Marketing strategy workshop · Two half days
You do not have a marketing problem. You have an unmade decision.
Two half days with your team. We work out who you are for, what you sell them, and what to do first. You leave with a strategy written down, not a list of tactics.
Why this exists
Most marketing does not fail in the execution. It fails before anyone opens a design file.
The website describes the business you used to be. The proposition is a list of services rather than an outcome anybody wants. You sell to everyone, which means the message lands with no one. There is no obvious first thing a new client can buy, so enquiries stall politely and never come back.
None of that is fixed by posting more. It is fixed by four or five people in a room being made to answer the questions everyone has been too busy to sit down with.
What you leave with
Four decisions and the plan that follows them.
- Who you are for. One primary audience, chosen and defended, with the runners-up written down rather than argued about again in March.
- What you are genuinely best at. Not the five reasons any competitor could claim. The two that are actually yours.
- The easiest thing a new client can buy. Named, priced, and described in a paragraph anyone in your business can repeat.
- What happens on Monday. A sequenced plan with owners and dates, sized to the people you actually have.
All of it written up properly and sent to you within a week. The workshop produces the thinking. The document is what makes it survive contact with a busy month.
The agenda
Two half days, split by a night to think.
Every business is different, so the agenda gets built around yours. This is the shape it usually takes.
Day one · Where you actually are
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01
Ambition and constraint
Where the business is going, what must not be lost on the way, and the honest limit on what it can absorb. We start here because it sizes everything that follows.
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02
What you actually sell
Every service on the list. Who buys it, what problem it solves, what triggers the purchase, whether it scales, and whether you want more of it. Then the question that finds the real proposition: which of these would you drop tomorrow if you could?
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03
Your buyers, and your right to win
Real clients, real deals. What they bought, who signed it off, why you and not someone else. Then the comparison that decides the year: of the audiences in front of you, where is your position strongest right now?
Day two · What you are going to do
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04
Positioning and difference
What you want to be famous for. What a client would say about you to another buyer. What you can honestly claim that a larger competitor cannot. We push past the comfortable answers, because the comfortable answers are the ones everybody else is also using.
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05
The offer
The entry point a new client can say yes to without a committee. What it is called, who it is for, what they get, what it costs, and what it naturally leads to next.
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06
Go to market, honestly
If twenty qualified prospects arrived tomorrow morning, what would happen? The silence after that question does more useful work than any audit. Channels, proof, follow-up, and who owns the engine once it exists.
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07
Priorities and close
The three things that have to change, one answer each, no discussion. Then the sequence, the owners and the dates, agreed out loud while everyone is still in the room.
How we run it
Facilitated hard, on purpose.
The most senior person in the room has usually held the whole business in their head for years, and will answer first by instinct. On the questions that matter we ask everyone to write in silence for two minutes, then take answers from the room before the founder. Four independent views beat four endorsements.
We interrupt. Politely, and with permission asked at the start, because there is a lot of ground and five articulate people. Polite consensus is the real risk in a room like this, not conflict.
And we park the brand conversation. Colours and logos are more fun than propositions, and they will swallow the afternoon if allowed. We decide what the brand has to communicate before anyone designs how.
Practicalities
The questions you were going to ask.
- Format
- Two half days, ideally a few days apart. In person works better than remote, though we run both.
- Who should be there
- Four to six people. The person who can make the decision, the person who owns delivery, and whoever genuinely knows your clients. Small is better than representative.
- Preparation
- Ours, mostly. We review what you have published, speak to you beforehand, and build the agenda around your business. Your team turns up and thinks.
- What you get afterwards
- A written strategy covering positioning, audience, propositions and a sequenced plan with owners and dates. Sent within a week of the second session.
- Investment
- Quoted per workshop, based on the size of the team and the preparation involved. We will tell you the number before you have to ask twice.
- What happens next
- Usually nothing from us. If you want help executing the plan, we can talk about that separately once it exists.
Contact
Find out whether this is the right workshop.
Thirty minutes on where the business is and what is in the way. Free, and useful whether or not you book anything.