What if your client hates your strategy workshop process?
By Levina Kusumadjaja
What if your clients decided that they don’t like your process midway through your strategy workshop?
You had a great initial call. Your client was excited, you were excited. You signed a contract, they sent you a deposit. You’re with your clients, ready to conquer Day 01 of your strategy workshop. All was smooth sailing. Until you actually started digging deeper in the workshop. Now, instead of you asking questions and uncovering golden nuggets from them, they are the ones questioning your method and your process.
“Why should we spend this many hours talking about our ideal customer’s persona?”
“Why do stories of me growing up have anything to do with my business?”
“I’m starting to wonder if you know what it is you’re trying to accomplish through this strategy workshop.”
Oh no. What now?
First of all, take a deep breath and let’s figure out what to do from there. The fact that your client is willing to pay for your thinking and strategic process shows that they do value strategy. The challenge is that sometimes, the same framework that might work for most clients might not work with this particular client. It can be because seeing many slides on the screen overwhelms them. It can be because they have never thought about the questions you brought up before, so they feel like they are put on the spotlight and pressured to give answers when they genuinely don’t know the answers.
Your goal isn’t to educate your client about how good your process really is. Your goal is to understand and help your client—with your current process or with a completely different way.
There are many possible reasons why they might feel taken aback by the process. However, the best way to respond isn’t by explaining why your framework is great and that they should just follow the process. The best respond is perhaps to step back for a moment and switch up the angle of the conversation. You know the information that you need from your clients in order to understand their problem and help solve that problem. So, be creative and don’t be afraid to completely abandon your current framework to try different questions and exercises to dig deeper.
If your client seems to find a hard time going with your current process and framework, don’t hesitate to throw that framework out the door and come in from a different angle.
If you are doing this live in an actual physical space, you can suggest for everyone to take a break and get some fresh air outside of the meeting room. Perhaps get a cup of coffee or tea, and then maybe abandon the whiteboard and keynote slides. If you are doing this online, then you can stop showing them the slides and suggest a break. And then, just talk about the things that your client love about their business and what they do. Ask them about their favorite client, ask them about what gets them excited and frustrated about their work.
Your client hired you to help them solve their problem and get to their goal; they didn’t hire you to do a strategy workshop.
Don’t overthink and don’t overcomplicate the process. You are going to be okay. The workshop was designed to help you help your clients, not the other way around. If what you have prepared doesn’t seem to work, change it up—it will work out. Stick to the goal, which is to understand and help your client get to their goal.
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!