Blind spots in customer understanding can hold companies back, but customer advisory boards offer a way to uncover them and strengthen strategic accounts.
Alex Raymond is joined by Betsy Westhafer, the CEO of the Congruity Group, to discuss how CABs reveal gaps in customer knowledge that companies often miss. Are you as customer-centric as you think? Betsy shares eye-opening stories, including one where a global company’s lack of account planning was laid bare in a CAB meeting. Insights from that moment led to significant improvements and pointed out the importance of truly knowing your customers.
Betsy breaks down the essentials of creating impactful CABs—aligning leadership, engaging a mix of customer voices, and encouraging honest conversations. CABs are about listening and acting on what matters most to customers. She also explains why bringing in a neutral facilitator can make all the difference and warns against half-hearted efforts that risk doing more harm than good.
If you’re an account manager or business leader ready to rethink how you engage with key customers, this episode offers actionable insights on building trust, uncovering critical gaps, and turning feedback into a competitive advantage.
Quotes
“We did a customer advisory board probably about two or three months ago. And within the first few minutes, one of the customer advisory board members said to the host company, ‘Here’s what I want to hear from you: What’s your plan for my account?’ And it caught this company completely off guard, and they had to fess up that they did not have an actual plan for that account. This is a large global company.” (04:48 | Betsy Westhafer)
“When you bring in an outside third party that can create an environment where these blind spots get uncovered, it’s really, really valuable.” (05:56 | Betsy Westhafer)
“We do look at different metrics that are non-monetary ROI… the number of blind spots that have been uncovered or the number of advocacy activities resulting from CAB members. There are lots of other metrics beyond strictly sales dollars that we do track.” (32:58 | Betsy Westhafer)
“One of the things we do at the very beginning of any engagement is create a value scorecard with our clients. Because it’s different for every client we work with… We build that value scorecard and then track it throughout the entire engagement using a red, yellow, green system to indicate whether things are on track. We pay close attention to whether the customer engagement activities are delivering the desired results.” (33:46 | Betsy Westhafer)
Links
Connect with Betsy Westhafer:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsywesthafer/
Website: https://thecongruitygroup.com/
Connect with Alex Raymond:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afraymond/
Website: https://amplifyam.com/
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