Many technology companies have developed a great resource over the years that I believe can help with your planning process. I am talking about CABs (customer advisory boards). The CAB can be an important part of any marketing planning process and should be considered a valuable resource. A properly run CAB can provide valuable strategic insights about your company, your competitors and even your marketing initiatives. They are a reliable source of information and should be approached for feedback against your marketing planning activities.
Gathering the input from the CABs can be difficult as these folks have other responsibilities, so you may want to limit their involvement in the planning process to wards the assessment stage of your planning process.
Use your CAB to refine your marketing insights
Having a CAB input session upfront can assist your data gathering against various business trends impacting the industry, decision making insights, solution differentiation, messaging, content development, competitive product offerings, even preferred media consumption habits.
Set an agenda outlining specific topics that you wish to discuss during your input session and provide to the CAB participants prior to the set meeting date.
Limit the number of topics you wish to discuss. Using CAB can reap a lot of knowledge around many marketing and operation issues, but if you are going to use them for strategic insights, stay on course with this topic.
Best practices would suggest that you gather your discovery and process your insights prior to sharing with the CAB participants. By doing so, you can test your hypothesis and get focused feedback on your insights and limit off topic discussions. The axiom of ‘garbage in garbage out’ applies here.
In this first stage, try to keep the discussions on a strategic level, stay away from tactical discussions unless they relate to media consumption habits. Mentioned twice because it is important.
Consider using a third party facilitator. Using a facilitator can help create an unbiased atmosphere and a safe environment for customers to voice their views and experiences.
With a focused approach, you can garner actionable feedback to to adjust your current assessment of the marketplace. This information from the voices and minds of your customer base can guide your strategic recommendations, your tactical recommendations and the necessary content to drive your marketing activities.
A good advisory board can play a number of important roles during your marketing planning:
- Objective brainstorming. Typically advisors are not mired in deep knowledge of your market and its history. They can bring a fresh perspective and insight even though many of their ideas may be naïve, already in use, previously discarded, or impractical. But, there may be a few gems of ideas that emerge simply because they are not involved in day-to-day operations.
- Devil’s advocates. Many outsiders are by definition naysayers. They may poke holes in all of the things you have gotten excited about. Defending your position and making sure that their negatives are not real issues can be of great value.
- Course correctors. Advisors can raise issues that you missed, didn’t think were important, or skimmed over. They can question both your strategies and tactics with very critical eyes, picking up things you may have missed.
- Analysts. When you are involved in a variety of day-to-day tasks, you may think that you are monitoring the most important issues and working through them, but an advisory board can really make you think through the issues in ways that may not have occurred to you.
- Brutal honesty. A properly selected advisory board will have no hidden agendas and will tell you things that subordinates and very likely even superiors will not tell you. They will be polite, but will not sugar coat the basic facts. You may need a tough skin to listen to them, but if you are open and really listen they can give you great insight.
