The Gist
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CAB provides strategy. Customer advisory boards offer strategic insights from top executives and help guide long-term product and company direction.
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Pre-meeting insights. Interviewing CAB members before meetings uncovers valuable information that can inform your customer data strategy.
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Post-meeting data. Post-CAB surveys capture actionable insights, including feedback for improvement and opportunities for customer-driven marketing initiatives.
As 2025 kicks off, many companies pledge to not only improve their customer engagements but also to take action based on their customer data as a key strategic initiative. Such an approach is commendable. Leveraging customer data is the most effective way to assess past performance, as companies set informed goals for the upcoming 12 months.
Yet while many companies will tackle this strategy with tactical or online programs such as customer recommendation sentiments, more subjective and substantial input received by a customer advisory board (CAB) should be an integral part of a 2025 customer data strategy.
Here’s why integrating these insights into your strategy is crucial, along with ways to capture and apply this valuable data.
Table of Contents
User Data Can Fall Short in a Customer Data Strategy
While user data can be insightful and may have its place, just remember that it’s generally intended for your product users only. The feedback you receive will mostly come from lower-level product users, who can only comment on what you’ve provided — your solution. In turn, the feedback you receive will likely be focused on tactical aspects, such as improving the user experience, helping new users become productive more quickly or suggesting minor improvements.
With their limited exposure to broader, high-level corporate initiatives, your product users may be only able to suggest such minor, tactical product improvements, and they will make their recommendation decisions based solely off of their user experience.
Related Article: How to Leverage Customer Insights to Shape Product Strategy and Growth
CABs Offer High-Value Strategic Feedback
CABs, on the other hand, are made up of higher-level executives from your best customers, and they’re able to provide more valuable strategic input to your company. Such input may even be for entirely new capabilities or solutions your company has never previously considered.
They can also provide insights into their own corporate priorities, which your company can include within its own planning to make sure you remain a valuable solutions partner for years to come.
Finally, CAB members often provide insights into what your competition is offering, trends within their own industries and other technologies that might uncover excellent partnership opportunities for your company.
Pre-Interviewing CABs for Valuable Customer Data Insights
CAB members should not be used solely for subjective comments and suggestions collected at meetings. They can also provide excellent data in advance that can be a valuable part of any customer data initiative.
For example, CAB members can be interviewed before meetings to help you prioritize desired discussion topics and uncover their plans for the coming years. Where are their biggest challenges? Where are they investing their IT budgets? What other solutions are they using alongside (or integrated) with yours?
CAB members are often very supportive and eager to share their challenges and struggles with your company if they are confident that you will be able to provide some guidance and solutions that can help them.
Related Article: Launching a Customer Advisory Board: Top 10 Questions to Ask
CAB Meetings Uncover Key Data for Customer Strategy
When established and managed properly, CAB meetings provide a range of valuable data. Most commonly, CAB members are not only exposed to your company’s product roadmap, but if they are users or familiar with your solutions, sessions can also focus on prioritizing future product capabilities and features.
Further, customer desires and priorities can be captured through innovative games that involve voting or using pretend money to assess how much people would be willing to spend on potential improvements.
Other meeting sessions can gather additional data, depending on what the host company would like to measure. As CAB members are usually higher-level decision makers, such data can uncover exactly how much your customers are willing to spend on capabilities, helping your company determine where to invest.
Post-Meeting Surveys Capture Additional Key Insights
At the conclusion of your CAB meeting, you will want to distribute a survey to capture all the feedback on the meeting you just held. At this moment, there are also opportunities for additional usable customer data. For example, you can ask if any CAB member would be willing to present at a future meeting or at other events such as your user conference or even sales kickoffs. You can also ask if they would be willing to participate in marketing initiatives such as testimonials, videos or as a reference to your prospects.
This is the ideal time and opportunity to collect volunteers, which can be difficult to do through other channels. CAB executives will almost certainly be more convincing to your prospects than lower-level product users.
Harnessing CAB Insights to Strengthen Your Customer Data Strategy
When it comes to building a customer data strategy in 2025, companies should be sure to have a strong customer advisory board program in place. Meanwhile, marketers can take advantage of the valuable customer data these programs provide. Doing so will provide more deep, valuable data that companies can incorporate into their overall strategy.
Editor’s note: Here’s a summary of two core questions around the topic of customer advisory boards and customer data strategies:
Core Questions Around Customer Advisory Boards
How can customer advisory boards (CABs) strengthen a company’s customer data strategy?
Customer advisory boards offer unique strategic insights that go beyond what traditional user data provides. While user data focuses on product-level feedback, CABs comprise high-level executives who provide a broader perspective, including industry trends, competitor insights, and untapped opportunities. By integrating CAB input, companies can align their product roadmaps with customer priorities and uncover entirely new capabilities or solutions. This strategic data becomes invaluable when shaping long-term goals and ensuring continued relevance in competitive markets.
What pre- and post-meeting strategies maximize CAB insights?
Pre-meeting strategies involve interviewing CAB members to identify discussion priorities and understand their upcoming challenges and investments. These interviews uncover actionable data, such as IT budget allocations or integration needs, that can shape your customer data strategy before meetings even begin. Post-meeting surveys add another layer of valuable insights. They capture feedback on the meeting itself, while also identifying CAB members willing to engage in marketing initiatives, provide testimonials, or participate in events like sales kickoffs. These insights not only refine the CAB program but also open opportunities for customer-driven advocacy and partnerships.
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