You’ve done the hard work of blocking your team’s calendars for a day of strategy and planning. Now it’s on you to make the most of your team’s time together.
High-growth companies heavy in execution mode rarely pause for strategy. So when you make the time for it, make it count.
Drawing from my experience running strategy sessions with dozens of clients, I’ve found the most successful ones have three things in common.
Whether it’s a few hours or a few days, the most productive workshops always have:
a solid plan going in
a clear agenda, with guardrails to keep brainstorms focused
a go-forward action plan with shared team ownership
Here are a few tips for running a tight ship:
Give your team homework
One to two days in advance, prompt your team with questions or homework to help them get ready for a productive discussion. Suggest they look at key competitors, past customer conversations or historical channel performance to surface opportunities worth discussing as a group.
To help them prep, make sure to share an agenda ahead of time.
Example full-day workshop agenda:
9am - 10am: Kickoff and anchoring around goals / objectives, assign roles and responsibilities for the day (note taker, time keeper, etc.)
10am - 12pm: Brainstorm session —> mornings are best for brainstorming when everyone’s fresh!
12pm - 1pm: Working lunch to continue brainstorm or summarize ideas
1pm - 2pm: Prioritization exercise, decide what to tackle first and why
2pm - 4pm: Roadmapping and action plan
4pm - 5pm: Final thoughts and wrap-up
Begin with the end in mind
What is the objective of the meeting? When you look back on the several hours or days spent together, what do you expect to walk away with? Make this clear at the beginning to ensure the whole team is aligned on the expected output.
Be clear about meeting objectives and the scope of the team discussion. Questions to ask yourselves ahead of time:
Are you bringing sales and marketing together to brainstorm a long-range strategy for tapping into new customer segments? Or is the scope of your conversation around near-term experiments within a specific channel?
As a marketing team, are you here to discuss incremental channel strategies or optimizations to existing campaigns?
As a growth team, is the goal to create better qualification criteria for leads so sales can improve opportunity creation rates?
The more specific you can be, the more you can focus your team’s attention on the business problems you want to tackle. And be clear about timelines. Planning for your strategy over the next year is a very different conversation than planning for your next quarter.
Document, document, document
It seems like a no-brainer but you’d be shocked how many teams conduct workshops or brainstorms without documenting what was discussed. A similar version of this is leaving each individual to write down their own notes, leaving gaps in what’s captured. Wrangling a hodgepodge of workshop notes falls to the bottom of the priority list once the offsite is over and everyone goes back to their day jobs. Those are valuable (and expensive!) insights lost after getting the team to spend a day on strategy.
You’ll want to revisit all the great ideas that surface throughout the day. You’ll also want to share with team members who don’t join the conversation but could benefit from what was discussed (junior sales reps, marketing managers, etc.)
Best practices for documenting:
At the start of the meeting, ensure there is a designated owner of note taking in a format that’s easy for your team to access, collaborate with and share—Google Docs, etc.
If there’s a whiteboarding exercise, have someone own taking pictures and sharing images of what is sketched (before it’s erased!)
Each time an action item surfaces, be sure to write it down and assign an owner. This will help you put your ideas into action and clarify who owns what when you walk away from the meeting. When everyone owns follow-up, no one does.
Store all files (pre-work, notes, workshop slides, whiteboard pictures, etc.) in one central location that the team can access—for ex, a shared Google Drive folder
Create a shared team Slack channel for the offsite, where you can look back on conversations and links to relevant content
Freestyle brainstorm—within limits
There’s nothing I love more than a brainstorm. But when you have limited time with your whole team around the table, keep the brainstorming time focused and anchored around the session objectives.
The meeting facilitator should hold the team accountable for keeping brainstorms on-topic. If you find the team gravitating towards ideas that are out of scope, consider scheduling a separate meeting to explore those ideas.
I recently ran a session with a client to brainstorm growth strategies for their Q4 demand generation goals. As the creative juices started flowing, it was easy to get carried away with big ideas, many that went beyond the Q4 2019 timeline.
As a result, one action that came out of that meeting was to schedule a separate brainstorm for 2020 annual planning. That created a forum for fleshing out those longer-term ideas.
Create a framework for prioritizing ideas
With all your team’s great ideas, the next thing you need to do is prioritize what to tackle first. The effort vs. impact matrix is a helpful prioritization framework.
One axis is the effort involved in tackling the project. Effort could mean:
team hours
stakeholders involved
dollars spent
The impact axis relates to business results, AKA metrics that tie back to the goals discussed at the beginning of the workshop. Examples of these are:
leads generated
signups
MQLs
SQLs
opportunities
revenue
A client I recently worked with wanted to surface the best opportunities for driving MQLs for sales within a given month. The “impact” in that case was MQL volume by channel.
Prioritization Matrix: Effort vs. Impact
Once you have your ideas mapped on the matrix, you will want to prioritize:
low effort & high impact
high effort & high impact
low effort & low impact
You’ll want to steer clear of anything high effort & low impact.
Something to consider alongside the effort vs. impact matrix is an exercise in capacity planning. This helps your team better quantify “effort” which affects your priority stack.
Many product and engineering teams adopt a points system for roadmapping. Each project can be assigned a certain number of points (on a scale of 1-3 or 1-5 for example) to quantify how much capacity or effort it would take.
Your growth org can adopt a similar technique. Based on the team’s current capacity, you can decide how many points your team could tackle within a given timeframe. Then you can look at all the ideas together to see how many you could reasonably take on. Depending on how much time you have available in the workshop, you may need to schedule this exercise as a follow-up.
You can read more applying this type of points system to your growth org in this 10-step guide to developing a lean growth plan.
Leave with a clear roadmap and action plan
Once you’ve narrowed down your highest-opportunity initiatives, start mapping out clear roles and responsibilities of who will own what:
Come back to the action items that surfaced throughout the day and prioritize them based on your effort vs. impact exercise
Set deadlines for quick wins you can get in motion right away
Break up bigger projects into key milestones so you have a clear view of what needs to happen when, in order to move these ideas into action. Assign dates to check in on these smaller-batch milestones
If you have several priorities, it’s helpful to conduct this roadmapping exercise in breakout groups. For example, let’s say you have 3 big priorities and 9 attendees at the offsite. You can have 3 groups of 3 develop action plans for each of those strategic priorities.
Check in on progress over time (weekly, monthly, or quarterly)
Finally, bake time into your regularly scheduled programming for follow-up and accountability. That way you don’t lose momentum the minute people leave the offsite.
You can keep your strategic priorities front-and-center by:
adding an agenda item to your weekly team meetings to review progress
scheduling a separate daily or weekly standup to check in on bigger projects
having a 90-day checkin to evaluate progress towards your strategic plan and assess how to tweak priorities
Having a plan going into your workshop, keeping to an agenda, putting structure around brainstorms, and ending the day with a clear plan can help your team make meaningful progress towards your growth goals.
Happy workshopping!
