Customer Advisory Board is a Sales Window into the C Suite

You may have heard of a customer advisory board, may even be part of one, but many of us don't fully understand the tremendous sales power these groups can afford a business. Think about it for a moment. Your business is bringing together C level executives from your top customers and creating a recurring forum for open discussion about your products and services as well as the issues and challenges your customers face. This is solid gold material for your organization. Not only can you glean intelligence from these senior decision makers on improving your offerings, but you also get a clear window into those things that drive their everyday decisions. Many companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to a market research firm to try to ascertain similar, yet less insightful, intelligence.

A customer advisory board grants you and your senior team access to these top level customer executives. In many cases, your organization had no touch at all with these individuals l before the customer advisory board was conceived. You see, this non-sales access to these top customers gives you the opportunity to build rapport and soft sell them into even bigger deals without them ever really knowing you are trying to sell them. It's brilliant, and it works!!

Our customer advisory board has brought a number of executives together to discuss current business drivers and how Millbrook could help them improve their business performance," said Jack Plunkett, President, Millbrook Inc. (a business intelligence software provider for property and casualty insurance carriers). The advisory board has far exceeded our original expectations and has been very effective in putting our executives in front of our customers' senior management team. In fact, it helped us wake up a dormant account in which we only had access to the CIO. We are now talking directly with the C level executives and are on our way to closing a major deal."

The advantages a customer advisory board brings to your business are enormous. Perhaps it's time you started thinking about having one formed for your organization. It most definitely has the potential to dramatically improve your overall sales performance and bring you closer to your own customers. Who wouldn't want that?

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