Customer Advisory Council - Customer Feedback Plan?

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" - Albert Einstein.

Myself and a selection of my company's senior product and marketing leaders are sitting in a beautiful hotel conference room on the California coast. With us is a selection of fourteen decision-making c-level executives from top companies in our customer base. In this advisory council event that I've been planning for many weeks, we are here to discuss strategies for multiple products. Some are existing products, and some are newer products in rapidly growing markets.

All executives from my company are at least a VP-level over their product areas or engineering teams. In addition, each is accomplished and experienced in their respective market and product areas. First, our head of product takes the lead on presenting our overall strategy, and then each product leader discusses their specific product area.

The next morning, our customers' feedback to us was, "we know you are a very technical company and are rightly proud of your technology, but we don't understand what you are trying to tell us. Unfortunately, we're too busy to decipher your messaging and direction, so we're most likely to pigeonhole you into a specific area of the market".

It's an amazing moment of realization. Even with the breadth of experience within our senior product organization, we have failed to communicate our strategy. We have lost our customers by being too technical, and no doubt, overwhelmed them with information.

This experience is not untypical for a customer advisory council process.

Ensure that you have an agreement and internal commitment on what you will do with your customer feedback before you ask for it. Ensure you know why you are holding a customer advisory council. Ensure you understand what you are trying to achieve, what you want validation on, and are committed to earnestly making needed changes from customer feedback. Finally, ensure your strategy messaging is as simplified as possible and focuses on the benefits to your customers.