Strategic Advisory Frameworks: Elevate Your Company to Industry Leadership

Becoming the top influence in your industry requires more than just great products – it demands strategic initiatives that position your company as a thought leader and a driver of industry-wide change. This means engaging deeply with the community of experts and customers around you, amplifying your leadership voice, and spearheading partnerships that transform the market. This strategic framework can be broken into three parts:

1. Building influential advisory communities with industry leaders, customers, and subject matter experts.
2. Leveraging thought leadership to shape industry standards and amplify your company’s voice.
3. Driving market transformation by promoting new frameworks and standards through strategic partnerships.

Strategic Frameworks for Influence: Advisory Communities

Bringing together customers and industry experts in an advisory council provides valuable external insights that shape strategy and innovation. A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) or Executive Advisory Council convenes influential customers, industry leaders, and subject matter experts to offer guidance and feedback. Composed of senior executives or thought leaders, these boards help companies see challenges from the client’s perspective and challenge internal assumptions.

The key to maximizing engagement and impact with an advisory board is a clear structure and purpose.

Define a charter and objectives for the group from the outset . Is the goal to get candid product feedback? To validate your roadmap against industry needs? To co-create solutions to emerging challenges? Being clear on “why” will guide “who” to invite and “how” to run the forum.

Best practices:

• Invite the right mix of members: Aim for a diverse mix of voices. Include top customers (the executives who use or champion your product) as well as respected industry experts. Each member should have a stake in your domain and be unafraid to offer honest input, and structure meetings to encourage candid peer-to-peer discussions.
• Make it a no-sales zone: Ensure the forum focuses on insight, not selling. Cisco, for example, runs its customer advisory sessions with roughly 80% of the time devoted to listening and discussion, and only 20% to company presentations . Members stay engaged when they see it’s a genuine two-way dialogue rather than a marketing exercise.
• Act on the feedback: Close the loop by showing which suggestions get implemented. When advisors see their input reflected in your next product update or policy change, it validates that their time is well spent and motivates them to continue contributing.

When well-run, these advisory communities can supercharge your industry influence. Many technology firms credit their CABs for sharpening strategy and even unlocking growth. Ryder, for instance, leveraged its customer advisory board to shape new offerings in its logistics business. Feedback from its CAB led to a supply chain service campaign that boosted leads by 21% in one month and spurred the launch of new digital platforms for freight visibility . Ryder’s marketing director went so far as to call the advisory board the “secret sauce” behind several successful product launches and major strategic decisions . In another case, a Total Economic Impact study found that Workday’s CAB program delivered an astounding 431% return on investment over three years thanks to increased customer loyalty and faster innovation. The takeaway: an advisory council, when structured well, is not just a feel-good committee – it’s a strategic asset that can drive product-market fit, customer loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth in the industry.

Leadership Influence: Thought Leadership and Industry Voice

When company leaders share forward-looking insights on big stages or in influential publications, they help shape industry standards and amplify their company’s voice. Establishing industry influence also requires thought leadership from your C-suite and other experts. By consistently sharing visionary yet practical insights, your company can shape the conversation around best practices and emerging trends. Over time, this credibility allows you to actually steer industry standards. Why invest in this? Because thought leadership builds trust and attention. For example, 84% of people trust recommendations from experts over advertisements, and more than half of business decision-makers say that high-quality thought leadership content directly influenced their purchasing decisions . In short, if your organization is providing the most insightful answers to the industry’s pressing questions, others will follow your lead.

To amplify your company’s voice, adopt a multi-pronged approach:

• Executive speaking engagements: Put your leaders on stage at key conferences and webinars. A compelling keynote or panel presence boosts your company’s credibility and visibility. These speaking opportunities can cut through the noise and establish your executives as authorities . When your CEO is known for speaking about, say, cybersecurity best practices at major events, your company gains influence in how cybersecurity is viewed and implemented across the industry.
• Content in influential channels: Publish and partner for thought leadership content. This could mean co-authoring a whitepaper with a respected consulting firm, contributing guest articles to industry journals, or being interviewed in trade media. Getting your insights featured in respected outlets extends your reach to new audiences. Meanwhile, the imprimatur of third-party platforms or partners lends extra weight to your content than self-publishing alone. Additionally, encourage your internal specialists to engage in these channels—bylining articles, joining podcasts, and weighing in on industry discussions online—so that your team becomes the go-to resource when the market debates what “good” looks like.

A strong thought leadership program builds your reputation as a standard-setter. For example, IBM in cloud computing and Google in search have solidified their authority by consistently sharing expertise – IBM on cloud strategy and Google on SEO best practices – effectively educating the market and setting benchmarks . By sharing valuable knowledge (not just product pitches), these companies shaped industry standards in their favor. The lesson: a company that is always contributing insightful ideas will naturally influence how the industry evolves and which practices are considered best-in-class.

Market Transformation: Driving Frameworks and Standards

Strategic partnerships – symbolized by a strong handshake – can turn a company’s innovative idea into an industry standard as multiple players join forces to promote it. The final component of becoming an industry influence is using your clout to drive market transformation. It’s one thing to participate in the conversation; it’s another to lead it in a new direction. Transformative companies often introduce a novel framework or methodology and then work to get it widely adopted as a standard. The goal is to have your approach become the way the industry operates.

One effective way to achieve this is through strategic partnerships and alliances that amplify your reach:

• Consulting and analyst partnerships: Team up with major consulting firms or industry analysts so they champion your framework. When a respected firm validates your approach, it gains instant credibility across their client base. For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) partnered with Accenture to accelerate enterprise adoption of its cloud and AI frameworks . This kind of partnership effectively made AWS’s methods the default playbook for many Fortune 500 companies deploying cloud AI.
• Ecosystem alliances and open standards: Invite other tech providers, partners, or even competitors to co-create an open standard. By building an ecosystem around your framework, you ensure it’s not seen as proprietary to you but rather as the industry’s preferred solution. Google’s approach with Kubernetes is a textbook example: Google open-sourced its container orchestration technology and worked with the broader community (through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to make it universal. Within a few years, virtually every cloud and IT vendor supported Kubernetes, making it the de facto standard for container management. Openness and collaboration can drive far greater adoption than a go-it-alone approach.
• Flagship customers as evangelists: Early wins with influential customers can persuade the rest of the market. When a marquee enterprise publicly embraces your framework, others are more likely to take notice (and feel safe following). General Electric’s public embrace of AWS’s cloud signaled to its peers that cloud was enterprise-ready, and soon other large companies began “migrating to AWS in droves” in its footsteps . In other words, GE’s example gave many of its fellow enterprises the confidence to accelerate their own cloud journeys.

Beyond these initial wins, support the new standard with training, integration tools, and published success stories that make adoption easy and compelling. Also, ensure partners and customers have a vested interest in its spread. For instance, if your partners and users gain significant value or revenue by embracing your framework, they’ll become eager evangelists for it. When stakeholders benefit directly from the standard’s growth, it quickly stops being just your framework and becomes the industry’s collective standard.

Conclusion

Ultimately, establishing top industry influence comes down to three interlocking strategies: listen, share, and lead. First, listen to your customers and experts by actively engaging them on advisory councils (and treat that “Champions Group” as the strategic Customer Advisory Board it truly is). Next, share your expertise widely – through thought leadership content and frequent speaking – to shape the narrative and build credibility as an authority. Finally, lead by turning your innovations into industry standards, using partnerships and early adopters to drive transformation at scale.

Importantly, these efforts reinforce one another: insights from your advisory board fuel your thought leadership; that thought leadership builds trust and attracts partners; and those partners and customers validate and spread your ideas – creating a virtuous cycle with your company at the center.

For C-suite leaders, the takeaway is to step beyond day-to-day operations and actively cultivate this broader influence. Be deliberate about getting outside advice, bold in sharing your vision publicly, and collaborative in rallying partners around your ideas. By doing so consistently, your company won’t just join industry conversations – it will lead them, setting the agenda for others to follow.