Marketing
leadership success takes more than meticulously wringing the maximum ROI from
your technology investments and media buys, using stone-cold data.
Like any
business leadership, your ultimate job is to empower the success of your
marketing team.
This is a
daily activity, to be sure. But one of the key moments you can leverage as a
catalyst for your team’s success is an offsite meeting.
Why Hold an Offsite?
The Power of Presence and Gathering
Distributed
teams have become expert at working remote, using technology; but even the most
powerful technology can’t replicate the complexly fulfilling experience of
human interaction IRL (in real life). We humans are social creatures, and
in-person interaction has an electricity — a vibrance to it — that no technology
can replicate.
And it
helps form a deeper bond.
I
remember my first in-person meeting, working with a distributed sales
enablement team. With all of the conference calls we had together, there was a
picture in my mind of what each team member looked like. (In fairness, this was
before widespread use of video conferences and LinkedIn.) Meeting them in
person sometimes surprised me as to what they actually looked like or
reaffirmed my notion. But in each case, it made me feel more of a connection to
them during our remote work throughout the year, after that meeting.
Even if
your team works together in person every day, there is a creative freedom
imbued in getting outside the four gray walls of your office building and
visiting an organic farm, a beach house, or even a city center hotel conference
room. It allows your team to physically step away from the banal concerns of
the everyday and get into a different mindset.
But like
any meeting or conference, just getting offsite to a nice location isn’t
enough. A successful offsite should have five essential elements:
5 Necessary Elements of Offsite Meetings
1.
See Through the Eyes of the Customer
I
wrestled with which point to start with, as they are all important.
But every
marketing activity should start with customer-first
marketing, so let’s begin there.
I’ve
worked with marketing leaders who instilled operational excellence at their
organizations and were great at keeping the trains running on time. But
sometimes when you’re too focused on keeping those trains running on time, you
miss the boat (pained analogy, I know).
For
example, they would start an offsite with a team exercise focused around an
operational spreadsheet used to help manage the department. But the spreadsheet
was too company-focused.
And it
makes sense why a leader would think to take that approach:
·
Too Company-Focused Step 1: Here are our goals,
·
Too Company-Focused Step 2: Here’s how we define
potential customers at different stages,
·
Too Company-Focused Step 3: What can we do to get
them moving through the funnel?
But that
company-focused approach will set the wrong tone for the offsite, and you won’t
get the marketing team’s best thinking.
Empower
your team to put the customer first. Step out of that company mindset for just
a few hours, and (metaphorically) invite the customer into the room.
There are
many methods to do that, so here’s an example of a customer-focused activity:
mapping prospect conclusion funnels. You can see a verrrrry generic version
here: Mapping
the prospect conclusion funnel [includes free PDF example].
This
keeps the meeting focused where it should be — on the customer.
2.
Get Your Team Inspired
The
marketing year (or quarter, depending on how often you have offsites) can be a
long slog of data analysis and project management, budgeting, and vendor
selection.
Don’t let
your team forget why they’re doing these activities to begin with (hint: the
customer). Make sure they walk away with a new spring in their step.
All of
these activities should start with the company’s value
propositionand its (hopefully customer-first) mission.
Start the
meeting really hitting on the transcendent purpose of everyone’s jobs in the
room (this may be too cheesy for your style, fair warning, I’m a cheeseball).
“Your tooth is killing
you in the middle of the night. It’s all you think about. You go to the dentist
the next day. And … there are no specialty diamond burs. They can’t take you as
a patient. You never get your tooth fixed and walk around miserable all day.
This is what life is like without our solutions company for healthcare
professionals.”
Or …
“From accountants to body shop owners, from attorneys to organic
chefs, most professionals don’t know how to hire the right employee. We do. And
they hire best, and ultimately help people best, when we serve them with our
human resources outsourcing services.”
Or …
“Your kid is struggling in school. You can’t figure out why. She
seems to work hard. And then one day … She goes to an optometrist, gets
glasses, and starts getting straight As. She just couldn’t see the blackboard
before. Our optical chain creates these life-changing moments every day.”
This is
your rallying cry throughout the year.
Caution: This
can be abused and overdone. A running joke on the TV show “Silicon Valley” is
how every startup claims to be making the world a better place.
“We’re making the world a better place with
scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed, ACID transactions.”
Hey
haters, back off. If your company isn’t serving a customer, then why does it
exist? Does that mean every company makes the world a better place? Unless
you’re Tesla or TerraCycle, that is probably an overclaim.
But your
brand should be making your customers’ lives better, even in small ways. And
your offsite is the best time to get your team fired up about that mission and
have it ooze through your marketing, all year long.
3.
Get Your Team Thinking Creatively
This is a
major benefit of getting off site. Hit “pause” on operations and throughput for
just a moment and think creatively.
For
example, now that you’ve set an inspirational, customer-first tone, you might
want to break your team out into groups and let them think creatively about how
to best serve customers. Then have everyone present back to the group. Here are
some questions you can use to get them started:
·
What questions/challenges/opportunities do customers have that our
product can help solve?
·
How can we teach potential customers about how our product can
serve their needs, considering they are heads-down focused in their busy day?
·
What other challenges do customers have related to our value
proposition that don’t tie to something specific we sell?
·
How could we help them with it (perhaps with content marketing)?
Those
questions should lead to a final output — map out that customer journey from
initial challenge to final solution. Bring something to the offsite that gets
your team off their computers, that is tactile, and encourage them to spread it
out through the room. Something that I’ve found works well is those giant
Post-It notes. Have people go wild with them, post them all around the room or
rooms, and then let different teams walk everyone through the prospect
conclusion funnels they came up with.
Another
tool you might find helpful for a creative exercise is the “Introductory
Guide to Developing Your Customer Theory.” It can help your team see
through customers’ eyes, and realize that they are not as focused on your brand
as your marketing team is. (Here’s an example of this tool in practice — “Customer
Theory: How to leverage empathy in your marketing” (with free tool).)
4.
Build Camaraderie
When
teams work together like this, and present to each other, you’re not only
trying to get ideas from the ground up — you’re building camaraderie.
To that
end, consider the invite list for your offsite. Invite key participants beyond
just your marketing team. How about the CTO? The SVP of engineering? Sales
leaders? The executive leadership team? Or program managers, account managers,
communications managers, sales enablement, consultants, analyst relations, tech
support managers, online community managers — the list could go on. Even
vendors and business partners.
The right
attendee list will be different for every company; but when you invite people
from beyond the marketing team, you help build a natural rapport with
individuals who are going to be key to marketing execution through the year.
You help get them on board with your strategies, instead of being outsiders on
corporate, branding, lead generation, and field marketing decisions (this is
especially helpful with sales-marketing
alignment). Plus, I’ve found that most other departments love going
to marketing offsites, because marketers just tend to be better at planning and
running fun, exciting meetings.
Another
way to build camaraderie is to deeply experience the place you are holding the
meeting. Marketing and sales professionals can travel a lot, and a conference
room in one city can look a whole lot like a conference room anywhere else.
What is special about the city you’re in, and how can you pull everyone
together to experience it?
This can
be especially important for field marketing teams or any other team where geos
and territories matter. The leader of a field marketing team I worked with had
different field marketing directors host the offsite every quarter and
incorporate elements unique to their geo. This ranged from simple touches, like
eating chocolates and cheeses in Montreal that weren’t available in the U.S.,
to a bay cruise in San Diego that brought us to the legendary Hotel del
Coronado for dinner.
Every
team and every budget will be different, but the upside of having different
geos host the offsite is it allows them to present their hometowns to a team
they work with remotely throughout the year. It helps the team get to know each
other better. I remember the leader from Canada was particularly proud of
getting to share his country with the rest of the team.
Don’t
forget about those who can’t attend. Incorporating technology throughout the
entire offsite can be distracting (especially when there are technical
difficulties, like an old farmhouse with weak wi-fi). But you could create a
specific session dedicated to including those who couldn’t physically make it
to the meeting. For example, at Salesforce.com’s annual management off-site
meeting, CEO
Marc Benioff invited all company employees to participate virtually, using
Chatter.
5.
Have an Outcome
Once
you’ve had a chance to inspire and get creative thinking from your team, it’s
time to get more tactical and use a boring spreadsheet or whatever works best
for your team to map that newly identified customer journey against your
marketing and sales flow.
Also,
start prioritizing. The best of these sessions come up with way more creative
ideas than you can execute on right away. But it helps you start building
toward something special. Communicate which of those ideas should be acted on
right away, which should be executed in the mid-term, and which are blue sky and
should be used to guide long-term thinking.
Be clear
with your team on the next steps and how you’re going to carry these new
inspirational ideas forward, and continue to reference back to them and put
them in practice throughout the quarter and the year.
Daniel
Burstein is the Senior Director, Content and Marketing at MECLABS Institute. Daniel oversees all content
and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments
and MarketingSherpa brands
while helping to shape the marketing direction for MECLABS — digging for
actionable discoveries while serving as an advocate for the audience.
https://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/5-essential-elements-for-effective-offsite-marketing-team-meetings/?utm_source=MS-list&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&utm_campaign=BOW
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