Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / How CMOs Use Customer Councils to Shape Product Roadmaps
Transcript
- Lucas: You know that sinking feeling when your product team ships a feature that everybody in the room swore customers wanted, and then... crickets. Luna: Oh, I've lived that. The feature gets a blog post, maybe a webinar, and then adoption flatlines at three percent. Lucas: Exactly. And the typical response is to run more surveys, do more focus groups. But there's a structural problem there — surveys give you stated preference, not revealed behavior. People say they'll use something, but they won't. Luna: So what's the alternative? Because we can't exactly wire customers' brains. Lucas: Some CMOs are building what are essentially formal customer councils — small, diverse groups of customers who meet regularly and have a direct line into product and marketing. Not a once-a-year user conference, not a beta test. A standing body with real influence. Luna: Sounds expensive. And a bit risky if the council steers you wrong. Lucas: It is expensive, and it can go wrong. But let me walk through a case that makes the math interesting. There's a mid-market SaaS company called ClearVoice — they do compliance workflow software for financial services firms. In early 2025, the CMO, a woman named Jenna Ortiz, started a twelve-member customer advisory board. Luna: Twelve members. How did she pick them? Lucas: She segmented the customer base into four buckets: power users, high-revenue accounts, at-risk accounts, and what she called 'silent majority' — customers who paid on time but never engaged. Three from each bucket. Then she personally called each one and asked them to commit to a twelve-month term. Luna: And they said yes? I'd want something in return. Lucas: They got a few things: direct access to the product team, early access to features, an annual summit in a nice hotel, and the sense that they were shaping the product. No monetary compensation. Ortiz's argument was that if you pay people, you get their time but not their honest opinion. The council works because members feel ownership. Luna: Okay, so the structure. How often do they meet? Lucas: Two in-person summits a year — one in January, one in July. Then monthly virtual check-ins where they vote on feature priorities. The key piece is a private Slack channel with the product managers, and the rule is that any question from a council member gets a response within 48 hours, even if the answer is 'we don't know yet.' Luna: That's a serious commitment. I'm guessing the Slack channel becomes the real source of truth. Lucas: It does. Within three months, Ortiz noticed something. The product team had been planning a big ai powered analytics module — the kind of thing every SaaS company was building in 2025. But in the Slack channel, council members kept asking about compliance dashboards. A simple, boring feature: a dashboard that shows auditors exactly who accessed what data and when. Luna: Because they're in financial services. That makes total sense. Lucas: Right. The analytics module was cool. The compliance dashboard was necessary. So Ortiz and the product VP reprioritized. They shipped the compliance dashboard in Q3 2025, and it became their most adopted feature ever — 68 percent of active users within 60 days. More importantly, churn among accounts that had flagged compliance concerns dropped by 14 percent. Luna: Fourteen percent churn reduction from one feature. That's huge. What about the analytics module? Lucas: They built it too, but six months later, and with less fanfare. The council had told them it was a 'nice to have,' not a 'must have.' The council saved them from over-investing in something that would have gotten a lukewarm reception. Luna: So the council didn't just surface a good idea — it helped kill a bad one. That's almost more valuable. Lucas: Exactly. And Ortiz tracked the impact on net dollar retention. In the three quarters after the council launched, net dollar retention went from 102 percent to 124 percent. That's a twenty-two point improvement. Some of that is feature adoption, but a lot is just the relationship — customers on the council expanded their contracts because they felt heard. Luna: I want to push back a little. Twelve people is a tiny sample. How do you avoid the vocal minority problem? The loudest customers on the council might not represent the broader base. Luna: That's the biggest risk. Ortiz dealt with it by triangulating council feedback with usage data and quarterly surveys sent to the entire customer base. If the council wanted something and the survey data agreed, it was a green light. If the council wanted something and the data said no, she went back to the council and showed them the numbers. Lucas: That transparency actually built trust. One council member told me, 'I respect that you showed me I was wrong.' Luna: So the council isn't a democracy. It's more like a focus group with a feedback loop. Lucas: Better than a focus group, because it's longitudinal. You see opinions evolve. And because members stay for a year, they get more sophisticated about trade-offs. The first meeting, everyone wants everything. By the fourth meeting, they're saying, 'We know you can't do everything — here are our top three.' Luna: What about the cost? You mentioned it's not cheap. Lucas: Ortiz's budget for the council was about sixty-five thousand dollars a year. That covers travel for two summits, some catering, a part-time community manager who monitors the Slack channel, and survey tools. Against a customer base that generates, say, ten million in annual recurring revenue, that's sixty-five basis points. If the council improves retention by even two percent, it pays for itself. Luna: And in her case, retention went up way more than two percent. So the ROI is clear. But I wonder if a council like this works for every company. If you're a consumer brand with millions of users, twelve people can't represent that. Lucas: It doesn't scale down, but it can scale up. Larger companies run multiple councils — one for enterprise customers, one for SMB, one for partners. HubSpot, for example, has had a customer advisory board since 2012 with different tiers. The key is keeping each council small enough that every member has a voice. Luna: So the principle is: small groups, high trust, direct access to decision-makers. Lucas: Right. And the CMO is the natural owner, because marketing sits at the intersection of product, sales, and customer success. The council becomes a source of stories, testimonials, case studies — not to mention actual product direction. Ortiz's team used quotes from the council in four major sales decks and saw close rates improve on deals where they referenced the council. Luna: It becomes a sales asset too. That's smart. Lucas: Look, if you're a CMO and you're spending money on market research that gives you hypotheticals, you might want to redirect some of that budget into a council that gives you real, ongoing signals. The cost is real, but the cost of building the wrong thing is higher. Luna: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used — maybe a new way to think about customer research, or a framework for pitching a council to your leadership — then you know how valuable this kind of practical insight can be. A couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these conversations going, completely ad-free. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to say this content matters to you. And it genuinely makes a difference — a few coffees a month from listeners like you keeps us independent and focused on what's useful. Luna: So back to the council. One thing I want to understand: how do you handle turnover? If a member leaves mid-year, do you replace them immediately? Lucas: Ortiz had a bench of alternates — three customers from each segment who said they were interested but weren't selected initially. If a council member dropped out, she'd call the next person on the list. She only had one dropout in the first year, and the replacement was fully briefed within two weeks. Luna: That's good planning. I also wonder about confidentiality. If customers are sharing their pain points, they might not want competitors to hear. Lucas: ClearVoice's council had a non-disclosure agreement that was surprisingly simple — two pages. Members could talk about the fact that they were on the council, but not about specific product discussions. And Ortiz made sure no two direct competitors were in the same council. If a prospect from a competing bank applied, she'd put them on a different cohort. Luna: Makes sense. So what's the one mistake you see CMOs make when they try this? Lucas: They treat it as a one-way information channel. They present their roadmap and ask for feedback, but they don't actually change anything. The council figures out fast that their input doesn't matter, and engagement drops to zero. The whole point is that the council has real influence — otherwise it's just a sales call dressed up. Luna: So you have to be willing to change the roadmap based on what they say. Lucas: Exactly. Ortiz's first summit, the product team came in with a full year's roadmap. By the end of the two days, they'd scrapped two features and reprioritized three others. That sent a signal: this council matters. And that signal is more valuable than any single piece of feedback. Luna: It's a trust-building mechanism as much as a research tool. Lucas: It is. And if you're a CMO who wants to be the voice of the customer inside the building, a council is the most concrete way to do it. You walk into the executive meeting and say, 'The council told us this. Here's the data from the Slack channel. Here's the voting record. And here's what we're going to do about it.' Luna: That's harder to ignore than a survey PDF. Lucas: Way harder. And that's the whole point.