Selling Knowledge Article Series Five: Running Customer Insights workshops

In article four, we stepped through the preparation work needed to ensure everything is in place to deliver a successful Customer Insights workshop. But what about running the workshop itself?

How to run Insights workshop sessions

Agenda

The typical agenda for a Customer Insights workshop might look like this…

Program

Typical timings for a half-day workshop might be as illustrated below.

Project kick-off

Don’t be tempted to omit the ‘Project kick-off’ section. A number of the attendees may not have been involved in earlier discussions about the project and won’t really know why they have been invited – busy people want to understand what the project is about, why it’s valuable and what’s going to come out of the work.

Ideally you will set up a half hour project kick-off call before the main workshop to make sure everyone buys into the project and you address any concerns in advance. This will mean you can get straight to the intake discussions with attendees in the actual workshop.

Facilitation

Whoever is leading the session will need to make sure they keep the pace going while allowing people to get out on the table what they want to say. Getting the balance right between pushing the discussion along and frustrating someone who has an important point to make isn’t easy.

One technique is to have a flip chart ready to capture and park any contentious or peripheral points for discussion by the team at a later date.

In the ‘Themes and drivers’ section, explain how these need to relate to the areas of business your company serves and should drive challenges and opportunities for customers that your products and solutions can address. Try to steer the conversation away from general market themes that don’t meet this criterion.

For the ‘Opportunities and challenges’ session you can focus either on one business area / workflow for the customer at a time or do this by persona. My recommendation is to work through thinking about challenges and opportunities by business area and then add the relevant personas at the end.

For each challenge, don’t just capture the business issue but make sure you get a view from the team on how the customer is likely to see the associated pain or opportunity.

Face to face versus remote

Value of in-person sessions

Before COVID-19, my recommendation was always to have people in a room to make these types of sessions highly interactive and fun.

Getting some of your most knowledgeable and experienced people together to figure out what’s going on in your customer’s marketplace, the top of mind challenges they face, and opportunities to improve processes and performance is hugely valuable. The team dynamic is always more powerful and generally more positive when people are physically in a room together! It’s also far easier to facilitate sessions to make sure everyone gets the opportunity to contribute and everyone is engaged and focused on the task at hand.

So, under normal circumstances, the travel costs are more than offset by the benefits gained from getting people into a room.

Remote sessions demand greater facilitation skills

However, COVID-19 has made a huge difference to the way people work, which is likely to persist beyond the pandemic. The appetite for travel is lower and people are getting used to working together via video call.

Customer Insights sessions can be undertaken with stakeholders attending remotely and I’ve run successful sessions using video conferencing or web collaboration tools like WebEx, Zoom and Microsoft Teams for many years. But facilitation takes a lot more skill. Knowing that people are paying attention and aren’t doing their emails can be difficult. Advising people in advance that they should turn cameras on for the session can help a lot.

Finally, with remote attendance you have to run shorter sessions to ensure you keep people’s attention. This may mean you have to run a series of 2 hour workshops on different days to get all the input you need.

Managing conversations

Making sure one or two people don’t dominate the conversation, without being rude and cutting them off can be tricky! But it’s vital to do this if you want to get a balanced view and tap the knowledge of all those attending.

I’ve run quite a few sessions where one senior executive simply wants to talk and gives others little opportunity to contribute. This is where the facilitation skills of the person leading the session really come in. He / she needs to have the presence and strength of character to guide and control the conversation, and make space for everyone to have their say.

Having a clearly articulated agenda and a set of supporting slides that indicate a structured process is going be followed is vital. This will help stop a powerful character taking the session down a rabbit hole and help steer things back on course!

In my 17 years of running these sessions, I have only once had an attendee stand up and walk out of the room! In fact it was 2 attendees! In fairness to me, the argument was not with my facilitation or the structure of the session but was the result of a long running argument over who ran what and a personality clash!

My takeaway from that session was, always run through the attendee list with someone senior in advance, to make sure you uncover potential personality clashes or disputes that could boil over in the session!

Team alignment

Attendees often comment that they have really enjoyed one of these Customer Insights sessions.

In addition to the primary purpose of capturing and developing the Company’s understanding of its customers, these workshops often deliver huge value to attendees, as they share knowledge and get aligned around a common point of view.

Capturing output

As I mentioned in Article 4, to be efficient and get maximum value out of workshop sessions, you will need to find some way to share the information you have gathered in advance, and then capture output from attendees as the workshop proceeds.

At BPM we use a specialized platform called the Messaging Workbench that allows us to capture and organize output from workshop attendees in real-time and share it with them on screen. If you don’t have a specialized tool available for this, you can use a pre-formatted Word document or PowerPoint slides with different sections and boxes to capture and share the information from attendees.

In the next article I’m going to take a look at Proposition Mapping – the fun part where you get to talk about your own products and how they solve problems and deliver value to customers.