Why we start with a workshop

In a word…. Communication

When is the last time you had all the key stakeholders from each of the sales, marketing and delivery teams in the same room? When is the last time you discussed how your internal communications and processes aligned to reach your overall revenue targets?

What we often find when working with both large and small organisations is that communication outside of the immediate team silos is rare. Departmental or inter-team communication is often not what it could be.

When companies grow, goals and targets change and new projects start. Teams widen, communication shifts. 

Whilst understandable, this changing landscape can lead to misalignment of goals, causing issues further down the line. If your focus is on growth, not having everyone singing from the same hymn sheet can be detrimental to your plans.

By running workshops, we start with a basis of alignment. Workshops facilitate honest communication between the decision makers, gets buy-in from those involved and generates a sense of excitement and possibility for the result strategy and subsequent campaign.

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The 3 aims of strategy

The 3 main aims of a strategy are to give a foundation for ongoing activity, provide a framework for measurement of activity and gain an agreement of responsibilities. To do this you need to have the key members of an organisation in the room.

People’s default positioning is to see things from their perspective, It’s completely natural. This being the case if you’re a marketer you market for marketers or if you’re in sales you will only approach things from a sales perspective assuming everyone else does or should do things your way. Unfortunately, this isn’t how things work and is a core reason for misalignment across companies.

Take this example for instance, sales people live and die by their pipeline and revenue figures. Marketing are much more focused on lead generation figures. Now if marketing are producing hundreds of leads but none of them are closing they will begin to blame sales and sales will begin to question the quality of the leads. This is a very common occurrence and leads to misalignment and mistrust within companies.

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Problems are rarely clear cut and so with a workshop we bring the key stakeholders from each department in and establish no who is wrong or right but how we can proceed effectively across all channels. In an instance, such as the one above we would create a common KPI goal such as meetings booked which would put the onus on both parties and agree what aspect each party was responsible for instance marketing would have to secure a lead with name email phone number and job role and sales would have to ring said lead within 4 minutes of detail collection etc.

Above is a very simple example of sales alignment within a workshop but this is only part of the story. Once we have agreed on common goals for the stakeholders we look at the processes and collateral they need to empower them towards their newly affirmed goals. By mapping out the processes we can identify drop off points and figure out how to fix them with additional resource, planning or automations. People can only do so much in a day so we try to supplement their activity by using technology to plug any gaps that may exist.

Getting to know each other

Workshops are great for another key reason; we want to work with our clients not dictate to them. Collaboration comes through communication and understanding of every person involved. Workshops are beneficial for the start of a relationship as they fast-forward the initial, get-to-know-you phase.  Workshops identify subject matter experts, build trust with people from customer service, engineering, and marketing. It also helps us to understand and work with the most important group: sales.

If we are going to start and continue to build a successful growth strategy communication is key. Simply put there is no better way to facilitate effective communication ad establish strategy than a workshop.