Lauren, Hi. Thanks so much for putting this together.
Some people can meet this morning yet. So I think we just have a maybe one less. But it's good. It's going to be a small group. It'll be easier this way to talk
30 minutes. But hopefully
that's, yeah, that's enough for us. I think, yeah. How are you
I am doing? Well, yeah,
you're more awake than I am. I'm, I decided to sleep in a little bit. I did a long bike ride yesterday. I'm, I'm in California,
okay, well, I'm also on the east coast. So I'm, like, almost ready for lunchtime.
Almost lunchtime.
My kids came home from overnight camp yesterday. Oh, you're tired readjusting to the full house. But yes, they all everybody slept well last night, good. They were both very excited for showers with hot water
and Oh, really, okay, okay, I didn't know they would. I guess infrastructure still is, you know, that's good, though. Yeah, that's good. It makes them realize how blessed they are to come home and they have all your comforts. And, yeah, my friend took their kids to India. They were like, you know, Indian kids were like, what? Like, they heard about it, but then when they saw it, you know, like, life could have been here, you know, but Well,
I don't know if camp is quite that. Eye opening, no, no water only lasts.
Bug, you get some warm water. But after that, it's, it's chilly, but
this perfect. Then kids still want to take a shower.
Yeah, then you have, you move fast, right? I think everybody's got to get through.
Well, we'll wait a couple more minutes, if now we'll just start with answering your questions, and we can talk, because this is your time to want to be respectful of everyone else. I mean your time, not just if they don't, they don't check Yeah, I am one week before a cab, and my dilemma is the there's two executives that wanted to own the nomination, and the other one, just like, I don't know, fizzled out. Like, you know, you ask and say yes, and then it's like nothing and you know, like, can't that's the way, like, you know, life is. So I started pulling stuff.
Stuff out for us on our behalf. So that's good.
Well, that's good. And I remind me, are you internal or you're
I'm external, I'm solo. Decided to go solo practice. Yeah, yeah, I'm after, I don't know. Now it's 26 years of running customer advisory boards, running marketing, different roles of marketing, mostly, I would say more than half of my, my years have been in customer marketing, in running advocacy. Yeah, and we, I even went to, like the very old show that this, this person named Bill Lee. He used to run this old customer they would call it back then, customer reference,
yeah, yeah,
long time ago. It feels like a long time ago. Okay. Well, let's get started. Let's So Lauren, like, what? Yeah. It,
yeah, so, so a little bit of background, so I so I am in house is like one little slice of what I do. And I actually do have a consultant that I work with as well, and that largely so I started the cab program last year. We had one board, I think we met three times, twice, virtually and once in person, okay,
virtually, sorry, first, and then in person.
Virtually, first
got it,
and then in person, mostly just a function of timing.
Mostly United States. US customers
Correct. Mostly, yeah, and that's one of the things that's been a little bit of a challenge. And I'm interested in how other people have approached that. This year, we are running two boards.
That's good. Those are, those are a lot of fun. People really, actually are much more like willing to even give and go deeper. Good strategy,
and we're doing quarterly meetings, so it will by the end of the year, to virtual, to in person, is the what we're working towards. And we've had mostly us, but we have had a couple of European folks,
yeah, and
a little bit of a challenge. And so I'm curious, like,
challenge because of timing, or challenge because of feed their feedback, or,
um, I would say, in a few ways. So one is, you know, getting them to the in person events. We've not yet succeeded at that, even when we've said, yeah, we'll just pay for everything they, you know, they can't
leave.
They've joined some of the virtual events, but not and, you know, I try to pick timing wise, I go for basically, like this time where it's, like, kind of early, but reasonable for West Coast and not too late for Europe.
Yeah, it's like four o'clock for them, yeah, yeah.
So that's that's been okay, but I think because they haven't come to anything in person, they're not part of the group in the same, you know, the you build those connections in person in a really different way.
And who drives? Like, who's your executive sponsor? May I ask that drives the cabs that has sort of like, does your CEO? Or is it? Who would it be that, you know, kind of leads, it runs, it owns it.
Good question. Um, we are in the midst of a CEO transition, but I would say it was so our chief customer author is actually
she's been a big part of driving it. So I think I actually have now, like a wonderful, nice executive sponsor in her at the top, perfect. Yeah, I've never worked with a CEO that came up through the customer side before, and I'm, I'm pretty excited about it. I think, oh,
may I suggest, uh, I think having an an executive sponsor on top. So when I say on top, make that also like the writing program or the perk of the cab that you can have, and she'll probably be very busy assuming new duties. Yeah, but maybe so usually I like to have, like, the the practice that I the best practices that I like to do is I have an executive sponsor, and then I have a few executive sponsors, just depends on strategy and whatnot. But you could have maybe,
let's say you
have in the virtual room. So those could be parsed out to be your customer executives, pre and post, so they can say, Hi, I'm your sponsor, and then at the end, I'm your sponsor. So we can have communications and if you have a CSM team, they can do all the coordination. That's high level. Another is because you're tackling this issue with a mia customers, you could ask her, before this starts again, you could give her these challenges, right? They're not going to pay. They're not so you could ask, okay, we only have two, like, right? Maybe you only have two or three EMEA customers on your board. Ask if she could offer, you know, every, every quarter, to check in on them. Like, she would be the executive sponsor, and it'll be just a half an hour, just to, I think that'd be good for her also, because she'll have that data point in immediately.
And I think that, I think that will help her. I just, I'm just thinking it might be hard for her, because she's got a lot on her plate, but I think that it would, it wouldn't be even like, wow. Like, you know, the CCO is now the CEO, and she wants to be my executive sponsor. Okay, I will, I will go to go to bat, basically these whoever, they don't see the value for some reason, and they they like, Okay, now, now my sponsor is the CEO. Whoa, okay, I'm good. I'm gonna go ask for that budget to fly out. Yeah. I think that could help. Yeah. So I don't know if that helped you. We could also brainstorm some other ideas. Like, how do you think if you were to run that scenario, what do you think? Do you think that would work? Well,
it might help. I think actually, one of the challenges that we've run into, I don't know if it's a challenge, but one of the
are actually great at talking to customers. And so for some of our customers, I'm like, Hey, come to the cab, and you'll get all this time with the CEO, with the chief product officer. What you know, with all these people? And they're like, Well, I kind of get that anyway. And like, that's, I think, awesome that our execs are so good at that. And many you know, the accounts that are being invited to the cab generally will have an executive sponsor attached to the account. At the account management level. We haven't done a specific sponsor for the cab, and maybe it's just maybe we even keep that same sponsor, and we are more explicit about incorporating cab into their role.
Another could be. It could be the, the
somehow they're not seeing the value of the cab. So there maybe there's not as much discussion in the virtual cab, and the the way the agenda is organized, there's not people talking as much because of the other value of why people want to be in a cab is sort of like, after, like, you know, say you and I are in the same practice, right? And so I can we sit on a we met during a cab, and later on, months later, we're looking at, I don't know, another SAS thing, and like, oh, yeah, I remember Lauren was thinking about that too, or she has the same pain point, and we talked about that. I'm going to follow up and we're going to compare notes. And that's typically another value of saying, Hey, I met this cadre of people on this board, and I can I've built trust. They've heard our war pains and our stories.
So I don't if you could weave that into the discussions more or have people speak up more and less. Slides might be and I'm sorry, I don't, I don't know, right? We're just talking here, so maybe you've done all these things, and I apologize. I'm just trying to help and talk to you about things that you know that could be helpful to help your program.
Yeah, no, I think we it's something that we've been working on, and I think we have more to do. The other thing we've been trying to play around with, but it's one of our industries is very geographically concentrated, and so we've been talking about doing in between cap meetings, just like a really informal breakfast, right? No slides, no like, we'll send an executive or two with some like thought starter questions, but no.
Help you have more conversation. That's a really it's gonna, it's gonna be a lot harder in our other region, the other board, because everybody is really spread out
so and you can pull them to another idea is to pull them say, Do you want to have breakfast? Like, I don't know sometimes, like, in places like, I'll give you one that's like a real problem is LA, like, if you ever try to do like, an event in LA, it's impossible, because everyone lives in certain neighborhoods and kind of like Boston, everyone lives in, you know, like, there's just,
I live in Boston, yeah, right. Like,
you're like, going over all that, right? So you might have to do like, mini pockets of them and say, and pull them like, hey, we really want to get together. And just like, talk about the top three things that keep you up at night.
You don't want to travel. Like, what would be best? And so you could offer like, if you really want them to come, and if you have the budget, you could do one where maybe you tried to pull one central place, or after in the evening, they get to do top golf or something fun. And you do it like Uber gift card, right? So then you just, they don't have to drive. They don't have to worry. It's expensive, right? Or a limo, it's expensive, right? But it, and I know it adds on, but it, it will add to, I think your investment of making this work, I think this is the hardest thing, and you're not alone. I mean, this is why, like, agendas are scrutinized. This is why there's multiple dry runs. There's why, yeah, I mean, so it's not and you have your full time you will have your full time job that's very, very, extremely demanding, right? You
uh, important, it's, you know, yeah, and to get the metrics out of that, like the soft and the hard, right? And so, yeah, I don't I, I, we're recording this. And I think that I don't know, no one's joined. So I think out of respect, what you'll decide if we should share it or not. I don't know how you feel about it, but anyways, you can tell me, because I think we were, I was going to offer to share it, but if you're feeling because it was just us talking,
I mean, I think I'm sure if that's helpful for people. And I would love maybe this is, like, the first of you know, maybe we can,
yeah, well, I actually wanted to offer early one. Thank you for Yes, thank you for giving. But people are like, No. People are busy in the summer. I was like, oh, that's when I plan all my calves, like, I have, like, two camps,
major ones that, and I do all the, you know, early planning. So when we get to the crunch time, it's like, oh, it's a lot easier, right? So,
yeah,
okay, ask away. It's your time. Now, let's see
what else.
Well, did that help? All that stuff we just
addressed. It does? Yeah, I think it's, it's all good stuff to think about. And I think you're right. And one of my biggest challenges, even though I do have some consulting help, is the keeping it top of my list when I have other things going on, or trying to balance right, it can't obviously be top all the time, but trying to balance those things out.
And how about there's another, actually, I forgot to mention one more before you ask this question is, yeah, sometimes it's really hard in your career to ask tough questions of your customers and go back to them. And I finally, I think I've learned this when I was in my 40 so after at least 12 plus years of running cabs and, you know, trying to be nice and professional, I would sometimes now I just pick up the phone and say, Why aren't you participating? You know, of course, you wouldn't say, Hey, John, I noticed that you're you're thinking about something else. May I ask you, you know, if you could help out and give out more, maybe share more. I know you have that big project. Do you think you could share that project into the next cab? So just getting people to like talk more and engage more meaning that's hard to with virtual is that you you got to get people to like talk. And I think that's also one that's a difficult thing, right? But
what I'm saying is that having those tough conversations, asking, why, like, why don't you want to come? Is it, you know, they gave you a response, but maybe ask a little so is it bad timing? Is it, you know, or Yeah? I mean, because you need to know, and it may put you in a comfortable spot, but I see it as growth. I learned a lot. I learned from my mistakes. And, you know, and yeah, so, yeah,
it's a combination of probably doing, seeing if there are better ways we can engage those people, and then also, I think, because we're newer to having a cab as an organization,
there's more
education that I need to do. Like one member in particular, I've been struggling, and I've been trying to go back to the to the account owner, and you know, how can we strategize? And she's like,
I'm like, well, then he probably should not have been invited. That's right, first place. And so I think, you know, I have more to do internally there that we don't use.
Yes,
cab isn't a way to try to get somebody involved who is not currently
they're tighter. There should be tighter, I don't mean to be so heavy handed. There should be tighter parameters for nomination. And even if they nominate, you have a call with them. It's a great also avenue for you to see if you can either cultivate them into a private reference or another reference than other than being an advocate or being an advisor. So I think, yeah, because sometimes people want to just add their person. I mean, here's here's this other client that I've been working with a they're like,
Oh, he's great. He's great. It's like
crickets, you know? And so now I'm like, I'm not inviting anything. Why not?
After he knows his responsibilities, and he did. Now, I'm not trying to be all like but I was very clear, we need you to do x beta. We need you X design partner, you know, and that's the value of the cab is long term, yeah, measuring everything. So, yeah. But you know, I I'm a little not awake, and I'm being a little bit more like a gung ho with you. But yeah, when I do it, I do speak to them and go, we need your help, right? This is why, and XYZ, can you help us? It doesn't have to be you. You could be a CISO, a VP, a CRO, but you hand it to your Lieutenant. Okay, you had more questions. Sorry, we derived, that's it. The other
thing I've been thinking about that we haven't done yet, but is, is is on the radar, maybe for next year, is expanding into public sector.
How,
how we need to adapt the program to work for them, right? So I think even you know, joining something is can be really problematic, obviously
restrictive. Yeah,
yeah, you know, I think we will be meeting only virtually, because there are no travel budgets and no ability to accept a
mug. Yeah, a mug and a pen and a notebook. Yeah, under $5 or something, I
believe we get $25
yeah, I know. I'm just
saying we have, actually, we have a difference who is not public sector, whose limit is $5 and every time their account team goes to visit, they're like, What can we bring? And I'm like, really, like, a pen, right? Like, not even, yeah, not even a real coffee. Like,
no, maybe one Dunkin donut, you know? Yeah? Well, maybe you could spin it as some training or tutorial and getting in, giving feedback specifically to the public sector. So I was in the startup, in cut work spot, back back in the day, and we had actually the city of Milpitas, and they were our first customer. And he was really willing to host, because he was, I would say, in the middle kind of middle Junior. He was a director of it there, and he understood the value of community. So I think you just have to find someone like that and that, because they're already doing their work of networking and being with, you know, talking to other people. They do, they share, they call up and go, did you buy that? They do somehow. They they they all somewhat know each other. They do always have, like, three or four people they know. And so you could just ask them, like, oh, in your area, do you know? So you might have we wanted to walk through, like, the onboarding for the new XYZ. Can we do that? So, like, maybe start that way and getting their feedback, and then they'll start talking, and that will be, I like, part of the cab, but it's more educational, like giving us feedback on Docs then, or a UX, like, hey, we understand. You know, you have different users. Like, maybe it's a surveyor or Parks and Rec administrator, or, you know, different administrators. What? What do you think this you you know, the the UX should be like the user interface? Should we change it? Should we make it new? I'm just thinking software. This is a software example, right? So, of
course, software, so that's okay. So,
right? But I want to say that it's it's more if you go the educational route, that's another way to say this is an educational customer advisory board or a council where we're seeking to better our content for public service, yeah, and this is why this is our mission, right, to help.
And would you position it as this is a, this is an ongoing thing, right? One of the things I've been
I would check in, I would say, I would say, hey, let's do a couple, you know, and maybe only make it one hour. Don't make them longer. And then after that, say, you know, did you like this? Would this? Would you like this to be ongoing? Ask them, and then you'll know, and it's good, because if they say no, that's okay, you know. And then you go find out why, and they say, Yes. Say, Oh, how what?
That would be great. And then they get a say, and they're building it apart. They're co building with you this program, and there's more longevity meaning. And then you could, you could, you could find that person that's sort of the most outspoken, say, Hey, will you open up and do the keynote and kind of like run the agenda? So it's they can somewhat facilitate too. They might be the hungry person that wants to be the head of it one day in their city, and it gives them the opportunity to showcase that.
Yeah. So it sounds like you wouldn't position it as like when we invite people for the first time. You're not positioning it as a series or a board or anything. You're just positioning it as a come to this one thing, and then
or two you could say to you, say we're trying this out. We've never done it before. You would be our inaugural customers. We would really like to try this out.
One you know, hour here we'll gather the topics that are top of mind, and then two, we set up another meeting. Were there any findings for the other two topics? We want to circle back, and then we want to leave about five, five or seven minutes to get your feedback. Was it worth your time? Was it valuable? It certainly was for us, but we want to learn from you, yeah, and I think that asking those questions, right? And then you can also follow up afterwards. It's a great way, right, to talk to them and find out if it was worthwhile. And then you can ask them like, oh, are there other events and things like that, but they that we should keep an eye out, that maybe we could have more of these smaller events. Or should we make them bigger? Would you like them bigger? Would you like them nationwide? Would you know it just like, so you could, like, pick like, maybe there you have half that are metropolitan and half that are rural. I'm just making stuff up. Oh,
take the metro, like the tier one cities and tier two cities, the tier three cities, and have these or no, just bundle them all in the central area of Atlanta, for example. Example, yeah, be more valuable. Give you feedback. I mean, it might not be exact like but I think it's a you're you're building trust with them, you're talking to them, you're learning from them. And that's one data point. Then you go ask a few more, and then you know, hopefully you can ask the rest of the cab or the council, or whatever you want, to name them, right? You call it a round table, and then at the end you you have some data.
Yeah, we have three minutes. I want to respect your time. Yeah,
yeah. No, this is helpful. I've a lot to think about.
It is it's, it's a lot. I don't worry. There's the transcript, so you could just have it
on the side, reference it. I'm sure.
Setting this up,
you're welcome. I do have a question, how long are the virtual customer advisory boards
we've been doing 90 minutes?
Oh, that's good. That's really
good. Yeah, that seems like, you know, an hour is not quite enough. But I think if we go, we, last year, we did some that were, I think, two hours, and then we were giving a break in the middle. And it's just, I think 90 minutes seems to be the limit of how long people can focus,
yeah,
yeah, on a virtual conversation and
good I think I love hearing that, because I think some people try to have three hour cabs just like you, and they've, they've learned the hard way, and then also it, I think it Really devalues the program and the brand, because we're, like, holding them for a long time, and they kind of like, go off. I mean,
log in, log off and listen. But the cab, we really, you know, we have all the boxes. Well, I do. I ask everyone to turn on their camera, and I make sure that they do, like I asked them, like, this is part of cab is us having all the cameras and we're talking, you know, I get it if you need to take a bio break. But,
yeah, yeah,
good, yeah, no, it seems like that's been a good, I would say the 90 minute. We've had one virtual so far this year, and we have one coming up, but the 90 minute seems to have been sort of the sweet spot, and it seems like it's working well. And then obviously, when we do the in person, we can do, you know, full day, like much bigger, bigger session. But that the checkpoints having that virtual time in between kind of keeps everybody feeling invested without us asking for more full days of your time? Yes, I
when's back to school.
I've got one that goes back next week and one the week after so
well. Thank you, Lauren.
It's great to meet
you Yes, and thanks for your generosity in sharing the recorded and transcript in the CMA weekly. Take care.
