Selling Knowledge Article Series Four: How to prepare for Customer Insights workshops

In the first three articles in this series we’ve talked theoretically about the process, stakeholders, segmentation and what insights are most useful for sales people. Now we come to the point where the ‘rubber meets the road’ and you have to run successful workshops to get knowledge on customers out of people’s heads and captured!

How do you prepare for these workshops, to ensure successful and efficient sessions?

Preparation steps

Step 1 – Put the stakeholder team together

We’ve already talked about who the stakeholders should be in Article One. Now you have to:

• Get commitment from people to participate in the overall process.
• Get commitment from a core group to attend workshop sessions, and from the others get commitment to participate on separate calls or online.

Step 2 – Specify the Market and Customer Insights to be captured

From the range of possible insights you might want to capture to power better sales conversations (see Article Three) you need to decide which are most relevant and useful for sales people at your company.

For most B2B propositions the critical items will include:

• Market themes that are driving challenges and opportunities for your target customers
• Top of mind challenges and opportunities in the different business areas your products serve and for the personas you must sell to
• Disruptive insights that could motivate prospects to engage with you and explore alternative approaches

Step 3 – Determine segments, workflows, personas, etc. to be addressed

In advance of the first session you should work with one or two core stakeholders to develop a view over:

• Target segments with insights into the characteristics of a company that would make it a potentially good fit for your products
• Business activities and workflows that are addressed by your solution with a brief description of each
• Personas who are likely to be decision makers or influencers in any decisions to engage with your firm and buy from you

When we started out doing this work 17 years ago, we used to leave the discussion on segments, workflows and personas to the first workshop – big mistake!

If you do this, you will find the first 2 – 4 hours of your workshop are taken up getting into huge detail on exactly what the target market is and who you sell to! You should arrive at the workshop with a view from one or two senior stakeholders that can be quickly and efficiently tested with the broader stakeholder team.

Step 4 - Identify and recruit customer contacts (where relevant)

If validation with actual customers and prospects is going to be part of your project, then you will also need to:

• Determine the sets of customer and prospect contacts that will be required to get Insights across the defined segments, workflows and personas
• Research contacts at customer organizations that may have the necessary knowledge to provide insights across segments, workflows and personas
• Determine the most appropriate inducement e.g. payment, donation to a charity
• Determine the optimum interaction method e.g. face-to-face interview, phone interview, online survey
• Make contact with customers to get their agreement in principle to take part in the research project

Step 5 – Mine existing materials for relevant insights

Unless you are working on a brand new product or proposition, there will always be existing materials to mine for insights, in advance of the workshop. Doing this will ensure you arrive at the session armed with the output from previous work done by the company on customer insights. Stakeholders are always very keen to see past work they’ve done being leveraged and taken forward!

Step 6 - Conduct desk based research

Using the web and other research tools you have access to, conduct research into current themes in customer markets that could be driving opportunities and challenges your company can solve for customers.

Step 7 – Produce workshop pre-read

To show stakeholders that you’ve undertaken a significant amount of preparation work in advance of the workshops and have leveraged any past work, you should pull together a short Workshop Pre-read document. Here’s an example table of contents taken from a recent project…

Asking attendees to scan through the Pre-read document in advance of the session will also ensure they are ready to hit the ground running when they arrive at the workshop.

Step 8 – Populate collaboration tools

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.

Flip charts and sticky notes used to be the standard way of doing this, and when I started out in 2004 this is how we captured output from workshop attendees. We soon found out this was pretty inefficient for this type of insights work, as everything had to be unscrambled and written up after the session and people forgot exactly what they meant at the time!

The other problem is you have to physically have all attendees in the room so they can take part and share what they are thinking. In a post COVID-19 world, where travel is likely to become far less usual and people expect to join sessions via video conference, flip charts and sticky notes simply won’t work.

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 could use a pre-formatted Word document or PowerPoint slides with different sections and boxes to capture and share the information from attendees.

Next week I’m going to share some tips and hints for running the workshops themselves, based on good and bad experiences over the last 17 years!