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/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

“Most QBRs suck,” says Alex Raymond, calling out the truth that too many Quarterly Business Reviews are boring, one-sided, and lack real impact. But what if QBRs could be more? In this episode, Alex gets into why so many of these high-stakes meetings fall flat. Are outdated beliefs holding you back from having the kind of QBRs your clients want? Alex uncovers four common missteps: seeing QBRs as presentations, handling them solo, taking a defensive stance, and focusing too much on past results.

Imagine instead a QBR where the focus is on the client’s goals, where data is shared in advance, and where the agenda is co-created with the client. Through practical shifts like these, account managers can turn QBRs into dynamic conversations that build trust and foster genuine partnership. Alex’s advice on limiting presentation time, encouraging real dialogue, and setting clear next steps brings fresh insight on how to make these meetings truly valuable. How often do you reconsider the structure and purpose of your QBRs? For those eager to level up, this episode provides a preview of Amplify’s upcoming QBR Mastery program in January 2025, designed to help account managers make every meeting count.

Quotes

• “If your QBRs are nothing but a 60-minute monologue, you’re missing a massive opportunity. And not only are you wasting your client’s time, you’re also losing a chance to position yourself as a true strategic advisor to them.” (03:38 | Alex Raymond)
• “If you’re thinking about the QBR as just a presentation about you, you’re thinking about it all wrong. And frankly, it’s not even a presentation; it’s meant to be a conversation. I’d like to invite you to reframe this and think about how we can use the QBR to align with our customer and create a dialogue.” (06:52 | Alex Raymond)
• “Let’s make our QBRs forward-looking. This is an opportunity to strategize together, to look down the road ahead, and to use this time to ask open-ended questions about your customer—their future goals, needs, and challenges. It’s a chance to figure out what it will look like as we work together to achieve these goals. That mental shift creates a real partnership, where both sides are committed and focused on concrete goals that lead to long-term success.” (14:27 | Alex Raymond)
• “If we want to make our QBRs truly valuable, we’ve got to ditch this idea that it’s a presentation—that our job is just to ‘show up and throw up.’ That’s not the idea at all. We also need to remember, we’re not here to do all the work ourselves. We have to enroll our customers and get them to do their share of work as well.” (25:04 | Alex Raymond)

Links

Connect with Alex Raymond:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afraymond/

Website: https://amplifyam.com/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

“There are strategic accounts that will organically grow without proactive effort. Every account is strategic but you don’t have the time to grow them in terms of the way in which top performers do versus the rest. I think it’s a big mistake up front by trying to go for it all, because you end up winning less,” says Andy Springer, the Chief Client Officer at RAIN Group.

In this episode, Andy joins Alex Raymond to talk about the game-changing power of focusing on fewer, high-potential accounts. Why spread your resources thin when doubling down on the right clients can yield far bigger returns? Andy reveals how top-performing account managers know the value of strategic account selection—choosing which clients to grow proactively and which will thrive organically.

Andy also shares a fresh perspective on segmentation: how well do you really know your clients? The more you understand their goals and challenges, the more you can build trust and position yourself as a true partner, not just another vendor. Andy walks us through the essential roles of an account team, the importance of a flexible, evolving account plan, and why becoming a client’s trusted advisor can be the key to unlocking hidden growth.

Are you ready to rethink your approach and unlock the “ridiculous upside” within your accounts?

Quotes

• “What we find also separates those who outperform versus those who don’t in strategic account management is one very simple thing: it’s the accounts that they select to grow… As a practitioner, when you’re in, and when you’ve engineered the success in terms of shifting that dial to take someone from the rest to top performance, you go for less, you win more.” (06:48 | Andy Springer)
• “There are strategic accounts that will organically grow without proactive effort. Every account is strategic but you don’t have the time to grow them in terms of the way in which top performers do versus the rest. I think it’s a big mistake up front by trying to go for it all, because you end up winning less.” (09:30 | Andy Springer)
• “Top performers see account planning as a dynamic. The rest see it as a linear annual event.” (30:15 | Andy Springer)
• “The bigger the org, the more complex it is. The more demands that they put on really important people like you who help generate future growth and sustain current revenues for the business—it’s critical.” (45:25 | Andy Springer)

Links

Connect with Andy Springer:

Website: https://www.rainsalestraining.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyspringer/

Connect with Alex Raymond:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/afraymond/

Website: https://amplifyam.com/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm