I’m so nervous, Mike, they’re going to hate us, it’s going to be a black eye.

But whenever we’ve done that and use the proper language and finesse and delicacy with it, the response is always, oh, thanks for letting me know, that makes sense, let me know how I can help you. And it’s no big deal, we over think what the drama is going to be and just having that open communication helps. All right, I know we’ve got maybe a few minutes left where other questions we didn’t get to. I think I can take one more question then I’ve got some wrap up comments and then we’ll turn it over to Mary and Megan.

What else do?

It looks like Juli had a question if you could share an example of the proper language for that.

Not here. So if, because we just don’t have time for that. I do offer coaching, shameless plug. I offer coaching services on CAB as a CAB strategist and CAB coach. All of your questions are really good. If these are something that you’d like to dive into a little bit more, I’d invite you to reach out to me separately. Brad, I think you asked about partner advisory boards or somebody asked about, partner advisory boards are related but a totally different animal. And I’d be, I also offer coaching and prep for that. So if that’s something.

Yeah, and I will say like 1011 is gonna work a lot on that idea of the advisory boards for the early ones too. And so we will try to put some more stuff together on that specific non- CAB, I guess, where Mike’s more specialty is, but just a little bit earlier in the process.

So we can talk as well. Very good. I think.

Yeah, so the last sort of theme of questions, you talked about the biggest mistake or the biggest fail of the CAB is not following up with the CAB board. And there were a lot of questions on, do you have any ideas or quick tips for keeping engagement going all year long? What’s the recommended cadence for meeting with the CAB? I know, I think you said like 18 months before, but maybe just a couple of quick like tips and tricks for post- CAB engagement.

Very good. So I’m gonna share one. There’s a whole lot we could talk about. I’m gonna illustrate a couple of points with just a quick slide here. This will whet your appetite, hopefully. Your CAB is not a single meeting. If you’re thinking of your CAB as a single meeting, you’re leaving literally money on the table. CAB is a program and it is an integrated program that must be tied to your annual planning process and to your sales account review at the end of the year. So here is an example of a model. This is a model that was used quite a bit in 2023.

It’s being used now. And this is one example of how companies have used this. So January and April, and this is gonna touch to the four or five touch points you’re gonna have with CAB members throughout the year. So January through April, you’re planning, you’re gonna set your new charter statement. We talked about that. There’s a process for extending the invitations, which we could spend a whole hour on the right language and how to do it. First touch point with them, CAB interviews.

Once the CAB member has agreed, has RSVP that says, yes, I wanna be part of your CAB, you should actually have a one- on- one interview with them. I spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of executives and there’s a lot of reasons why, but consider that as your first touch point. What happened in May, so virtual meetings prior to COVID, there was no virtual meetings, but COVID changed everything. And now virtual meetings properly run are an important staple.

And what I mean by that is it’s a 90 minute, you cannot have an effective virtual meeting longer than 90 minutes. Lots of reasons why, ping me and I’ll tell you why later. But having a virtual meeting that is in preparation for an in- person meeting that says happens in September and October in this example, is a great way to kind of test the groundwaters before you actually get together in person. June and July, now this is a really fun one, this notion of CAB pod.

So you’ve got 12 customers, but they’re heterogeneous, they’re not always, even if they’re in the same industry, there’s some nuances. And when you discover either through the interviews or through the virtual meeting, that there’s a sub theme that several customers are interested in, what I like to do is pull them out and have a CAB pod discussion, have a Zoom call with two or three customers with your product guys. Brad, this would be awesome for you.

And say, hey, I want to test some pre, it’s early stage, let me test this idea, you guys were interested, let’s just talk. So you have a couple of those, and then that helps become fodder for the agenda in September. And then do something nice. If there’s a CAB appreciation event, let’s say, I don’t know, next time you’re going to a big show and all your customers are there, you might sponsor a networking table. There’s no agenda there, but it’s just, hey, let’s get the CAB group together for all of these there and say, thank you.

So this gives you five touch points and you can rinse and repeat how often that you want. Now, of course, you have to manage your time, you have to manage your budget, because it takes effort. And you don’t have to do all of this.

stuff. But I think at minimum, if you’re starting, you should have at least two touch points during the year. That first touch point is probably an interview, and the second touch point is either one or a small series of virtual meetings or an in- person meeting. And I’m not going to suggest you do more than that because you’re just getting your sea legs and figuring out how to make your CAB program work. Don’t add too many variables that makes your life difficult.

So this is an easy way to start, and it helps keep the momentum of your CAB. Now, behind the scenes, every time you have a CAB meeting, you’re going to document what you’ve learned. You’re going to share and socialize what you’ve learned internally because everybody in your company needs to know what you’ve talked about so they can benefit from it. And then you’re going to do a customer- friendly version of that report. It follows the Chatham House Rules of Etiquette. It’s another topic we can go into another day.

But you’re going to circle back to them, and that is a deliverable that proves that you’ve been listening. I have no expectations that the customer will actually read it, but they will know that you sent it, and that’s why you need to do it. So that answers some of the touch points. And Mary, I’m going to turn it over to you because I know we’re out of time.

Thanks, Mike. Well, we actually, we’ve got five minutes. We went ahead and popped up this session poll. We’d love to hear your feedback on the session as well as future topics of interest. Everyone will agree.

I don’t know if anyone would be willing to share, just from within the 1011 group, an example of how they’ve, to this point that Mary made about making people feel valued and heard. And I guess Chrissy’s good point that people want to participate when they know they’re being listened to. I mean, Chrissy, maybe you have an example of something you’ve done in the past to make people feel that way.

I mean, I think a lot of it goes into making sure that there’s a lot of opportunity for customers to comfortably share and really be the voice at the CAB instead of, like Mike mentioned, kind of talking at them.

So we just did our first CAB, I guess, February. It feels like it was longer than two months ago when I look at the calendar, but it was just two months ago.

And we actually did something a little bit unique and actually brought our CAB to our engineering team and had some interactive sessions with the engineering team, some dinners with and without the engineering team. So our kind of larger group got to hear from our customers, why they purchased our product, where they kind of are in their journey, where they’re heading. And then we had the smaller sessions that were a bit more intimate with the executive- only team.

So I think that added a little bit of a layer there, and they actually got to kind of understand and meet and appreciate, I think, a lot of the people behind the product that they’re actively using. So I think a lot of that just cultivating that ability for it to not be like awkward interactions, but rather have some of those kind of more natural, comfortable interactions. And then the follow- up and follow- through, I 100% agree with Mike that they never read the email, but they do know that you sent it.

And then just kind of that continued discussions as you’re going through engagements with quarterly business reviews and things like that, where you have other touch points with the executives that are part of the CAB itself. We can kind of weigh in on where their feedback on the CAB actually then applies to things that are being taken into account and where we’re heading.

So it’s kind of layering into all of those interactions, but making sure that you’re kind of keeping it top of mind and that you’re really listening to them throughout those engagements and touch points along the way.

Yeah, Chrissy, that’s a great point. Let me just add, I just sent a note in the text. I’ve got a website that I’ve dedicated to share a lot more information on CAB best practices. It’s cabstrategy. com. I invite you all to bookmark it and check out the blog. I’ve got blogs, I’ve got videos, I’ve got lots of articles. There’s specific resources for those of you who are looking to form your CAB for the first time.

There’s other resources for those of you who are more experienced and want to look how to improve your game for the latest best practices for 2024. A lot of information that’s on there. So I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget to tell you cabstrategy. com. A lot of great information available for you there that talks about what we talked about today and a whole bunch of questions we didn’t get to.

Great. All right, guys. Thanks so much. I really appreciate everybody’s time today. And yeah, I really think that there’s so much value from experience sharing. So thanks so much to some of the companies who are a little bit further along sharing their experiences with the newer companies. All right. Hope everybody has a great week. We’ll follow up with all the information. Then we’ll try to track down some of these questions too.

Thanks, guys. Hope this was helpful today.

Thank you.