Many founders look at building a customer advisory board as extra work — I know I did. But when you're trying to find product-market fit, there's no better approach than getting a trusted group of customers together for fast feedback and testing your hypotheses. This document summarizes the meeting notes from one of our quarterly customer advisory board meetups.

We found that having around 10 customers on the board was the right number. Instead of trying to gather everyone on one call, we opted for two to three meetups every quarter with different groups of advisors. I found it incredibly valuable to put together these notes after every meetup — not just to synthesize their feedback, but to demonstrate that we were taking their input seriously.

To inform our meeting agenda, we asked each advisor to do a little bit of prework. In this case, we included a survey and a feature prioritization exercises. Making decisions around feature prioritization is really difficult, but having structured feedback from your most trusted customers brings some clarity to what to build.

After re-listening to each of our calls, we'd pull out the best sound bites for our product team and for potential use by our marketing team. There's nothing more powerful than voice of the customer.

Jonathan Palay

When you’re trying to find product-market fit, there’s no better way to test and iterate quickly than by establishing a customer advisory board. This document summarizes one of our quarterly meetups with our most trusted customers.

Advisor 5, VP of Sales, North America at Company 

Advisor 9, VP Enterprise Sales at Company 

Advisor 10, Commercial Sales Leader, EMEA at Company 

Jonathan Palay, Head of Growth atCommercialTribe 

There’s a lot of excitement about Sales Management Intelligence - the recent gains made by Revenue Intelligence lead us to believe it is inevitable - which is why we are continuing to bring together an elite group of practitioners who are excited about the problem space and want to continue to be involved. 

We shared an update on Forrester’s latest report on Revenue Intelligence and the big news that Zoom has entered the space with its ZoomIQ for Sales product. 

Jonathan shared the feedback from our Feb meetup that have now been translated into CT Connect: 

Time spent with 1st year and at-risk reps 

And Paul demoed those features included in the latest Product Tour.  The advisors allocated 100 pennies against 4 new features for future development and we got feedback on prioritization. 

Before getting to the specific features, we took a poll. If we could only pick one, who should we build features for: Sales Leaders or Frontline Managers?

“I expect this to be a 2nd line leader hub. I’m envisioning CT Connect to be what every 2nd line manager is pulling up in their 1:1s with their managers.” -Advisor 1

“I want to encourage managers to self-analyze where they are spending time, which reps are getting their attention and adjust.” -Advisor 2

To be clear, we aim to address both personas but it’s an interesting question as we think about what to get right first.

The advisors gave feedback on the following features.

We asked each advisor to allocate 100 pennies across 3 features (Note: Seller engagement pattern replaced Weekly manager planner in the last meetup):

“Now it’s still the wild west as to how effective firstline sales managers are….meaning, I can have two firstline managers and they can still operate completely differently without industry benchmarks. As soon you start introducing this is what great looks like, it will drive managers toward great. Therefore, I know my managers will out manage other managers within our industry and become a strategic advantage.” - Advisor 1

“How do you bring the managers along on this journey? If I had to pick one feature it would be benchmarks.” - Advisor 4

“The biggest opportunity I see is “co-sell” and “who with”. What would it solve? Participation and ramp to productivity are the two highest KPIs I’ve got. Any incremental visibility to shine a spotlight on where we’re not executing from a management perspective on new hires with the desired outcome being accelerating ramp to productivity is a go.” - Advisor 5

 “I’d like to see a simple new hire dashboard -> Red, Yellow, Green based on level of manager engagement.” - Advisor 2

“I want to see team average, target and best practice for manager time within our Revenue Management Framework (operating cadence). We may be so far off best practice I want to set a target we can get to.” - Advisor 4

“We’ve modeled out to how much time we should spend but we’re not actually tracking how much time managers are actually spending vs. target. Your software automates this.” - Advisor 2

“I want managers to set their own goals based on team composition.” - Advisor 5

“Their calendar gets jammed full of meetings. Then it gets ad-hoc very fast. Because there are so many hours in the day, they have to start juggling things.” - Advisor 1

“We’re in a reactive environment. We’re not very thoughtful about how to be proactive where to spend time” - Advisor 2

“Could you provide the manager with a set of recommendations, based on tenure / performance of reps, calls on the calendar, etc…as to where to spend time.” - Advisor 6

Customer Advisory Board Meetup Notes at CommercialTribe

Sales Management Intelligence

May 2022 Advisory Board Meetup

Participants

Advisors

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