Secret Promotion Hack: Setting Up Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) with Andrew Petersen - Episode #162

Andrew began his career by spending seven years in newspaper journalism. He then logged five years in higher-education marketing, co-managing a college website with a focus on video storytelling and fine-tuning email messaging to 18-year-olds. For the past 7 years, he’s worked in B2B software, in marketing operations and then product marketing, with a focus on quantitative and qualitative customer research. He’s started one customer advisory board and scaled two others, both in person and virtual, and strongly believes there’s significant value in both approaches, for both customers and companies.

Questions and topics we discussed in this interview include:

• What are the basics of customer research that marketers need to understand as they grow in their careers?
• When proposing the idea of a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), is it mainly to inform product marketing initiatives? Are there other areas of marketing and business overall that can benefit from the investment in a CAB?
• How should marketers identify and select the right members and determine the correct size for a Customer Advisory Board?
• What strategies can marketers use to keep CAB members engaged and active?
• How should the feedback process with CAB members be structured to ensure it's productive and actionable?
• What are some other common challenges businesses face when managing CABs, and how should marketers address them?
• How can marketers measure the success and impact of a Customer Advisory Board on product marketing initiatives?
• How do the role and operation of a CAB differ in startups versus established SaaS companies? Is there a specific stage in a business’s life cycle where a CAB is more beneficial?
• How is the role of CABs expected to evolve in the next 5 to 10 years?

And more!

You can say hi to Andrew on LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewgpetersen/

You can find me on LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennysoto/

Past guests of The People of Digital Marketing include April Dunford, Amanda Goetz, Melissa Rosenthal, Bill Macaitis, Miruna Dragomir, Andrew Capland, Erik Newton, Andy Crestodina, Sarah Bedrick, Michael Wieder, Dan McGaw, Kathleen Booth, Foti Panagiotakopoulos, Tommy Walker, Lea Pica, Maya Grossman, Sara Pion, Margaret Kelsey, and more.

Music for this podcast comes from www.davidcuttermusic.com