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Welcome to The Outpost, where customer marketers trade what works.
This is where your peers are sharing their best customer marketing and advocacy plays –– the ones that get their CEO's attention.
Join us every other week for new episodes. And to join one of our sessions live and unlock the content that will define your next best play, mosey on over to userevidence.com/outpost
[00:00:00] Jillian Hoefer: Hello everybody and welcome to The OutPost. My name is Jillian Hoefer. I run content here at User Evidence, and I am thrilled to have you here today. If it’s your first time at The OutPost, welcome. This is the place where you can just saddle up, pitch the wagon, hang out for a little while, learn from your peers in customer marketing advocacy about the plays that are turning their CEOs’ heads. And today we have an incredible presentation from Irene Yam. If you do not know Irene Yam, I’m going to tell you a little bit more about her in a second. But first, the topic at hand today is that she found the perfect way to run a virtual CAB. So a little bit about her and how we’re going to kind of dig into this topic today and why she is so credentialed to talk about this.
[00:00:49] Jillian Hoefer: So Irene has 24 years in customer advocacy and marketing at places like Riverbed, EMC, Joint, and RingCentral, and she now runs her own consultancy, which is focused on CAB frameworks. Her mission is to help companies grow with more empathy, clarity, and human connection, not just more noise or data, which we all could use now, right? Irene believes that when done well, CABs can create a space for honest conversations, mutual respect, and alignment. These bespoke experiences deepen relationships between vendors and customers and often surface the insights needed to solve a company’s toughest challenges. She is the author of a book called Build a World Class Customer Advisory Board. She’s a contributing writer for CEO World and Indian Management and a passionate advocate for conversations that lead meaningful change. And something I love about Irene is that she really is… She has 24 years of experience in building and running these CABs.
[00:01:44] Jillian Hoefer: And she said to me, “Hey, do you mind, can I actually bring someone in for this presentation at The OutPost who is a veteran CAB member of one of the boards that I have run in the past?” Because it’d be great. We can’t really talk about CABs without having someone who’s been on the receiving side of it and having them share their experience and what works and what doesn’t work. And I was like, “Heck yes, please. Thank you. That’s exactly what this is for.” So she brought to us today Thomas J. Patti, who is actually, he was going to be joining us live today. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for us, but we’re going to let it pass because it’s wonderful, he got a wonderful new opportunity to start a new gig. Starting date is today. We obviously said, “Don’t give it a second thought.
[00:02:25] Jillian Hoefer: Go enjoy your first day and be fully present without trying to join us from a lobby of a new building that you’re in.” But he was gracious enough to get on with Irene and I late last week and record his portion of the presentation today. So it’s going to feel like he was live. It’s going to feel like he was here anyway. So thank you for coming to The OutPost. I’m bringing Irene on stage now. And Irene, thank you for being here. We’re thrilled to have you at The OutPost.
[00:02:47] Irene Yam: Oh, I’m happy to be here. I even got my most Western shirt on.
[00:02:54] Jillian Hoefer: I was going to say, we both have a little bit of the collar action on today. I absolutely love it. So thanks for addressing the theme and I’m going to kick it over to you to get us started
[00:03:01] Irene Yam: here today. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate it. So big thanks to Jillian, the community, User Evidence for having this OutPost. I think it’s brilliant. I love customer advocacy just for this, for the passion that we all come together and share. So I’m hoping that you’re going to leave with this community just to reinforce this camaraderie. We’re going to talk about my blueprint, my secret sauce to running a virtual CAB. And there are some real outcomes to come out of this. So I’ll give you the KPIs and then you’re going to take home some meaty material that you can actually go on to replicate and create your own virtual customer advisory board. So I think I’m going to drive, right? Okay.
[00:03:56] Jillian Hoefer: Yes, you got it.
[00:03:57] Irene Yam: Okay. Thanks. All right. Well, everyone has different definitions. So let’s just take a step to talk about what is a customer advisory board. So a customer advisory board is a small group that informs decisions. So that could be at the C-suite level, that’s very common. But even in virtual, you could have a VP or a subject matter expert run a virtual customer advisory board. And what I think a virtual customer advisory board, okay, so I will be clear because I want to talk about this type. So this type is when everyone participates online. This isn’t like, “Oh, we’re having an in-person one at this hotel and could we have someone dial in and they open a laptop where there’s a head there?” It’s not that. It’s we’re all on the same technology, whether that be on SQL, Zoom or what have you, we’re all together virtually.
[00:05:00] Irene Yam: Okay? So my big thing is five people, meaning five vendor side and five customers. No more to be in a virtual. And you’ll probably go, “Why?” But we’ll get to that. So the next slide is, okay, have you seen on the very left where you’re probably squinting like, “Who’s there? Who can I talk to?” That’s really hard. This is a webinar and we are, due to pandemic, we are conditioned to be a part of this, right? And we know, so we sit back and we’re kind of like in and out. We pick up the phone, we go get some water. That’s not the kind of CAB we want. If we’re going to do a virtual CAB, we want, and I don’t mean to be intense, but we want connection. We want to build trust. I mean, that’s why we’re building a CAB, right? We don’t want just another webinar, but we have to think like this.
[00:05:57] Irene Yam: So we have to think, how can we, as CAB leads, build a way to really form connection, trust, and safe where people can feel that they can collaborate? So how do you do all that, right? So, oh, sorry, I forgot. Why do we drift? I think we talked about it, but no mission. We have too many slides. We do a lot of show and tell. And then the CAB needs to be a relationship investment, not that the webinar take. And I think people just get a little stuck there. And I bring this up because I’m going to hammer this home. You’re likely going to have to tell your executives to not have as many slides. And we’ll get to that in a moment. But first, I want to tell you, I’m going to date myself, but in my early 30s, I was asked four weeks before an event to run a CAB just for this big shot PM person that was building the new data center offering.
[00:07:02] Irene Yam: And he’s like, “Okay, we’re going to go to Gartner and that’s when we have the Fortune 200 customers and I want you to do this.” And I said, “Wow, on the event side, the events team didn’t have time.” I said, “Okay, I’ll figure out right outside of the Las Vegas MGM, I’ll figure out the best restaurant that has a private room where we can have a CAB.” So we did that. We were able to get actually 12 customers there. The customer showed up, everyone’s tired from Gartner. We got them there and I had all this airplane snacks, like stuff that they would typically buy, like drinks, food, but back in the day when you could actually buy a drink and bring it on the airplane. But anyhow, we had the speaker speak, right? And then you could just tell he was completely flat and I trusted him.
[00:07:49] Irene Yam: I didn’t ask him to do a dry run. So I was like, “Oh, everyone is not in sync. Everyone’s sort of just sitting there like, this is boring.” So I just said, “Oh, you know what? We are just so tired from Gartner. That was such a great event. I think it’d be best if everyone… We cut short, but do you agree, all of you on the 12, can we have a virtual CAB?” And so most back then, the people had CABs in person. So they were like, “Yes, yes, yes, we’ll do it.” I said, “Okay, great.” So I said, “Take all the treats, have a safe flight. I’ll follow up with you. We’ll have one at least 60 minute webinar-ish CABs.” So that’s how I phrased it because we didn’t have virtual CABs. They all left. I sat down with the PM and I said, “Show me your slides.” And they were good slides, but he was really flat.
[00:08:44] Irene Yam: And he goes, “Yeah, I had a bit too much fun last night in Vegas.” I said, “Okay, well, let’s put this aside and tell me what are the top three things you really want out of this CAB and tell me what they are.” So he gave me a slide deck and goes, “Yeah, I want these three things. I want to have not just 60 minutes. I want at least 90 minutes.” And I said, “You realize that we really blew it. Now we’re going to ask for 90 minutes. Respectfully, we can’t do that. You’re going to have to get it down to 60 minutes.” He’s like, “Well, I want these three things. I need to have this discussion.” I got on the plane. I was thinking about the whole time. So I said, “You know what? I’m going to write up the email and I’m going to ask everyone.
[00:09:32] Irene Yam: I’m going to poll every customer to ask what are the top three, rank them topics that resonate to you and your business, your business needs?” And then we’re going to go back to that PM and say, “Okay, PM, this is what we’re going to talk about.” And the third one, if we have time, we’ll add it. If not, we’ll poll everyone if we want to do another group or we do one-on-one to talk about that third topic. And that worked. So we did that and we actually had customers interested early on and they became beta customers. So with that, they became a part of our launch. By doing that, we had to change the mission, right? We made it virtual. We had a tighter agenda because we asked our customers what they thought, what did they want to listen to. And then we had a follow-up.
[00:10:22] Irene Yam: And the outcome was out of the five Fortune 200 customers, they became actual beta. I actually wanted six. I wanted at least 50%. I didn’t get that, but my managers were happy. And then we were able to launch with two customers, two new Fortune 200 customers. So we were overjoyed. One was a little camera shy. So he only did analyst calls, talks, white papers, webinars. And then we had another one who was very eager to get out there. We flew him to New York, we flew him to the Bay Area to do our launch there, and he was great. So with that, I just want to say you can take something that didn’t turn out right and you can turn it into a virtual, and this is what I learned. You can still recover that, but you have to have that clear mission, you have to have that tight agenda and you have to have that follow up.
[00:11:17] Irene Yam: So those three things I started thinking like, “Oh, wait, this could be…” And then I just rinsed and repeated it throughout my years. Okay. So all these years, how did I, like, what’s my secret sauce? And every time I think about running CAB, I think about these things. And this is sort of soft, I guess, skills. And I think actually a lot of the advocacy folks here, the leaders here, you all have this, but I actually now want you to really use it. And that is having respect for your customers when you’re building the agenda, the experience, be thoughtful. Yes, what’s in it for us, but really what’s in it for them? Be empathetic. They don’t have time. They have so many vendors to deal with. If we are more empathetic to them, they will pick up the phone and talk to us.
[00:12:12] Irene Yam: They will respond to us versus ghost us, right? Prepare. If we really prepare and we prepare with our customers who sit on our advisory boards, they will be more hands-on. Mission, have a clear mission. Be honest like, “Hey, we’re struggling here. We’re growing so quickly. We’re not staffing the right way for our CSMs. We’re not touching you. We’re not giving the best executive briefs. We’re really looking briefings. We’re looking for help to give us advice. What would you like?” Or, “We notice that our comms are not being opened. We launch these products and people aren’t using them. Could we talk to you about that?” Being honest with the mission, people, okay, it’s not like, “Hey, we’re just going to come in here and try to sell you stuff or have a focus group.” Just be honest and then make sure you always, always, and I think we do this really well, but maybe hold our executives and the people who are invited to speak on our side, hold them accountable to take action and follow up with customers.
[00:13:17] Irene Yam: And you may need to help them too. Okay. I think I’m going to pause because we’re going to now switch over to Tom.
[00:13:24] Jillian Hoefer: I actually had just one quick question, Irene, kind of based on the last slide, when you talk about mission and you talk about being open and honest with like, “Hey, this comm isn’t getting open. We’re really trying to get feedback on this.” Did you ever get pushback from executives on having that vulnerability with a subset of customers as like, “Hey, this thing isn’t working and we need your help.” Or was that always something that was understood and like, yes, we do need their help and we do want to be honest about it.
[00:13:49] Irene Yam: Thank you. Thank you. I think I was really lucky because the companies that I worked with, even though I was junior, I was like an early employee, so I was able to be able to speak to the room. And that’s a really good point. I think when you’re a little shy and you’re trying to speak to that group, it’s really overwhelming and you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to put my neck out there.” But actually I would take a step back. Have you ever had an elder person that you’re very close to, like your grandma or your aunt or whoever or your uncle that you’re really close to? And when you challenge them and you speak to them and you’re speaking from your heart and why you want to do this CAB and you’re just so passionate, I’m not saying that your executives are grandpas or grandpas, but what I’m saying is when you’re talking to people who are just not in that you typically talk to and you engage with them that way, they will be like, “Wow, that was impressive.
[00:14:53] Irene Yam: Yes, we want her to lead.” So this is your time to never have imposter syndrome. You got to show up and you have to speak your mind. This is the kind of CAB that we’re going to get in higher engagement. This is what we’re going to do. If not, let’s not do it. In fact, I was thinking about writing a post, then don’t do a CAB, frankly, because we’re not ready to do a CAB. If we can’t be there, if we can’t be vulnerable, we can’t share, we can’t engage.
[00:15:20] Jillian Hoefer: Man, an Irene pep talk is A plus. We all came for a playbook and we got an Irene pep talk too. That’s amazing. No, no, no. All right. We’re going to pop it over to our recording with Tom just to give you guys a little preview of what’s coming. He’s going to share why he says yes to CABs, some of the surprising things that he has gotten from his CAB experiences in the past and what we can take from that in order to optimize and make sure that we’re giving a wonderful experience for the people who are saying yes to being on our CAB. So over to Tom, and then we will be back live after his little portion here.
[00:15:48] Thomas J. Patti: Thank you very much. It’s great to join you. So when I first learned about customer advisory boards, the way that it made the most sense to me and from a value perspective was there were absolutely different types of opportunities that you have from a customer perspective when you’re interacting with a vendor. So at one end of the spectrum, you may have quarterly business reviews or weekly or monthly touchpoints with the vendor. On the far opposite end would be if you’re attending any conferences. And where I found that the customer advisory boards then, from my perspective, was right in the middle of those two. And so looking at that, essentially broke this down into four key pillars of why I would always be very eager and say yes to joining a customer advisory board from a customer perspective. You see them there, trust, relationships, network, and perspective.
[00:16:50] Thomas J. Patti: So to boil this down from a trust perspective, the input that we were able to share from a customer working directly with a vendor, we were able to actually understand exactly what was happening behind the curtains, if you will, peel back a little bit to really see what was going into either a product or a product roadmap. And I think there was a mutual trust that was built between the vendor and from the customer side to really feel like we were part of the process there, to feel like we were a trusted partner and not just someone else that maybe was purchasing a product. So that was one of the key areas. The second was really building relationships. And even speaking today, working with Irene, who I met seven or eight years ago in one of my first CABs, just the relationships that I was able to build, as well as relationships with various other C-level personnel, people of all different industry verticals, to be able to work with them, to build relationships, to come together, whether it was once a month or once a quarter, and really be able to build a strong commitment, not only for the product, but also for how the product actually operated.
[00:18:19] Thomas J. Patti: The third part was actually networking. And so as I mentioned, as we continued to build different relationships with people, one person that may have been in an airline perspective when I was in hospitality, was able to reach out to this person and kind of talk through, “Hey, this is how we’re using a particular product. How are you doing that?” And what I found out from a CAB perspective in networking was really that even though everyone had their own competitive advantages that they needed to maintain and how they were using a product, it seemed to be more collaborative as we were coming together in a CAB, whether it was in our meetings virtually or whether we were in person, there was that greater sense of camaraderie and the ability to share, this is how we can get the best out of a particular product. And then the last piece there was really the perspective.
[00:19:22] Thomas J. Patti: I’ve mentioned this several times, not only understanding how other fellow CAB members used a particular product with a vendor, but even going off that script, I mentioned recently with the hospitality company when I was with Marriott, we had a major issue in Maui with a disaster recovery situation. And my ability to reach out to fellow CAB members, even though we weren’t necessarily using the same product to resolve an issue, it was just that familiarity with, this is a particular product, these are some other solutions in the marketplace. And it was that ability to give me different perspectives on how I could approach trying to resolve an issue.
[00:20:11] Thomas J. Patti: Okay. And then on the next slide here, really we’re looking at now what is the return on investment? You understand why, from my perspective, I think CABs are amazing and why I always wanted to be a part of them. Going a step further, what is that real ROI? Certainly the vendor, as Irene would go through, has certain ROIs that they need to achieve or realize from the customer perspective, there are really three main areas. The first being trust, the second being relationships, and then that network that kind of compounds with what I just mentioned. So when I’m looking at, from a customer perspective, I’m taking time out, whether it’s to go out and visit the arrangements from a CAB perspective to spend a weekend somewhere or a week somewhere, learning about products, looking at roadmaps and whatnot, or it’s on a monthly call where we’re understanding what’s happening recently, if we have any issues with products, how can our vendor kind of help us to think through those as well as everyone else in the CAB.
[00:21:25] Thomas J. Patti: But it’s all of that network that over time really begins to compound in expressing more of the value of the product. So the ROI, even though we’re spending time to learn more about a product and we’re not doing our normal jobs at that point in time, just that the overall networking trust and relationships really helped build up a much greater sense of value, I truly believe from a company perspective and what I could do as a customer to bring to the table.
[00:22:04] Thomas J. Patti: And then the final piece, really we talked about you have your QBRs at one level, you have your conferences that you may attend at the other level. And I would say not all CABs obviously are built the same way, but these are four areas that I truly believe in the successful CABs that I participated in. This is the four pillars that really made it successful. One was the cadence. So this wasn’t a one-time event in the successful CABs that I attended. It wasn’t, we’re going to meet once a quarter. There was a known cadence in advance and part of that cadence was actually built from a customer perspective, working with the vendor to say, how often do we think we should meet? Where can we get value in that, both from the vendor perspective as well as the customer side of the house? So cadence is, I would say, incredibly important from that perspective to really get value out of a CAB.
[00:23:09] Thomas J. Patti: The second piece is really the co-created agendas. So what often happened is about three to four weeks prior to our next CAB meeting, we would get an email saying, “Here are some proposed topics. We’d like to review with you our roadmap. These are some upcoming changes to the product that you’re currently using. What would you like to hear about?” We often had volunteers from each of the different CAB members that wanted to present either how they were utilizing a vendor’s product, or if they were running into issues and they couldn’t resolve something, kind of soliciting input to that. So really, I think one of the biggest values is co-creating an agenda so that it’s not, “Okay, now I have to join another meeting. I’m going to be away from my office for an hour.” It was really, “This is what I’m going to learn about in this.
[00:24:07] Thomas J. Patti: And oh, by the way, I think these other three points would help educate us better and help us get more value.” So that was really critical. Direct executive access was something that I didn’t expect when I first joined my first CAB, and it was amazing. I was actually paired up, I believe, with the chief innovation officer for a particular vendor and their product. And so I had the ability to email her, text her, call her if I had any issues. So in a sense, it was almost like a mentorship ability. I mean, it wasn’t taking up a lot of her time. I was very respectful of that, but if I did have any issues or things just from an executive perspective that I was curious, how are you handling with this? How did you achieve what you’re currently doing in your role in the C-suite of this company?
[00:25:04] Thomas J. Patti: So I think just having that direct executive access was really critical and invaluable. And then the final piece was really the follow through. It wasn’t just, we’re coming together, we’re going to get your input or you’re going to take a survey or anything like that. It was more, let’s talk through how are you using our product? Which features do you think are valuable or not valuable? What would you like to see happen in the future? And it was taking that input and then getting updates and saying, “Hey, this was a great idea. We’re going to try to put it into our roadmap for our next release. This is something low hanging fruit we can probably add for you.” Or, “Hey, this sounds really good. We’re not sure we can implement it within the next six months. However, here are some options with the product that you can utilize and we’ll keep you posted on the development of the product to incorporate that.
[00:26:01] Thomas J. Patti:” And I think, again, these four areas were really critical to me from a customer perspective to find real value within the CABs that I attended.
[00:26:13] Irene Yam: Thank you so much for sharing. A little color about your direct executive access. So when I was running this CAB, I already defined who your executive sponsor was. After the CAB, the chief innovation officer pulled me aside and said, “I want Tom.” I’m glad it worked out. It was great.
[00:26:44] Thomas J. Patti: It was amazing.
[00:26:46] Irene Yam: Yeah. She chose you because she was really thinking farther along and she really wanted to validate some of the strategies to transform how people were connecting, whether it be through text, voice or video. So thank you for being a part of that.
[00:27:04] Thomas J. Patti: Absolutely. No, that was amazing. And for the viewers and whatnot, my first CAB experience was with Irene and it absolutely set the bar because Irene really understands, I think from all sides of the picture, how you can get the most out of a CAB. And that’s why I think we’ve aligned so well and I’m super excited to support her and to support this initiative to encourage others to seek out the CABs and make them the best that they can be.
[00:27:42] Irene Yam: Yeah, thanks. And thanks for being here. Really appreciate it.
[00:27:45] Thomas J. Patti: Absolutely.
[00:27:48] Jillian Hoefer: Well, it’s awesome with Tom. I’m so glad he was able to do that for us, Irene, and thank you for inviting him to join us. It was great having his perspective. All right, we are getting back to the presentation. I’ll pull up these slides here, Irene, and then we can jump right back in. Here we go. Over to you.
[00:28:03] Irene Yam: Okay. Okay. I didn’t mean to say my promise to you, but you can’t, we all know this, you can’t shrink a two-day CAB in the 90 minutes and that’s not going to work. But what I hope you can do is you can design a CAB that works for you and works for your company. So the goal of this is to make sure that you can build a CAB that you have clarity, you build trust. That’s really important. You try to build trust over this virtual CAB. You’re seeking their feedback and you’re really helping to validate even both sides. So your executives want a CAB to validate strategies and initiatives, but also on the flip side, your customers want to be there too because it validates what they plan to do. If they understand what you’re doing, what you’re building, your roadmap, they too will get energized and they can validate what they’ll be thinking of.
[00:28:54] Irene Yam: So we are not loading up the wagon until it breaks here in the OutPost. We are packing what matters. So with that, okay, this overwhelming slide. Okay. Now I kind of built this all in one because you also have this as a slide to take home. This is my 90-minute virtual CAB and how do you map your agenda? So it’s kind of all in one. I will try to read all this through. It’s actually kind of small on my… But it’s because I have really bad eyesight from writing the book. But what I wanted to do here is I created a more well-rounded CAB agenda because if you’re starting out, you may want to test the waters with a couple of different people. And there might be some people who want to volunteer to speak. Like you might have a new CMO or you might have a new product person or whoever.
[00:29:48] Irene Yam: So this is sort of like what’s a general CAB. You can get more specific. You can have different product CABs, for example. Somebody just mentioned that, right? So absolutely. So the left to the right, I think about the time and the topic. I think about who is going to speak. I did not build in that customers are going to speak in this CAB, but they should. But let’s just focus on, this is going to be a vendor side speaking. What’s the value for the customer? I’m really big on that. So what is going to keep them basically engaged? The goals.
[00:30:30] Irene Yam: Everyone should know that. It’s kind of like the mission. What is the goal of this topic? Benefits for the company. What are we learning that’s part of the mission? And the other, it could be what Tom said. It’s the networking part, the listening, sharing, exchanging, building trust with everyone. So with that, the bio slides, the agenda, it’s tough to do in 15 minutes, but you should try to. The CAB lead can do it with the executive sponsor. You want to really get everyone sort of comfortable with each other. And this could be like no slides. Everyone’s just going around talking. You might build a bio slide and hand those out ahead of time, like a couple days ahead of time. It’s just so everyone I just talked about is on the same page. We review any housekeeping. Then we get into the company overview. Okay.
[00:31:24] Irene Yam: So executives usually on webinars do two things. They’re either selling or they’re listening to something that terribly happened and they’re trying to fix it. They’re trying to calm the customer down. This is different. So this is where you might have to remind or have this conversation. I had a client where I hardly spoke to the CEO. I asked to speak to the CEO because he wanted to do the company overview. And I said, “Mark, I need you to be vulnerable here. I need you to talk about how you’re the mighty startup and you’re going against the big gorilla or whoever. And you really see your business to be of this niche and you need everyone to help here. And that’s why you’re having the CAB.” He goes, “Yeah, you want me to be vulnerable?” I’m like, “Yes, I need you to be vulnerable and I need you to be honest.
[00:32:18] Irene Yam:” And I think once you set that stage, everyone will start sharing even more and you’re building that trust. And he goes, “I got you, Irene.” So take the time to do that. And if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, ask your manager to do that or whoever has that connection with them. But just make sure that they get that, they know because remember your executives are used to like, “Okay, I’m going online. What do I do?” They use the regular muscles. So this also makes people feel very comfortable in terms of the reason why they’re being a part of the CAB. They’re building the trust. Everyone knows this. And then this shapes much more storytelling across people. So with that, we jump into the next thing, the demo. Okay. A lot of people go, “Oh, we want to do the whole demo.” I would actually show them the little sample.
[00:33:14] Irene Yam: You want people interested. You want to go deeper. You want to ask people to pause and stop and talk about that. “Oh wait, can we go back and do that?” If you did a whole 20 minute and a 90 minute, you’re going to miss a lot of feedback. Sort of like this, we should stop start in this webinar because then we can kind of go back and forth. This is the kind of CAB you want. And you want to basically get that early access that what are people thinking about the new product? You want to also validate some of the strategies, these aha moments. And if you streamline the demo later on, you can take all these great bits of feedback from every customer who’s been on your advisory board. This could help not only your CSMs, but sales enablement, sales, partners, you name it, because you have all these great soundbites.
[00:34:09] Irene Yam: So think small, not large. Don’t think a hundred slides. Think focus on what slides that really count. You may have a new CMO or someone in product management who is going to do a big GTM motion and you want to share like, “Hey, we want to reach this audience. We never get to talk to the data people, but we have great data reporting and could this message help?” And they can give feedback like, “Hey, we never thought of it that way. I could share it with my data guy. We’re really good buddies. I can share it with them.” So you never know when you do messaging and positioning, you can actually maybe get an influencer to help you internally. You can fine tune your launch. Who knows? You might even get a beta customer out of this. And the last is future roadmap. Everyone loves to do this.
[00:35:04] Irene Yam: I always keep it at the end. I love to have someone executive come. If the chief officer is very cerebral, have someone who’s used to talking and get them to speak. But also have the executive there too. And I think that’s really important. You want to do early preview, you want to get people excited. Maybe from this, just like what Tom says, you want people to walk out of there. The ROI is that they don’t see us as a vendor. They see us as a partner. And I think that’s what we achieve in terms of this CAB is we’ve built trust, we have engagement, we have partnership. After that, we can have deeper conversations. We can have another CAB if it works. We can have a series. Okay. Very important. Why dry runs? And you’re like, why? Yeah, seriously, why? It’s so hard to get executives to do this.
[00:35:58] Irene Yam: Well, we were just talking about it. I’m going to go a little quicker. The executives have two brains when they’re selling virtually or they’re dealing with an issue. They have to kind of rethink. This is a rethinking. This isn’t a webinar. How many slides? We were just talking about that. How do you practice handoffs? You’re not used to this, right? This is different. This is a different modality. This is a different muscle. Who are going to ask the questions? You got to practice all that because if you don’t, remember like Las Vegas guy? If you don’t practice, they could have a bad day. Okay, who is the backup? I know we spend a lot of money on physical CABs, but you should almost spend not the money, but the time to get everyone ready.
[00:36:46] Jillian Hoefer: It’s almost like a performance, I feel like.
[00:36:49] Irene Yam: Yes, you’re right. It is a performance.
[00:36:51] Jillian Hoefer: Yeah. And it’s like they’re the audience. You have to engage them. You have to think about their experience. You have to have them walking away feeling like it was worthy of their time and they were in some sense entertained, at least in a productive way, I’m sure.
[00:37:03] Irene Yam: Absolutely. You’re right. You don’t want it to be, and I don’t mean to use this word webinar, webinar, webinar. You don’t want it to be a webinar. Then they have a webinar. Don’t have what you call a CAB. And something about that. The virtual CAB is super awesome because you could invite your CSMs or your sales team and you can let them know. And in the beginning, they can all open up and say, “Hi,” and then say, “Okay, well, we’re going to start with CAB. Your support team is just going to be in the background listening because they really want to listen to what you have to say.” And that’s the upside of having a CAB, but you can’t have them all on camera, remember, because you don’t want to be able to squinting and stuff like that. Okay. So what if your CAB goes well, what do you do next?
[00:37:51] Irene Yam: Well, you can run a three-part virtual CAB. And this is really good when weather’s really bad or right now when the price of gas and war and travel and summertime, everything can be really, really difficult. So you can run your first regular CAB where you’re kind of going through some high level things. Then you can split up the CAB. You can do a CAB that’s really focused on say CSMs or enablement or anything like how come there’s no adoption. You can focus on the business side. And then the second side could be the product review. You’re looking for a special persona or end user using that. You might invite the UX team. Maybe you’re doing a whole revamp on the front end of the GUI or the software and you need feedback. So you could do that. You could do that with these virtual events.
[00:38:45] Irene Yam: And then lastly, the third session, you kind of bring everyone together and you do a top down of what you listen to, what you learned, and the next steps. This sort of for me is also I use after a CAB too. I like to sometimes say, “Oh, there are some people who are really interested in this side of what we want to try to accomplish an account in this group, and we’re going to take that virtually.” By having this continuous relationship, just like how Tom said, this cadence really makes it where executives and customers feel like they’re just a text away. You can text each other and have a conversation. You don’t have to start all the way beginning to build this trust or have context. You already know your customers can go straight in and say, “Hey, we want to show you real quickly some mockups.
[00:39:31] Irene Yam: What do you think?” Okay. We have a couple more, a couple more slides. Okay.
[00:39:39] Irene Yam: I’m really big on follow up and I know it is so hard because as a customer advocate, you are pulled so many ways and you can’t sleep because always someone’s Slacking you or texting you or emailing you or I don’t know, calling you asking, “Please help. I can’t find this.” Like you’re a librarian too. You have to find things still. Even though we have all these systems that we can find things and Google things, but they still need, “I need help.” So please, whatever you do when you run your CAB or run a customer facing event or virtual event, make sure you follow up. And so instead of listening to the noise, try the word signal. This is not in my book. I started to perfect this after my book, but think of the source. Who is giving you the feedback? Is the executive or the customer after the customer advisor?
[00:40:28] Irene Yam: Who’s giving you that feedback? The intent. What’s the value out of it? Why does it matter? Who needs to hear it? Make sure what’s the intent. Gauge, how are you going to gauge? And then next, how do you follow up? Who do you follow up? Do you invite your CSMs to be a part of that? If it’s virtual, you may need support. Or if you don’t want to do all the follow up, maybe you partner with support. Alignment, making sure, okay, not only does the CSMs know, but the account team knows. Maybe they have a PS engagement. Make sure that professional services knows too. And leadership, that’s you. Now you get to say, “Hey, we did the CAB. This is what we learned.” And make sure you thank everyone and also share what you learned. Be a part of all hands or do an on-demand video.
[00:41:19] Irene Yam: If you’re shy, you can practice, but get out the voice of the customer from the CAB. I’m just going to keep going through. Okay. Virtual CABs, the KPIs, because why have it? What’s your time? What’s the money? What’s the impact? Everything. So number one, growing advocacy. Reaching the customers we hardly can get ahold of. Maybe they’ll attend virtually. The growth accelerator. By executives talking to other customers, maybe we can move things along. Maybe they can be a part of our launch. Maybe like Tom, he knew that he could trust us. So then he went to bat to his legal to get us to be able to sign off that he can speak at events. This was big because Marriott wasn’t going to do that for us, but he’s like, “Look, I’ve been a repeatable CAB member. I really believe in this company. We’re invested. We’d like to do X with them.” Again, adoption.
[00:42:15] Irene Yam: Once you’re having that small room, you’re talking with people, people are volunteering, they might be your early adopters. That helps with everything, product, launch, you name it, content, AR, PR, right? And influence. You can help influence the market. You can have these customers because you’ve built this trust. They could talk to underwriters if you’re going to go IPO or you’re seeking another round of funding. They can be the person that talks to the VC. AR and PR are very similar, right? Pitching, Gartner reviews, you name it. I think by talking to the CAB members, they really get it now. They’re willing to help you. So I think it’s really hard sometimes as an advocate person to say, “Oh, out of the blue customer, will you do this?” Or, “We have this new logo. How are you going to attack this?” The CAB kind of helps that because it’s like, “Oh, okay.
[00:43:06] Irene Yam: We’re part of the CAB. We want to be helpful.” And you can also ask these customers to be participatory. I can’t think of the word, but this is like, we’re really hoping that you’ll take some of these activities. So you can also ask them upfront if they’re willing to do that. Soft KPIs. I think this is number one. This is going to kind of shape your career, your community, your culture, where you have customers where you can constantly talk to you. Even after they leave, they might even come back and bring back your product. Or like, I haven’t talked to Tom for eight years. I just picked up, we started talking again. This is what matters in the world, this human connection. Okay. Two free resources. You’re going to get something out of my book. This is the virtual CAB calendar. And then last is the agenda.
[00:43:58] Irene Yam: So this sort of helps you. You can remove it and add your own, but it gives you sort of a sense of how to run your own CAB.
[00:44:08] Jillian Hoefer: I love it. We are just about up on time here. So I’m going to pop back over here and just remind you all that you’re going to be getting these resources, the virtual CAB, how to map your agenda, and then the CAB communication calendar from Irene. Irene, thank you so much. And then as a quick little brief to everyone, we’ve got a session coming up. It’s not technically an OutPost session. I will say because there is a User Evidence product demo portion of it. We’re trying very hard to make sure OutPost is not UE product demo, but the bulk of this is so good for The OutPost. I think everyone is going to benefit because most of this is going to be truly just these four CMA people sharing how they’re using AI to scale customer approved and like their actual use cases. I was on the pre-call for it.
[00:44:51] Jillian Hoefer: It is going to be incredibly use case driven and incredibly helpful. So thank you all so much for being here. And Irene, thank you and thank Tom so much for being here. We really appreciate your insights so much. It’s been a really, really great session.
[00:45:04] Irene Yam: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:45:06] Jillian Hoefer: All right. Bye everybody. Thanks to see next time.