Client Advisory Boards, or CABs, sound simple on paper: pulling together a group of handpicked clients that are important to your organization and talking with them about your strategy. No problem, right?
For the next few months, we’ll be exploring why these events are so much more challenging than they appear and how Collective Next is thinking about ways to elevate CABs for everyone involved.
The Problem With CABs
Think about the last time you took part in a Client Advisory Board. What do you remember? Listless expressions? Folks checking their phones or watches, waiting for lunch to begin? Chances are that someone gave a PowerPoint presentation at some point, but you probably don’t remember what it was about. And what did your team learn from the experience? Were there any flashes of insight? Did the room ever light up, excited about a new idea or initiative? Or when it was all said and done, was your biggest action item to hire a different caterer for next time?
You are not alone. Client Advisory Boards can be rich, invaluable experiences, events that can change the way you run your organization and draw you closer to your most important stakeholders. But like anything that we’ve been doing for a long, long time, it’s easy to lose sight of why we run these events in the first place.