We’ve Built a Customer Advisory Board at Frontdoor. Here’s How You Can Do It Too!

We were agents like you. While looking for real estate software, it appeared that most of them weren’t focused on what an agent needed. We didn’t start this to sell software, we started Frontdoor to solve software problems for all agents everywhere.

Real estate is a human business, having warm relationships with a crowd of prospective real estate professionals and their executives is essential. Today, as we gear up to launch our first series of family features, we have dozens of brokerages on Frontdoor’s Customer Advisory Board.

Our Customer Advisory Board is an extension of our customer development process. We’re transitioning initial research conversations into a longer-term relationship, giving Frontdoor a chance to prove how awesome our series of family features for professionals are and our execution on it.

And investing these partners in our success. The aim for us: Once Frontdoor is up, real estate professionals seating in our CAB become our evangelists and lighthouse customers recruiting more like them.

What’s a Customer Advisory Board
For us at Frontdoor is a group of passionate real estate professionals who are representative of who we believe we’ll be selling to. Real estate professionals have an interest in what we’re doing because it’d help solve problems such as responsiveness, time management, team collaboration and data collection.

For example, as we’re selling tools for real estate professionals, we wanted to gather VPs of Technology, Chief Information Officers, and Chief Marketing Officers. This doesn’t have to be a small group. Just like Frontdoor CAB now includes 40 residential real estate brokerages.

We were looking to have a quorum at our disposal whenever we send out a quick survey, mockups, or paper prototypes, or when we invite people to an in-person event or dinner to provide feedback. Our goal with the Customer Advisory Board is to validate whether our next move is a winner.

There are many ways to reach out to them — Emilie, our COO is a believer in quarterly dinners, for instance — but the point is being able to ask a cross-section of potential users questions and get their opinions as we develop.

We want real estate professionals giving us candid feedback — they can tell us when something is plain stupid. And we sometimes had to help them do this, because agents don’t always want to. Made it clear to them that if they don’t tell us when our ideas are bad, we’re going to build something useless.

Ideally these real estate professionals created a halo effect around Frontdoor, a ring of people so enthusiastic and bought in that we always have someone to provide a great story. As Frontdoor’s frontier changes, our Customer Advisory Board needed to change with them. We asked them to help with early product effort and development, indicating whether the pain Frontdoor Insights solves is strong enough, and if the features we’re proposing actually solve a pain and create the value we want them to.

Once we validated we’re on the right path, we did ask them about pricing and new feature requests. Made sure the composition of our CAB did in fact match the challenges in front of us. We’ve scheduled at least dozens of conversations or else we wouldn’t get to a useful product. Offered them a small incentive for helping us as we’d like to do as well with you today.

5 Minutes: Quick introductions.

10 Minutes: Sussing out the problem.

1 — What are your top problems and are you solving this problem today? (Can we verify that our target problem is a top priority for you?)

2 — How much are you spending to solve this problem?

3 — How does this problem impact your business?

10 Minutes: Feedback and next steps.

We were diligent about taking notes (recorded the conversations), following up with answers to any questions they had, and staying in touch as feedback makes a difference in our product. We tried to understand current problems, solutions and genuine level of pain.

At this stage, we log all conversations in our CRM. Record each person’s role and the type of company they work for, rank the quality of their feedback, and note our rapport — because later on we’ll need to query this information for growing our CAB. When we started asking these people to join our CAB, we added specific fields for that reflecting whether we made the request, if they agreed, and whether they signed an NDA. Once it’s done, they’re on boarded.

Now that Frontdoor Insights is no longer a napkin prototype, a version is now existing, our engagement with the CAB has changed. We are ready to deploy the product to 5 large-scale customers at a time, to do interviews and validate that Frontdoor is solving their problems.

We asked smaller groups broken down by persona about pricing. How much would they pay? Under what conditions? Do they have the authority to buy? What needs to happen on their end first?

As we’re launching in Q3 2018, we’re asking questions about the best ways to achieve scale: Do our partners need more marketing collateral? Where might ads be effectively placed? What additional features should we consider? How was the on boarding experience? We wanted to get into this predictable cadence where you’re providing updates like you would to your company’s board for a board meeting.

Even if real estate professionals can’t come to our quarterly events, we’ll send out a deck to everyone that says, “Hey, here’s what we said we were going to do. We either did it and here it is, or we didn’t do it because new data popped up and we decided to go a different route. Here’s what’s blocking us from success. Does anyone have any ideas or feedback?”

If Customer Advisory Board members missed events, we’ll be scheduling calls. One-on-one feedback will almost always be more helpful than what’s shared in group settings. If real estate professionals want to meet with us, we’d go to them. The closer we get to launch, the tighter we want all these connections with our CAB members to be.

We’re responsive, diligent, and don’t let threads drop, our partners have faith in us — and that’ll translate into pilot testers, real estate partners ready to sign at launch, and evangelists from day one. Later these are the folks who will be our case study subjects and even speakers at our eventual user conferences.

→ Now I need your help:

Sign up for a free tour of Frontdoor. Check it out and I know you will love it.
Give us feedback and ideas (be patient) as we build additional productivity tools to solve your productivity pain points. If you are in the real estate space anywhere in the world, sign up for a free 7-Day Frontdoor account now.

I am ready to partner with you, work, and collaborate with you. If you would like to chat (after you get a FREE Frontdoor account, obviously) just send me an email at alain at frontdoorapp dot com.

Smarter work days are, so let’s go.

Frontdoor creates products for managing online prospects. Frontdoor is backed by successful entrepreneurs and some of the most brilliant real estate operators.