President & Founder

Jane has more than 20 years of experience building marketing and communications strategies for leading technology, healthcare and financial services brands. Her early work was with business-to-consumer (b2c) companies like Perrier, Rollerblade and Black & Decker. She took her market testing b2c expertise to the business to business space helping large enterprise brands like IBM, Morgan Stanley Capital International, Fidelity and Microsoft Health to transform their client experience.

For fun:
Jane is an avid runner and cyclist and can be found on the soccer pitch. She enjoys traveling and exploring new parts of the world with her family.

Professional organizations:
EO (Entrepreneurs Organization), The Boston Club, The Commonwealth Institute, Boston Chamber of Commerce. Jane is also actively involved and on the boards of several non-profit organizations.

Education:
Jane has a BA from the University of Western Ontario, Canada and an MS from Boston University.

Featured Article | Executive Engagement: Start with Defining Success

Executive engagement is increasingly on the radar of B2B leaders who are experiencing a positive impact on their top and bottom line. Yet while the CEO may be clear on the impact and success of executive engagement, how to build »

Featured Article | Virtual, Hybrid, or In-Person Meetings? What do we do?

The vaccines are here and our positive human nature has us thinking about what’s next. When can we get back to “normal” and what will that normal look like? For Customer Advisory Boards, we recommend that you work with your »

Featured Article | Will Virtual Customer Advisory Boards Become the Norm?

As we look to the dawn of a new day when people are vaccinated and COVID is not a daily worry, we ask ourselves – will we go back to an office to work? Will we ever be on planes as often as we were in 2019? Will we have Board meetings in person again?

Featured Article | 5 Tips for Effective Customer Advisory Boards

If you are looking to launch a virtual Customer Advisory Board here are five things to consider before you do so.

Featured Article | Meeting Facilitator: Tips and Tricks for Virtual and In-Person Meeting Facilitation

Meeting facilitators are critical assets for in-person and virtual board meetings. Farland Group has facilitated virtual sessions successfully with executive leaders for more than 10 years. Here are some tips on how to do it well.

Featured Article | 3 Lessons Learned in 2019 from Customer Advisory Boards

My Nanny McFarland, after whom I named Farland Group, used to sit with me and play cards for hours on end. In hindsight, her patience at the age of 90 was inspiring. Even more amazing was her graceful way of »

Featured Article | Progressing Customer Advisory Board Advice

‘Closing the loop’ is a phrase we use frequently at Farland Group. The point of this phrase is to emphasize that an engagement with a client is only as good as the action taken after the customer advisory board meeting. »

Featured Article | Why A Customer Advisory Board

Good relationships are about honesty, trust, and a shared commitment to agreed upon goals and mutual success. For clients to trust you, or anyone for that matter, you need to make commitments and follow through on the promises made or »

Featured Article | Do you Know What Your Customers Value?

Understanding what your customer values is critical to building trust, winning the sale and sustaining a relationship over time. Often sales leaders can assume what is valued without asking the questions required to know for certain.

Featured Article | Customer Advisory Boards: Listening Required, Action Mandatory

We facilitate many Customer Advisory Boards with C-level audiences (CIO, CMO, COO) who are critical to the future of our clients’ businesses. In a recent meeting a Board member asked me a simple question – “what makes this work so »

Featured Article | The Customer Engagement Challenge

An ongoing customer engagement strategy requires planning and an investment in the development of compelling content and interactions that keep your customers coming back. Here are tips in building a more systematic engagement approach with your customers.

Featured Article | The Pros and Cons of Net Promoter Score – NPS

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty measurement that brings great value and a simple measurement for organizing companies around customer centricity. Here are some pros and cons to the metric.

Featured Article | Customer Advisory Boards to Drive Internal Alignment

Customer Advisor Boards serve as an excellent source for driving internal alignment and sparking organizational change.

Featured Article | Advisory Boards Open New Market Opportunity

Customer Advisory Boards can drive new thinking and innovation if you consider a different approach to membership and content.

Featured Article | Transformation and Change Must Not Trump Customer Engagement

Businesses today are moving through a lot of change, but this is distracting employees to focus internally and forget about customer engagement approaches that are needed to retain and grow the business.

Featured Article | Want to Optimize Your Engagement Strategy? Focus on Executives

For B2B marketers and sellers, getting access to the C-suite and developing strong relationships with those leaders can often serve as the starting point of a long-term relationship between the individuals and the companies involved. The three most important reasons »

Featured Article | C-Suite Insights: From Digital Transformation to Customer Advocacy

Farland Group has the honor of helping our clients host forums that convene the top 20% of their customer base. At a recent gathering of 150 CIOs, it struck me that CIOs were engaged in a different set of discussions »

Featured Article | Is Your Facilitation Killing your Customer Advisory Board?

If your advisory board is struggling—or you’re just getting started and want to avoid the most common pitfall—consider carefully:
Is the person in the facilitator’s chair really ready to…facilitate? We share some of the common downfalls of board leaders and facilitators—and a checklist of characteristics that strong leaders share.

Featured Article | Customer Engagement Requires a Long-Term View

“Getting closer to the customer” is an all-too common goal of companies. And while the refrain has a nice ring to it, enabling a strategy to deliver on that promise is not trivial. After all, we know that customers have »

Featured Article | Measuring Customer Engagement: Managing the Attribution Challenge

Heather Higgins , Global Marketing Leader, Strategy & Analytics, IBM and I spoke last week at an ITSMA event on the importance of customer engagement strategies. We shared examples of how IBM is building a very deliberate customer engagement approach targeted »

Featured Article | Creating Signature Client Experiences: Consider Reciprocal Value

It’s a truism in B2B companies that a handful of customers generate the bulk of the revenue, and that keeping and growing a loyal client is far less expensive than finding net new clients. That’s why B2B marketers must develop strategies that help them listen to and engage customers actively in their marketing programs. As you listen, you will find that your customers are as vested in your company’s success as you are in theirs. That common interest is a basis for what we call reciprocal value: the powerful exchange that occurs when both parties get sufficient value out of a program for it to become self-sustaining.

Featured Article | Creating Remarkable Client Experiences

“Shock and surprise me,” was the advice a COO from a large financial services firm offered recently when I asked what he recommended for an upcoming meeting with 15 Fortune 500 CXOs. “We see a lot of great things everyday—this »

Featured Article | Selling to the C-suite

We’ve spent significant time lately with senior sales executives, helping them to create programs and processes that elevate their selling to an executive level. Effective sales people will tell you that selling is more of a science than all of »

Prospects and Executive Engagement – What Works?

Executive engagement strategies should largely focus on existing customers. Sometimes, prospects are a good add to the mix and can bring forward new results

Executive Engagement: Start with Defining Success

Virtual, Hybrid, or In-Person Meetings? What do we do?

3 Tips For Effective Virtual Customer Advisory Board Meetings

Running meetings virtually is today’s norm and likely to continue long after COVID is a distant memory – and aren’t we looking forward to that day! As we moved our lives online, some of the details that make for an »

Will Virtual Customer Advisory Boards Become the Norm?

The Impact of Customer Advisory Board Diversity

A lot has been written about diversity in recruiting for companies and corporate Boards, but what about Customer Advisory Boards? We operate many advisory boards for technology, financial services and healthcare companies across the globe. While gender diversity in one »

The Difference Between Listening and Waiting to Speak

In a world that is full of tension and polarization, we look to our work to bring us salvation, sanity, and a sense of working toward a shared set of goals. We need to enter discussions willing to take feedback, and willing to be curious.

Customer Advisory Board Pro-tip: Pitching Doesn’t Work

Co-creation, brainstorming and an interactive give and take that occurs in a successful sales exchange is a very successful approach for presenting to a Customer Advisory Board. Here are tips of what works and doesn’t work in developing a powerful presentation to a Customer Advisory Board.

Executive Engagement: How Customer Advisory Boards Can Lead the Way

The current health and economic environment is challenging businesses to reassess their investments and to optimize every dollar spent. In making these assessments, it is important to look at the impact on existing customers and how to retain and grow »