Whoever Understands the Customer Best Wins: Connecting Listening Posts & Customer Advocacy

Customer needs, wants, and expectations can change at any time. This is especially true as we navigate our way through the pandemic. Product Managers, along with their colleagues in marketing, sales, and customer success must stay ever-vigilant. But how do you do this, exactly? 

Join Mike Gospe, Voice-of-the-Customer Strategist, for an interactive conversation about connecting listening posts to roadmap planning.  He will share his Voice of the Customer (VOC) model, clarify the right tools for the right job, give tips on how to interview customers, and offer career advice for helping turn product managers into customer advocates.  You will leave with a simple, yet powerful exercise that will align your team and strengthen your approach to listening to the market and your customers.  And he will be taking your questions.

About the Speaker

Mike Gospe, Voice-of-the-Customer Strategist, KickStart Alliance

Mike Gospe is a hi-tech veteran with 30 years of experience in helping executives learn how to listen to the market and their customers.  After cutting his teeth as a marketer at HP and Sun, then a leader at several start-ups, he co-founded KickStart Alliance in 2002.  KickStart Alliance is a leadership consulting team dedicated to building advisory boards and driving customer success.  Mike is also the author of eight marketing “how to” books including, The Marketing High Ground, a hands-on tutorial for building personas, positioning statements, and customer-ready messaging.

For the past 20 years Mike has focused his attention on Customer Advisory Boards (CABs).  He wrote the first CAB operations manual in 2013, The Flipchart Guide to Customer Advisory Boards, volumes 1 and 2.  He’s helped B2B companies design and deliver more than 200 advisory board meetings around the world.  In 2020 he invented an innovative new approach for conducting virtual advisory boards which has generated some surprising insights.  His website, CABStrategy.com, is the home of many Customer Advisory Board best practices and is frequented by more than 35,000 visitors since it launched in 2017.