4 Steps to Successful Strategy Workshops
By Levina Kusumadjaja
Strategy workshops are so useful for brand strategists. It is the one thing that will help you understand your client, where your client wants to go, and how you can help them. Many strategists believe that giving out some kind of form or questionnaire for clients is enough for them to create a brand strategy for their client. But trust me, questionnaires won’t help you get to the strategy that your client needs.
You can’t develop an effective strategy without having a strategy workshop at the beginning.
That’s why I want to share about 4 steps that you can take to conduct a successful strategy workshop. If you’ve never done a strategy workshop and you’re still not convinced, that’s okay—keep reading and perhaps you will begin to see how valuable these workshops really are. If you’ve never done a strategy workshop, but you’re planning to have your first soon, congratulations! You are definitely on the right track. If you’ve done strategy workshops many times, kudos to you! Keep up the great work. Hopefully this article can help give some steps to help you be even more effective in your strategy workshops.
Step 1: Prep clients before the strategy workshop
I love this tip from Melinda! Get into the habit of preparing our clients before having the strategy workshop. This doesn’t have to be a long and serious conversation, but it needs to be a clear one. People will gladly participate in something that they deem as valuable. So, one of your biggest tasks as brand strategists is to help your clients understand the importance of strategy workshops.
Tell them that you will ask them a lot of questions. Tell them that some questions might be silly, some might be obvious, some might be really deep, and some might even be uncomfortable. Emphasize also that they have all the permission to turn you down if they don’t want to tell you something. But, communicate to them why you need to ask these questions and what’s the value of these strategy workshops for their business and goals. Help them understand that we want to understand more accurately to help them more effectively.
Step 2: Meet the clients
Yes, I know, this can be scary and intimidating sometimes. But trust me, using a questionnaire to produce a strategy is more stressful than to have actual strategy workshops. You don’t always have to meet them in person, but you do need to have a personal interaction with them. You can do this in person, at their business, rent a meeting room, or in a Zoom meeting—whichever is best, but you need to meet them face-to-face.
Questionnaires don’t work because they are a one-way conversation and they don’t allow you and your clients to clarify ideas or build a personal connection with one another. You can’t help your clients reach their goal if you don’t know their goals. To know these goals, you have to know the clients as well. On top of that, questionnaire feels like homework. It feels like you are giving your client a task to do, instead of communicating that you want to understand and get to know them and their business better. When you meet in person and ask questions in person, it communicates empathy not homework.
Step 3: Learn to dig deeper
Learn to ask really good questions. I tend to overthink asking questions because I get scared that my clients will be annoyed. What I usually forget is that it’s actually better to over-clarify, than to be under-informed. We are doing strategy workshops not to impress clients, but to help our clients. So, there’s no reason for any of us to feel intimidated to dig deeper with our clients.
Get clarity on what the clients mean on what they are saying. If they say words like “clean”, ask follow up questions: “What do you mean by ‘clean’?”, “What are the characteristics of things that you consider as ‘clean’?”, “Are there examples of other products and services that you label as ‘clean’?”. Find words that they repeat over and over again, and dig from there. Collect stories and get into the core of why they do what they do and who they are doing it for.
Don’t assume you understand. Ask and double check that you and your client are on the same page. When you have too many assumptions, you get a fuzzy brief and this is when problems begin. You won’t know what to do and you will feel anxious about doing the project. It doesn’t help you nor your client. So, ask a lot of questions and dig deeper.
Step 4: Practice active listening
For me, active listening is challenging because I’m a heavy thinker and it seems that I always have thoughts running here and there in my brain. But because I don’t want to lose anything that my client is sharing to me, I keep my questions to one topic and paraphrase their answers before moving to another one. If you can multitask, you can also try taking notes of keywords throughout the conversation. If that’s too much, just record the workshop so you can review it later.
Here’s the principle: it’s not just about asking good questions, but it’s about being a great listener. The moment you step into a strategy workshop, be fully present. Don’t allow yourself to get distracted. Listen to understand your client, not to reply. Get into the habit of recapping and confirming as you go about in the strategy workshop. Show to your clients over and over again that you want to understand them and make them feel understood.
Cheers!
Levina
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About the author:
Levina is a writer based in Indonesia. Because of Melinda Livsey, she recognized the power of brand strategy for every creative. She is sharing about her learnings as she goes to help creatives have fun in their growth and journey of building brands. Connect with her on LinkedIn and say hi!