When it comes to customer advisory board (CAB) planning, companies often stumble on a realistic timeline for planning their initial (or next) meeting. This usually means that they have not left enough time to adequately launch their program and/or plan for their meeting. While this is sometimes due to their eagerness to get started (which is good), more often it’s due to not fully understanding the steps and time needed to build a solid foundation of such an initiative. Many companies also make the mistake of having a CAB meeting date from the start—usually tied to some other event—and create unnecessary pressure on their CAB management team to “work backwards” to get through the steps, creating a rushed program that their customers will recognize.
As such, here is a timeline for launching (or improving) your CAB program and planning up to your next meeting. Of course, some of these steps can be done “in parallel” without having to wait for completion of the previous one, and getting ahead will always help create a better meeting experience for everyone involved:
8 months: start your CAB program: Target your first (or next) CAB meeting 6 months after you start your program. This will allow you to line up the resources and budget necessary to fund such a program, and gather consensus from your management team on what you hope to learn and accomplish with your CAB and establish a strong theme.
7 months: complete your CAB charter: Your program charter should include everything your CAB hopes to accomplish: it’s mission and goals, topics to be addressed and member participation expectations. Having all this fleshed out in writing creates a strong program foundation and helps with member recruiting.
6 months: complete all member recruiting: Only after specifying your ideal members, accepting and prioritizing nominations, and creating the outreach materials will you actually want to reach out to potential members. If done right, most of your customers will accept membership and eagerly participate in shaping your meeting agenda.
4 months: complete member interviews, create agenda: You’ll want to create some potential meeting topics and run these by your CAB members—ideally through interviews–to help prioritize them, and potentially uncover other issues that are of importance to them. Once you have vetted all topics with your members, you can create an agenda that addresses their top concerns early in the meeting.
6 weeks: finalize your meeting agenda: By now, all session owners—typically from your own company—should be finalized, and they know how much time they’re allotted, why they are doing their session, and where they fit in the agenda. Each session owner should be provided the meeting PowerPoint template which prompts for questions to be answered.
2 weeks: receive all session owner content: All session content should be received, reviewed, and discussed how to best facilitate each session. Does a breakout exercise makes sense to capture input and meet session objectives? Area any additional visuals needed? Any recommended pre-meeting reading materials to help understand a topic?
1 week: run through all sessions: By now, all meeting content should be reviewed and understood by all host-company participants. Is everyone in agreement with and understands the content? Everyone should also be clear on roles and responsibilities, and logistics and materials involved in session breakouts.
1 day: on-site prep meeting: Hosting an on-site prep meeting provides a final opportunity for all host-company meeting participants to review final materials and meeting logistics, review CAB member account status, and be clear on their roles in the meeting and what to expect afterwards.
0 day: your meeting!: All your preparations come down to this day, and your executives should be excited and confident that they have everything they need to host a successful meeting. Your customers will also be excited at meeting each other and recognize their input captured beforehand is included in the meeting agenda. Planned meals, breaks and social activities will enable additional networking and follow-up collaborations.
1 month after meeting: distribute meeting report, prioritize all actions: Once your successful meeting ends, the real work begins – organizing and prioritizing the input received and publishing a detailed meeting report that will be distributed to all the members, and distributed internally within your company to everyone who was not able to attend the meeting. Additionally, you’ll want to review and prioritize all potential actions that can be taken as a result of your meeting – and assign dues dates and those in charge of completing each action.
After completing each of these steps, the timeline to your next meeting begins again. While this is typically in another 6 months for your next in-person meeting, there may be some necessary follow-ups, workstreams or other updates that bear holding an interim conference call in a couple months to gather your CAB members once again.