Here at Six & Flow, we're huge advocates of strategic workshops. In fact, we run them with most clients as part of our onboarding process.
Whether you're jazzing up your marketing strategy, implementing HubSpot, mapping data or optimising your CRM portal, a strategic workshop is critical in driving alignment and scaling revenue growth.
But what actually happens during our strategic workshops and what do you, as the client, get out of it? In this blog, we explore the topic in detail...
When was the last time you gathered all your key stakeholders from each business function in the same room? When did you last discuss how internal processes all align to achieve your revenue targets?
It's natural for different people to have different viewpoints. You like ham and pineapple pizza whilst your friend prefers a meat feast. You prefer action films whilst your sister always chooses a comedy.
The same is true in a business context. Different perspectives mean that marketing, sales, service and operations teams rarely agree on every business process, and often develop their own unique ways of working. Internal politics and information silos can end up creating a mediocre solution that lacks direction and fails to delight anyone.
So whilst variety may be the spice of life, unfortunately, it's these different perspectives that lead to misalignment across departments and cause problems for your business.
This problem only grows when you experience significant business growth. When companies start to scale, new projects start and targets change. Teams widen and communication shifts. Whilst it's understandable, this changing landscape can lead to a misalignment of goals, causing issues further down the line. If your focus is on growth alone, rather than having everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, your business could suffer in the long run.
So what's the solution? Workshops. Our strategy workshops are centred around business alignment. They facilitate honest communication between decision-makers, identify opportunities and alternative approaches to problems, and generate a sense of excitement and possibility for future plans and subsequent results.
Now here's where we could give you some buzzwords like "a new perspective" or "greater collaboration" and whilst positive, they're intangible, unmeasurable and not something your budget holder wants to hear. The real result is a comprehensive strategy document that outlines current processes, highlights friction points and positions solutions.
But to fully explain the outcomes of a workshop, we first need to explain the different types of workshops we offer.
Our data mapping workshop focuses on mapping out your current user journey and identifying areas to amend, automate and align within the HubSpot CRM.
Following the workshop, we collate our findings and produce a step-by-step plan to implement or optimise your HubSpot portal. Recommendations might include the use of certain HubSpot tools, operational workflow builds and related reporting requirements.
A HubSpot strategy workshop builds on our data mapping workshop, adding additional steps to gather research and understand your customers.
It begins with our team completing a HubSpot portal audit and gathering feedback from key stakeholders. These insights are reviewed within the workshop session to align disparate views and provide stakeholders with a more well-rounded understanding of friction points across the business.
We also conduct a mapping exercise to define your ideal customer profile, identifying meaningful criteria and ranking values. This helps us to understand your audience, and create the framework for HubSpot lead scoring.
Following the workshop, we again collate our findings in a strategy document before implementation takes place.
Data mapping and CRM workshops focus heavily on the 'nuts and bolts' of internal business processes, delivering ROI by improving the speed, efficiency and effectiveness of your current ways of working. In contrast, marketing strategy workshops look outside of the business to better understand your prospects and develop messaging that will resonate with them. To deliver greater marketing ROI, you need to better understand your market.
As a result, our marketing strategy workshops are rooted in deep research. Rather than relying on internal stakeholders to define your ideal customer profile, we define, measure and survey your ideal customer market segment, placing a greater emphasis on external analysis.
This allows us to develop an unbiased understanding of who your ideal audience really is, how big and how valuable this market segment is, and what these prospects are most concerned about.
Following our audience segmentation mapping research, we deliver a workshop session to present our findings, align on targeting decisions and develop your core buyer personas and messaging. We also run our user journey mapping exercise to ensure your marketing strategy is supported by a suitable HubSpot framework. Finally, we align your marketing objectives with core tactics and performance metrics, ensuring campaigns deliver ROI to the business.
Strategy documents are created as a blueprint for both process implementation and ongoing marketing activity. These will include a 12-month implementation plan, as well as a 90-day plan outlining quick wins that can deliver more immediate impact.
From our initial project kick-off call to signing off on a fully fleshed-out strategy document, the whole workshop process takes between 5-7 weeks. This bespoke document provides a blueprint for your upcoming implementation, optimisation or marketing strategy, so it's essential that all stakeholders engage in the review and sign-off process!
Once strategy delivery is completed, it's onto the fun part - building, writing and creating!
We want to provide genuine value to clients, not lock them into complicated contracts. Bearing that in mind, once you have the strategy document, you can work with us to put it into action, take it to another party or do it yourself. It's your property and your prerogative.
As well as providing CRM implementation and marketing strategy delivery, we're also a dab hand at team training, so if you're looking to up-skill your internal capacity we're more than happy to help.
No man is an island, and no business department is either. Most modern companies need to operate in complex and collaborative ways, which can require a healthy dose of problem-solving and perspective-sharing.
Our workshops use discovery-driven learning practices to bring your team together, develop a single source of truth and build a strategy to help you to move forward as a business. What more could you ask for...