THE EXPERT GUIDE TO
Powerful Customer Advisory Boards
Learn the strongest boards’ five characteristics—and the methods behind them.
Download this guide for two bonus assessment tools…
Is Our Company Ready to Launch an Advisory Board?
Is Our Advisory Board as Powerful as it Can Be?
Launching a customer advisory board can be daunting. Many companies announce a board, recruit key customers, and hold a few meetings, only to struggle to capitalize on the effort or sustain it.
A powerful board, on the other hand, achieves its well-defined goals, fosters meaningful collaboration in and outside meetings, and drives long-term value for both the company and its customers.
This Guide: Powerful vs. Under-Performing Boards
In this guide, we help you distinguish the difference between a powerful board and one that either falls short of expectations or breaks down over time.
You’ll learn the signs of and methods behind the strongest boards’ five key characteristics.
Strategic Focus & Alignment
Executive Sponsorship & Participation
Robust Membership
Momentum & Action
Adaptability
Whether you're an advisory board program manager, marketing executive, or part of a cross-functional team tasked with board operations, this guide can help you:
Set up a new board for success
Diagnose and improve an under-performing board
Make a successful board even better
Let's get started building and sustaining a customer advisory board that delivers results.
Understanding Advisory Board Basics
A customer advisory board is a strategy-level listening tool and sounding board that brings together key clients and stakeholders multiple times a year to advise on strategy, product or service direction, and innovation. It serves as an ongoing, collaborative dialogue between your leadership team and your most important senior clients, fostering learning and an exchange of ideas and advice.
Companies sometimes apply the term "customer advisory board" loosely to describe various forums for customer input and interaction. For powerful boards, however, leaders don’t treat their board as any other lead generation tool, event, focus group, or user research campaign.
The most successful program leaders protect their board as an active community to refine strategy and accelerate strategic change in the business.
Understanding and distinguishing the advisory board from other marketing, engagement, and research programs lays the groundwork for real impact.
What is a Customer Advisory Board?
For sponsoring companies, a well-executed customer advisory board delivers significant value, the benefits falling into three main categories.
Key Benefits & Value
Stronger Account Relationships
The structure, attention, and personalization of a strong advisory board provides a unique forum to focus on your most important accounts, offering ways to:
Deepen specific executive-level relationships
Understand evolving needs and priorities
Demonstrate your commitment to customer success
Over time, this leads to increased revenue and wallet share, higher retention rates, and more positive customer advocacy within board member accounts. The best boards fuel innovations and improvements to benefit the broader customer experience, achieving second-order outcomes across the customer base.
Better-Informed Strategies
Insights, feedback, and advice gathered through advisory board discussions help companies:
Validate, refine, or reshape strategies
Align product roadmaps, go-to-market plans, and the long-term business direction with market realities
Incorporate the voice of the customer into strategic decision-making
Identify and correct gaps in brand perception and brand strategy, including the company's reputation for industry influence and thought leadership
This results in faster time-to-market, improved market fit, higher adoption and win rates, and larger deal sizes.
New Business Opportunities
Advisory board conversations often uncover new opportunities for growth and innovation, such as:
Unmet customer needs
Emerging market trends
Potential partnerships
By acting on these unique insights proactively, companies can identify new revenue sources, enter new markets, or develop differentiated offerings that competitors may not easily replicate. The outcome? Revenue growth from new market segments or product lines, faster overall growth rates, and improved competitive win rates or market share gains.
Before You Begin: Assess Your Readiness & Capacity
While a customer advisory board offers a lot of promise, not every company is prepared to take on or make the most of the effort.
Launching a customer advisory board alone is a significant undertaking. Maximizing its value requires an ongoing commitment to open dialogue, active listening, and continuous improvement.
Honestly assessing your company before diving in will help ensure your board delivers the maximum value for all involved. Given the reputational and resource risks of a poorly executed board, it's critical to candidly assess your firm’s readiness and capacity. At a minimum, your leaders should thoughtfully consider five questions:
Do we have the client relationships?
Is senior leadership fully committed?
Do we have broad organizational buy-in?
Is our culture open to candid feedback?
Do we have the internal team in place?
Let’s consider those questions in more detail...
1. Do we have strong, pre-existing relationships with the senior clients we want to recruit as members? C-suite, senior and/or executive clients with whom you have only aspirational relationships are unlikely to accept the invite. They don’t have skin in the game to see you succeed.
2. Is our company's senior leadership fully committed to the advisory board and willing to prioritize it? A clear mandate of support from the top—ideally with the CEO as sponsor and chair—is critical. Senior leaders need to be aligned with and accountable for the board's success.
3. Do we have broad buy-in across the organization, particularly among individuals with the clout and resources to act on the advice received? Excited listeners are not enough; you need leaders with the power and commitment to drive change based on board input.
4. Is our company culture genuinely open to seeking and accepting candid advice and feedback? A superficial desire for input will be apparent to your members. Leaders must sincerely believe they can benefit from and be willing to act on external advice.
5. Do we have the right internal team to launch and manage the program? A solid internal team for a customer advisory board includes having people who can effectively recruit members, plan and facilitate productive meetings, and provide ongoing program management. Several key internal roles need to be filled with the right people for a board to get off the ground and sustain momentum.
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Is Our Company Ready to Launch an Advisory Board?
Is Our Advisory Board as Powerful as it Can Be?
The 5 Characteristics of Powerful Boards
Strategic Focus & Alignment
A customer advisory board is an opportunity to bring together your most important customers (or partners, depending on the type of board) and invite them to provide their best thinking on your biggest strategic gaps and challenges. In this way, directing the board is an exercise in relentless prioritization—which topics, which customers, which challenges, which mindsets, which decisions need this intensive input and new perspectives?
At a minimum: board basics
Defined goals and objectives
A solid advisory board charter
Suitable meeting formats and frequency
Signs of strategic focus & alignment
Overall scope and individual agenda topics align with the company's strategic priorities.
Discussions and debates are forward-looking and actionable.
Members challenge internal perspectives and provide insight that shapes business decisions.
Impact is measurable, measured and celebrated.
methods for focus & alignmentLaunch in conjunction with pivotal change.
Clients can be your greatest advisors and allies to navigate major changes. Leverage the board to navigate major shifts in strategy, product or service offerings, leadership, or organizational structure (including mergers and acquisitions), tapping into clients' perspectives to guide the transition.
Curate and facilitate for defined outcomes and desired advice.
Focus the program and every meeting on specific, deeply relevant topics and questions. Understand the trending and enduring strategic topics senior-level executives need and want to focus on, engaging clients and internal stakeholders in creating every agenda. And be ready to cull. Less content is more when stimulating meaningful dialogue and eliciting advice.
Prioritize clients with the greatest potential.
Segment and focus on those accounts that represent significant revenue, growth opportunities, or other brand and strategic importance to ensure the board delivers outsize value.
Anticipate and articulate the relationship to other initiatives and platforms.
Aligning the board with strategic touch-points such as account-based marketing, voice of customer or customer experience programs, R&D, or product boards, can amplify its impact and ensure a cohesive approach to customer engagement.
Define both short- and long-term measures.
Establish clear success metrics up front, on customer satisfaction, account impact, and/or other outcomes. Hold the executive team accountable for acting on the board's input and reporting progress.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
After Kyndryl spun out of IBM, its leadership team set a clear strategy to engage customers in its pivotal transformation, including through a Kyndryl Customer Strategy Board. Based on board member input and priorities, the management team adjusts the board’s focus and meeting topics.
Executive Sponsorship & Participation
Customer advisory boards require committed leadership from your executive officers.
If you cannot secure genuine participation from your senior leaders, you will not earn your most strategic clients’ time and attention. The resulting output will be a watered-down version of what it might be.
Sponsors play a critical role in setting the strategic tone, modeling a culture of partnership, and driving change based on the board’s insights. Our strongest boards are sponsored by the CEO—leaving no question as to the strategic importance.
While this support may seem obvious, companies often begin advisory boards as thinly veiled marketing and sales events, and then compound this mistake by relegating oversight to lower-level executives or siloed functions.
At a minimum: board basics
Defined accountability, with at least one senior sponsor committed to action and progress
Clear lines of communication between board operations and senior leadership
Signs of effective sponsorship & participation
Executive sponsor—ideally your CEO—commits in both word and action, participating fully, following through, and holding other leaders accountable.
Senior leaders attend all meetings, uninterrupted, engaging attentively in open dialogue, taking notes, reflecting on insights, and keeping the culture collaborative and sales pitch-free.
Conversations include healthy debate—voicing internal deliberations, not just well-rehearsed, collective messages—in the presence of the group.
Cross-functional teams routinely take specific actions and implement changes based on the board's advice.
Leaders consistently socialize the board's purpose, value and impact across the organization.
methods for EXECUTIVE SPONSORSHIP & PARTICIPATION Choose the right sponsor—ideally, the CEO.
The sponsor should be the most senior leader involved, providing the vision, mandate, resources, and organizational sway for the board to thrive. They chair meetings, shape the strategic agenda, and hold their peers and direct reports accountable for action.
Frame your board as a non-fiduciary board of directors.
Help strategy leaders view the board as a singular opportunity to gain unfiltered insight into customer priorities—and link their organizational goals to customers rather than competing internal agendas.
Understand and prepare your internal stakeholders—role by role.
Provide tailored guidance and support to help each functional leader translate their (sometimes technical, inside-baseball) domain expertise, priorities, and concerns into customer-centric conversations. Consistently help them understand how their contributions support the board’s mission, as well as how the board relates to their specific roles and goals.
Foster a culture of candid exchange…and openness to even the hardest feedback.
Promote a mindset of partnership rather than defensiveness, encouraging executives to listen actively, share internal deliberations, invite members’ dissenting opinions without debate, and reflect back what they heard to validate their understanding.
Report on the board's insights and impact regularly and broadly.
Socialize the headlines and key lessons and collaborate cross-functionally on resulting action plans. Establish or use executive channels to cascade key messages and calls-to-action throughout the organization and reinforce the board's strategic importance.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
To convene the senior-most leaders at its largest clients, Thomson Reuters’ CEO and his full leadership team attend every Thomson Reuters Global Strategy Board meeting. The CEO’s presence clearly signals to clients: this is an important session worthy of their time.
Robust Membership
An advisory board is a community, not an event. Clients can easily attend events with any of their vendors. They commit to a board to learn something from their peers, influence your strategy, and gain unique understanding of what is next for your company and, possibly, their own industry or role.
A well-composed and engaged membership is fundamental to creating that experience—one that is equally valuable and meaningful to members and the sponsoring company.
It can take up to 4 to 6 months to secure your initial round of members, which is then subject to inevitable (and sometimes sudden) departures and disruption. Maintaining a robust membership, particularly for a relatively small group, is an ongoing challenge that requires careful planning, persistent effort, and long-term commitment.
At a minimum: board basics
Criteria for member selection and community size
Value proposition for members
Recruitment and onboarding processes
Clear rules of engagement for open dialogue, confidentiality, and legal and ethical compliance
Well-run meetings that maximize engagement and satisfy participants
Signs of robust membership
Members are peers, senior decision-makers with authority and influence to drive change in their organizations.
The board represents a diverse mix of industries, geographies, and perspectives, enriching the dialogue and surfacing novel insights.
Vacancies fill quickly and easily.
Members actively participate in shaping the board's agenda and direction, demonstrating a sense of ownership and investment in the group's success.
Members consistently engage in candid, constructive discussions. They challenge your leadership's assumptions, push the group to explore, and offer unvarnished advice, without getting mired or devolving into tactical, account-specific complaints.
methods for ROBUST MEMBERSHIPEnsure your pool of relationships is deep enough.
Your candidate criteria must realistically match your organization’s existing relationships. Your day-to-day clients may be loyal and smart, but will they provide meaningful partnership when it comes to strategy and growth? Avoid being too aspirational, and don’t settle for delegates or replacements if they don't fit your criteria.
Determine the ideal membership mix.
In addition to developing an “ideal member” profile for recruiting, aim to balance the board composition across multiple dimensions. Consider customer segments, industries, individual roles and industry stature, value to one another, demographics, account tenure, geography and other elements to ensure a diversity of viewpoints and insights in a well-rounded and cohesive group.
Implement a proactive process and pipeline for succession planning.
Partner with executive team and account leaders to create a continuous board recruitment pipeline, monitoring your network and the industry for rising stars and influencers. Maintain detailed tracking processes and databases to anticipate and cope with vacancies, identify potential members, and manage your outreach efforts.
Cultivate an exclusive member-oriented community.
Your goal is to assemble a compelling group of executive peers around matters that are important to them. Recognize it takes time to build trust, where members freely converse about common challenges, ideas, innovation, and directions. You will get advice right away, but if you invest in an ongoing community, with discussions tailored to their priorities, the board can yield deeper, broader insights and relationships that your competitors cannot replicate.
Foster member excellence.
Not all clients make good advisors. Recognize and celebrate members' contributions, and proactively address any issues that may hinder participation or satisfaction. Establish clear expectations through a charter, and coach members who need guidance on providing constructive feedback or redirection away from account-specific, tactical issues. A sensitive offboarding process can help manage member transitions smoothly and diplomatically, including removing clients who consistently fail to make meaningful contributions.
Keep your eye on the accounts at large.
Boards create powerful connections with those clients who participate. But these executives are part of a larger account relationship. Make sure those relationships are strategic and healthy—and that you’re aware of shifts in the size and status of the relationship—before you continue to solicit their advice. And check in with the day-to-day client teams to identify disconnects between what you hear from your members and what the broader teams experience.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
Turnover in the c-suite happens ever 2 to 4 years, depending on the industry. The team behind IBM’s Think Circle for supply chain—an exclusive network of senior-level change makers—keeps ahead of that turnover through a disciplined routine, conducting weekly reviews of the pipeline and taking action to fill the gaps in their membership.
Momentum & Action
Your clients' advice is the heart of your board's value, but extracting that value requires moving from listening to acting—embedding their recommendations into your strategies and operations.
Like a friend who grows tired of giving the same advice without seeing change, your customers will disengage if their remarks appear to go unheeded or you only respond to the positive. Follow-through takes discipline and may even demand difficult conversations, if you can’t make the changes clients want to see.
The strongest boards identify just one or two high-priority things to work on in collaboration with board members, regularly involving and updating them on progress. This cadence of consistent touchpoints and proof of sincere effort will propel your engagement and relationships forward.
At a minimum: board basics
Meeting read-outs or reports
Signs of momentum and action
Board documentation moves beyond rudimentary minutes, extracting both higher-level themes and specific implications for broader distribution.
Actions and outcomes are tracked and trumpeted consistently.
The board's influence extends beyond just the formal meetings.
Internal stakeholders clamor for more.
methods for MOMENTUM & ACTIONClose each meeting with a clear plan for action and accountability.
Document the key insights, vested members, and next steps, assigning owners and due dates. Some actions may be one-and-done, and some may be fodder for a working group or similar extended effort. Either way, socialize this action plan with the executive sponsor and other key stakeholders to secure their commitment and support. Hold yourselves accountable with regular executive planning sessions, dashboards and report cards, and in-meeting progress reports.
Empower a dedicated program manager.
This role requires strong organizational knowledge, project management skills, and relevant content expertise to drive consistent execution, serve as a listening post for opportunities, and ensure a high-quality experience for board members and internal stakeholders alike.
Synthesize, share, and act on customer insights in ways that integrate with other feedback channels.
Establish a central repository for board-related data and deliverables and develop templates and protocols for capturing and communicating insights in a consistent, compelling format. Collaborate with customer success, sales, marketing, and product teams to incorporate board feedback into their ongoing efforts.
Establish a regular cadence of touchpoints and optional extensions to your meetings.
Use meeting debriefs, interviews, virtual events, working groups, or similar interactions to dive deeper into key topics, pressure-test ideas, and co-create solutions with board members and their teams. Leverage a mix of formats and technologies to maximize engagement and flexibility.
Close the loop on advice by sharing progress, hurdles, outcomes, and success stories with the board.
Demonstrate the impact of their contributions through regular reports, showcases, and shout-outs, whether in pre-reading materials, as an agenda kick-off, or in a separate publication. Match their candor with equal humility, confessing to hurdles, explaining lessons learned and contrary decisions, celebrating wins, and inviting more input to refine and build on the results.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
For every board, Farland Group develops after-meeting action items, working alongside our client to ensure owners, priorities, and timeframes align. IBM’s Financial Services Cloud Council formalized this follow up in multiple, active working groups—comprising CIOs, CISOs, and risk leaders from the banking industry—which develop substantive white papers, discuss regulatory implications, and impact IBM products and the industry at large.
Adaptability
After you have a few successful meetings under your belt, your advisory board can feel like a well-oiled machine. Don’t get too comfortable. It is exactly when things feel well-oiled that you must consider how to evolve. Your company and clients are not static, and neither is an effective board. An adaptable board is one that consistently delivers value by staying aligned with your strategic priorities and your customers' most pressing challenges.
Customer advisory boards falter and lose steam for several reasons, and many come to a natural end. Sustaining a powerful customer advisory board requires a commitment to ongoing reinvention.
At a minimum: board basics
Meeting agendas cover timely, relevant topics that stimulate engaging discussions
Signs of an adaptable board
Leadership and members regularly and openly discuss the charter, content, or format—and identify how they fit market dynamics and company strategies.
There’s still no shortage of things to talk about—member feedback and attendance remains enthusiastic beyond year one.
Membership refreshes regularly to fill gaps and bring in new perspectives.
The board begets new boards or other customer engagement programs.
methods for ADAPTABILITYConduct both formal and informal audits and reviews.
Regularly collaborate with your executive sponsor and cross-functional stakeholders to assess the board’s effectiveness and realign it with your company's evolving strategic priorities. Perhaps your board focused on a specific strategic initiative, and it’s done its job. Or the board helped identify a new business line and should now focus specifically on that opportunity. Be willing to narrow or expand the scope as needed.
Change the membership mix to align with new priorities.
Regularly review your board's membership criteria and recruit new voices to fill gaps in expertise, seniority, industry, or geography—as well as to shake up the perspectives you’re getting. Don't hesitate to rotate off members who no longer fit or contribute.
Regularly recommit.
Renewing your organization’s attention and accountability to the board takes a deft combination of organizational politics, communication, publicity, and management. Map your stakeholders and their level of commitment, and work with everyone to come to a new agreement and accountability.
Level-up your management and facilitation.
A common mistake in board management is to staff and facilitate the board as an event, which may be sufficient for a few meetings, but will fail in the long haul. Assess honestly whether you have the right internal team, as well as a facilitator who is more than a logistics manager or emcee. The best boards include a true facilitator with strategy experience, objectivity, executive presence, and domain savvy, as well as a clear view of your priorities and pitfalls, to get the information and action your executive team and board members seek.
Dig deep to uncover your customers' current challenges and goals.
Spend concerted time updating your understanding of the common challenges, goals, and interests from a broad set of internal stakeholders, current and past advisors, and additional customers. Use those insights to develop compelling, thought-provoking meeting content and facilitate interactive, action-oriented conversations.
Don’t hold on to a board that has run its course.
Some advisory boards come to a natural end. If, after careful consideration, you decide yours has, acknowledge and celebrate its successful career, and allow it to end.
CLIENT EXAMPLE
After an initial set of meetings, intentional interviews with AspenTech’s board members indicated a need to shift the board’s focus even more toward business strategy. The company recast the board, pivoting it mission and agenda topics to address critical transformation pain points in their clients’ organizations—and their own.
Conclusion
Building and sustaining a powerful customer advisory board requires a significant investment of time, resources, and commitment from across your organization. By focusing on the five key characteristics outlined in this guide, you can create a powerful engine for customer insight, engagement and growth.
While the journey is not always easy, when done right, a customer advisory board can be an invaluable asset for navigating change, validating strategies, deepening relationships, and identifying new opportunities.
We hope this guide provides a helpful roadmap for maximizing the value and impact of your board at every stage.