In this insightful discussion, Chris Waldo, a seasoned marketing and executive engagement leader with experience at Zoom, VMware, Nortel, and more, reflects on the true purpose of Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) and how organizations often get them wrong.

Chris shares stories from memorable CABs in Napa, candidly discusses sales vs. strategy confusion, and emphasizes the need for structured follow-up and advisory-driven design. He and Irene Yam explore how CABs can play a pivotal role in brand positioning, customer trust, product validation, and even shaping go-to-market strategy in the age of AI.

Whether you're a marketing leader or a CAB practitioner, you’ll walk away with practical wisdom on how to run CABs that deliver executive engagement, feedback loops, and lasting customer relationships.

Why Your Customer Advisory Board Is Failing (And How to Fix It.) Guest, Chris Waldo - Transcript

Irene Yam  0:00 

Well, today I'm joined by Chris Waldo. See someone who's built some a remarkable career at the intersection of customer, marketing, demand, generation and enterprise strategy. He also builds really good CIO events. I've been able, lucky, sorry, lucky to work for him, and he's led some of the most influential groups under you know, in zoom, VMware, Nortel, if you ever have you know, worked with anyone in customer marketing or enterprise engagement, chances are you've seen his influence, seen his work. He's mentored tons of people. Chris, it's great to have you. Thank you for being here.

Chris Waldo  0:43 

Well, Irene, hey, thanks for having me on, and you're too kind with your comments. I really appreciate that. No, excited to be part of this conversation. I

Irene Yam  0:52 

mean, you were the first manager who taught me about racy. We were just talking about that, and I think racy needs an F for fun at the end.

Chris Waldo  0:59 

Yes, yeah, the humanity and the whole thing for sure.

Irene Yam  1:03 

Okay, F and the H, okay, Chris, um, we were talking last week about that. You think cabs sometimes are mistaken by sales people, and then I think it's because some of these new sales leaders are new and they're like, Yeah, let's do this, let's do that, let's do a vertical. Let's do all kinds of cabs. I wanted to get your take on that. Like

Chris Waldo  1:23 

that's that's a great question, Irene, and I think that when you go ahead of a salesperson now, they have a really massive job, and lot of times you start a quarter at zero, and you're trying to build that all the way out to hit your quota. And so whatever they can do to get a customer in the room to engage with it is a step towards a close, especially when you have other customers in the room talking about how good your stuff is. It really helps them a lot. But I think that sometimes that happens when you when you put it together as a cab, and you're talking to your customer, you lose out on the a cab, which is advisory.

Irene Yam  1:59 

Yes,

Chris Waldo  2:03 

and so and so, if you don't have, if it's a sales driven thing that you're couching as as a cab, right? And you don't have the advisory part, you do risk the part of your customers being disappointed that they weren't necessarily giving advice back, right? So, so I think that that it's important that, when you think about a true cab, that you're able to set up that two way dialog. And it isn't, you know, the company reading out to the customer, it's really letting the customers talk, but it's also taking the notes, and so you come back the next time to be able to say, Okay, here's what we accomplished based on your feedback. And the reason why that's so important, you think about your customer for their careers being invited to really participate in a gap that that shows that they have a subject matter expertise, yes, and that they're respected by the their their their vendor, or their partner or the person that's inviting them, and they put that on their resume. And so we want to make sure that that that that the true cabs are held as cabs. And when you're really trying to do an executive engagement program that you think really carefully, do you name it a cab, or you name it something different? Oh, I like that. And one of the things we did, and one of the things we did to help with that, when I had a sales team come back and do a gap. Well, you change it. You change it into Table Talk, cio table talks, and you do it with a topic that's that maybe you have three topics, and you have it prepped that way, and you get the engagement. You tweak it a little bit, but then there's less of an expectation that there's the company doing something on it, and there's less of expectation of membership on it as

Irene Yam  3:43 

well. Yeah, many aha moments. What surprised you the most?

Chris Waldo  3:47 

Well, I think that you know, back to that. It was 2019, prior, just just prior to pandemic, and we were still running the playbook of, let's invite our top executives and our top customers come in and spend a few days with us at a cab at a nice location people would want to travel to, and, you know, be able to earn their trip to spend a drive land in San Francisco and take a 45 minute drive out to Napa. So that was the whole setup. But, but what surprised me on that we had our executives, everybody's there, Irene did a great job setting it all up. But what surprised me, it just was the level of participation and knowledge about the product side, and so we were trying to go very high. So it was a BP level audience. But then thinking about RingCentral, and we had a marked multi product portfolio. We did, yeah, that subject matter expertise was generally for one product, and it was opening their eyes for the other products that we had, yeah. And so you think about it, it was interesting, because the customers that had not purchased product A now are interested in product A, and I'd come into it thinking that that they all would. Have some level of understanding of our products because they were top customers, but that was the reality that we saw on the ground, and it opened a lot of the eyes as we did a debrief on the other side of it too, about just how much work we need to do, even if our top customers didn't know all about our portfolio, how much more work we need to do to make sure that word got out, the message got out.

Irene Yam  5:21 

Well, well actually, I want to talk about that. Yeah, because I've been, I've been in in that room so many times. There's a couple of things, of these aha moments. It's so when you know when a customer buys, they're really focused on, this is why I'm buying the product. This is what I need to solve. And then the salesperson might try, or the CSM might try to say, hey, you should try to use contact center. You should try to use our new AI reception, all sorts of things. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I just need to implement, especially enterprise. I need to implement, I need to scale. But somehow, when you form, when you get people in the room and you're building trust, and you're missing the stories, kind of like those campfire stories in Napa, yeah? Like, Oh, wow. You know, Roger had something really good to say there. And I didn't even think about that use case. I think we should take a look at that. And it's, it's that human to human, and it's not that sales to sales or sales to customer. And then that's what happens. So yes, we do have in our if we put our marketing, customer marketing hat and we build content, it's like they may not open it unless they truly need it, if it's on their roadmap, but these cabs kind of that's that I might need it in my room. I need to change my like the customer needs to change your roadmap.

Chris Waldo  6:44 

Absolutely. Irene, you hit the nail on the head. You know, if you think about the day in the life of a customer, right, and all the stress and and inputs they have and decisions you have to make in the course of the day, and as a as a manufacturer or software provider, you have one sliver of their time, and you've got to earn it, and but it's gonna be topical about what the problem is they need to solve. And you hit it right on, you're gonna tune in when you're in market to buy something. And the interesting thing though, about the Napa experience was that if you can get them out of the office in their day to day for a couple of days, and humanize it to your point, and sit around the campfire a little bit. Yeah, man, they, they become Ravi raving advocates for you, and they actually adopt more of the portfolio. And so, going back to the sales example, that's why sales exactly wanted to do this. Again. It's, it's, you know, how do you get that in other types of venues? And how do you really get earned that mind share and that time from your customer base is really we're trying to solve for Yeah, it is that when we do a cab and you add up all the customer feedback you get, you get the advisory part, right? The a, yes, yeah. There are actions and actions of ideas that get flooded. And it's a really across the company, of things for people to do. How do you what do? What do you see as a best practice, so that the the actions get disseminated, that we were able to prioritize them and then communicate back to the CAB members about what the what the actions were a result of their advisory

Irene Yam  8:16 

right? Well, it's a good point. A lot of us have a hard time following up, because after the magic bubble of the cab, we go back to everything else in life. Oh, we got to do. You were talking about being in nine meetings in a day, you know, and we have to prep and we the cab is kind of like that vacation. We're like, oh, that was great, but there needs to be somebody accountable. So that could be the CSM. If it's a big enterprise customer, the CSM can help act as that conduit to have more ongoing conversations, not only with the advisory board member, but their team as well. So that could be one method another is having a team lead run a another program, which is a post cab program, where you're asking executives that will actually talk to the customer, or reach out to the customer advisory board member every quarter and have a one on one conversation. So you can call it an executive sponsorship program. That's usually a big perk for a cab a board member, it's a great way for us to keep touch. You don't need to always talk about business, but as a cab lead that I've been in, I have all the nuggets of information that we know about the account. We make sure we address any issues. If there's any alerts or support tickets that we also offer to help. You know, sometimes you might have the head of people there, and they're, they're the executive sponsor. They can offer to help, but they need to bring in another expert, another way to also do it, if I may add, is. That let's have those Park questions that we didn't get to in the cab, and let's follow up and have an ongoing conversation. So sort of jamming back to your idea of having maybe another round table to have a facilitate more of a discussion, say, a topic around support,

Chris Waldo  10:19 

for example. No, that's great. That's really how do you see

Irene Yam  10:23 

cabs contributing to kind of like long term brand positioning strategy?

Chris Waldo  10:28 

It's critical, especially if you have customers that love your stuff, and then the top of that pyramid, the ones that are loving yourself, and also thought leaders and that they've been selected for your cap to have hold them close, very close, and and nurture that relationship. And it's good for your brand, it's good for your word of mouth, it's good for all kinds of things, and it's so critical today, too, when you think about just how we think about demand gen overall for the last 18 months, that's become tremendous, where people, instead of going to Google to search on Product A or product B or go to your website, they're just asking an LLM to be able to tell me who the best providers are in this space, and that LLM then goes and searches for testimonials and customers and word of mouth, yeah, and that's the other way that people are getting ideas about who to talk to through word of mouth, and so being able to really focus your customer marketing, but then also have that tip of the spear of your customer advisory board, being able to provide you with input and content and good, good, good will that then you're able to use that to grow. I mean, it's just a tremendous, tremendous opportunity, but requirement today to work through that world of generative AI and how it's impacting the business overall.

Irene Yam  11:54 

I think we were talking about AI a week ago, about, you know, how it can even help with personalization That's right, validate those right before you do a big ABM, before you do something, you could actually run this by your customer advisory board, probably not an actual meeting, but maybe later on in a virtual we can do that and so, but I think now with AI we can, We can actually have a discussion about, how can we build a little bit more personalization with them?

Chris Waldo  12:25 

So it's really just thinking about meeting your customers, where they are, not only your current customers, but also prospective customers, and how they consume information today. Yeah, and just thinking about and it's all comes down to, can you personalize the communications to me and help me solve my problems that I have today? That's going to be the big differentiator for everybody and how marketing is going to come through. Irene, in your experience you have ever seen a cab and all the good stuff you're getting from the advisory really help accelerate or even develop a go to market strategy. We

Irene Yam  12:59 

actually were trying to go up market with the cab. So we had, like Naveed was one of the biggest first enterprise customers, box Paul Chapman, David Nuss, they were the customers that were our early enterprise customers. And then we also had other mid sized customers there, and they really gave us feedback where we needed to be, what services we needed to offer for enterprise, because we were shifting too. So it wasn't like, hey, how do we sell, but actually, how do we prepare? And that was a great cab, because we were starting to lay the foundation um, before you came to join,

Chris Waldo  13:43 

Oh, yeah. Well, that's awesome. And I think that what you hit on is you found your best customers. I remember too that you they also showed up in newspaper ads that you guys did with them right before Central, yeah. River sodas, yeah. And so you had that. So it was always been as a as a strategy for you guys about going up market and taking those early customer wins and being able to use those to show other customers there's a path to the cloud in that example. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Irene Yam  14:18 

Did you feel like you had a good base when you came in to run enterprise marketing with customers,

Chris Waldo  14:24 

absolutely, that's the first you check down on and trying to go to the App Market. The first thing is, well, tell me about your customers that we currently have right and understanding that there was a pretty robust set of some pretty big names that were there and people willing to stand on stage, and then you click into that. Well, how did they get there? Well, it was because of their cab participation and because they really saw a lot of value in the product. And so those names, not only did they participate in the cab, but they also were headliners for our events that we would run get them on stage, tell a great story about their when it really just helped us across multiple. Thoughts on that. So was a great foundation to walk into.

Irene Yam  15:03 

Well, actually, I'm going to throw curveball at you. Ready? You know you've been at so many companies that are like, where they need that enterprise leader, sweet spot, like you've done it at automation, anywhere to zoom, if you don't mind sharing, sort of like, how do you start jumping in and getting started with running a team?

Chris Waldo  15:27 

Oh, it's great. And so Irene, it's always starts off with, meet the people where they are and the company, the people inside the company. And each company has a different profile of what they're trying to accomplish. You know, for for Ring Central, it was going up market to get to half, from a half billion to a billion dollars at a time that we're working together there. And there's a lot of lot of great people, a lot of great work that was done. And so assessing where we are today and where we need to go, and then budget allocations and resources to be able to help us get to that place. And so that's the guiding principle. Is that each company, based on where they are in their growth and go to market, have different needs and playbooks are would apply to one company would have applied the other. You just have to pick them up where they are, right? And I think that the other part too is talking of playbooks, the playbooks that we used five years ago. Now, people will be different than they are today. Buyers are becoming less defined on who's going to buy your product with an organization, the committees are getting longer micro environment or pushing decisions out. You've also got the pressure of reducing costs to increase profitability, but still maintain growth. And so you have a lot of things that are pushing pressure onto the playbooks that we run. And so not only do you have to be cognizant about where the company is, but you also have to look at the marketing playbooks now they're adjusting as well. So I've always tried to hit it from that, that perspective, and from there, you know, we can build out successful programs like the cab that you and I ran together, that you were able to take it even from the good baseline that you had set up, but it really does require a leader to come in and ask a lot of questions, understand what's going on, and just really customize the communication and the coaching and all that experience to help the individual and company achieve their goals.

Irene Yam  17:24 

You know, I was just thinking, it didn't occur to me, but you were running your own cab internally before, you know, when you started you, of course, you do the discovery and you talk to everyone, but you, you wanted to meet everyone. You also knew the goals, and you were doing your own cab, in a sense, internally, at least, that's that from your that's like your strategy is that you're you're trying to meet people, and you're trying to meet the goal, but you also need to take everyone who's in the field working with customers. That's how you take the data and create this playbook for all of us to move forward with. So that's

Irene Yam  18:07 

great. Thank you. Thank you for being a cab practitioner. What would you say to you know, these up and coming marketing leaders who haven't been in that cab marketing room. And I don't want to say it's not just another event, but could you kind of give a coaching moment like

Chris Waldo  18:29 

I think the number one thing is that keep your eyes, like I said earlier this conversation on the advisory portion of the cap, the A, think, focus on the A, and when you look at the A, you will inevitably understand that the advisory requires your customers to talk to you versus you talking to them. And so your instinct would be, as you're working with the product marketing teams and all that, to put this together, that you want to be able to share all the great stuff that we're doing and how the company is helping and all that stuff, but you got to make sure that that your content, whatever you're going to present, is entertaining, engaging, thought provoking, so that your customers are engaged and able to provide a Great advisory for your cab, and that's, that's the key there. Just focus on the A.

Irene Yam  19:27 

I, you know, I'm just pausing for a quick second. There's no video issue. But you had me, I didn't think about that. You know, if we can focus on the the A, and it's, happens to be in the middle of the word of the term. I think that could be a part of everyone's mission when running a customer advisory board, because we in marketing, when we create slides, we want to tell we need to pause to let the advisors advise us the. That's exactly right. That's a new one, even for me, like I'm supposed to be Miss customer advisory board. So thank you for teaching me the A, focus on the A, I appreciate you and have a great summer. You too. You too. Thanks, Chris, all right.

Chris Waldo  20:19 

Bye. Irene.

FAQ

1. What’s the biggest mistake companies make when running Customer Advisory Boards (CABs)?

Chris Waldo warns that many CABs are misused as sales tools instead of true advisory forums. When companies treat them as product pitches, customers feel unheard. The solution? Focus on the “A” in CAB—Advisory. Let customers speak, listen actively, and return with visible actions based on their feedback.

2. How do CABs foster human connection and influence executive strategy?

CABs create space for non-transactional conversations—especially when held in inspiring settings like Napa. Chris notes that when customers share stories peer-to-peer, it leads to discovery, trust, and even expanded product adoption. These shared moments fuel executive insights, build empathy, and align product strategy with real-world needs.

3. What’s the role of follow-up in making a CAB successful?

Without follow-up, the magic of a CAB fades fast. Chris and Irene recommend:

• Assigning CSMs or executives to maintain contact
  
  

• Running post-CAB programs or 1:1 executive touchpoints
  
  

• Hosting virtual roundtables for unfinished topics
  These approaches ensure feedback becomes action, not forgotten slides.
  

4. How do CABs support brand growth and content creation in a post-digital world?

In a world driven by LLMs and peer reviews, CABs help surface authentic customer voices that inform positioning, messaging, and demand generation. Chris emphasizes that CABs are a critical layer of customer marketing—feeding testimonials, shaping narratives, and validating GTM strategies with trusted advisors.

5. Can CABs influence enterprise go-to-market (GTM) strategy?

Absolutely. Chris shares how early enterprise customers like Box and Teachers College shaped RingCentral’s shift upmarket by advising on what services and support were needed. Their input not only influenced product development but also helped define the brand’s GTM motion across verticals like education, healthcare, and financial services.