INVEST IN YOUR PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS WITH INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS

Expand, Freshen, Fine-Tune Your Skills

Today’s customer-facing teams move between a variety of responsibilities. The lines between Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, Service, often overlap often requiring people to expand, freshen, and fine-tune their skills. We are committed to your success, which is why we offer a variety of hands-on interactive workshops.

Prime the Pump: Interactive Workshops

Below are our most in-demand workshops designed to refresh positioning and messaging, to align and engineer the opportunity pipeline around the customer buying process, to systematically define and identify lucrative market segments, to optimize your touch points with prospects and customers, to kick-start your organization’s strategy and customer-centric planning processes, and to take the steps necessary to achieve accountability with the right metrics, and create a dashboard designed to measure performance, value and contribution.

Better than a business seminar, our interactive workshops are fast-paced, roll-up-your-sleeves, collaborative work sessions typically 1/2 to 2 days. At the end of each workshop, you and your company will have a blueprint to guide next steps. The workshops are available as stand-alone professional development or can combined with collaborative consulting services.

Everyday is a Good Day for Professional Development

All of our workshops and educational programs are designed to lead your organization along the path to accelerate growth, increase customer-centricity, improve alignment and accountability and jump start your internal performance excellence efforts.

Knowing what to do is often the easy part. Making an objective analysis, customizing the “what” to your organization, and maintaining momentum are more difficult. For customized services that will build on your success, book your VisionEdge Marketing workshop to expand your skills and that of your organization.

interactive workshops professional development educational programs learning customer centricity alignment accountability measures performance management

"...we asked VisionEdge Marketing to facilitate a highly interactive workshop at our annual conference to build a message map for our industry. With Laura’s guidance our leaders created the framework for a relevant message map that will resonate with key stakeholders, in our state legislature, water utilities, and our primary end users – homeowners. We’re excited to build on the framework and begin to put the results into practice."

Erica Fearn, President - Mainspring Association Management LLC

Most In-Demand Workshops

Check out our most popular workshops. Need something not listed. Let's talk about other options and/or how to customize a learning/professional development program for you and your team.

Positioning and Messaging Workshop

Message map and positioning framework workshop

The positioning and messaging workshop creates a framework that works across the customer buying journey.

LEARN MORE

Smart managers realize that they have little chance of achieving revenue goals and building shareholder value if their company/solution is not strategically positioned in the marketplace and if key messages aren’t believable. Poor positioning contributes to long sales cycles, low close rates, customer confusion, channel indifference, and sales organization discord.

The Positioning and Messaging Workshop (PMW) is an interactive work session designed for the purpose of creating the foundation for your strategic positioning and messaging.

Over 80% of the companies who participated in a recent survey said that their teams needed to adjust or re-think their company’s positioning strategy. Unfortunately many of these companies will attempt to develop their strategic positioning platform and key messages internally without assistance from outside the organization.

This approach often results in vague, inside-out, myopic, and ultimately unbelievable positioning. The reason for this failure is that office politics and deeply held biases heavily influence internal teams.

Positioning serves as the foundation for your message map. Message maps are an excellent tool and when crafted well work across the customer buying journey.

Outcomes

Message map and positioning framework
The positioning and messaging workshop creates a framework that works across the customer buying journey.

As a result of the PMW you will have a clear idea of how your company or solution should be positioned to be successful in the current marketplace. You will have a rough draft of a positioning map that defines the following:

Value: what does the customer/persona most value (both logical and emotional) that you provide?
Brand promise: what can the customer/persona count on you for?
Value proposition: why should the customer/persona buy from you?
Meaningful differentiation: how are you different from your competitors?
Concept of singularity: what is the single thing you want to be known for?
Positioning strategy statement: a shorthand description of the solution or company that integrates the first five components into a concise, compelling and meaningful description under 100 words in length.

A rough draft for a messaging map from which you can build the key messages that support the positioning statement and the customer buying journey.

Together, the Positioning Pyramid and Messaging Map provide the blueprint for all communications about your company or solution. In fact the Brand Promise should be viewed as the essence of your entire organization, its DNA.

Deliverables

A Word document is generated containing notes from the workshop and includes the value pyramid and positioning statement constructed during the session.

Just as importantly, the workshop creates and fosters a common understanding of the company/solution benefits and enables consistent messaging across channels and touch points.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Set Your Strategic Direction for Growth Workshop

This workshop is designed to help you develop a strategy to guide your decisions, set your priorities, and determine how your organization will run and in what direction.

LEARN MORE

Do not confuse a plan with strategy. A good strategy is the foundation of your plan. Your plan is what brings your strategy to life. But first, you must have a strategy. Your strategy is what guides your decisions, establishes your priorities, and determines how your organization will run and in what direction.

Setting your strategic direction is the focus of this one-day interactive session.

In addition to the strategic direction workshop participants learning about strategy, the elements required to build a strategy, how to evaluate and select a strategy, the primary output from the workshop is a viable and actionable strategic approach for the company.

The session typically run either 8-3 or 9-4 depending on the preference of the organization with 2 breaks and a lunch (provided by the company).

If you’re looking for an interactive session that’s distinct from the traditional and typical strategy planning, this program is for you. While we’ll cover the basics, the primary emphasis of this session is selecting stratgies for growth.

Set Your Strategic Direction Workshop Structure

The basic sections of the strategic direction workshop include:

Welcome, Introductions and Objectives
Strategy: The wood behind your arrow.
- This section addresses what is strategy, why it is important, its role in the business, and various approaches
What Goes into Creating a Strategy
Building Your Strategy
How to Evaluate and Select a Strategy
Bringing Strategy to Life: From Ideation to Action
Connecting Strategy to Growth
Measuring the Success of Your Strategy
Action Plan and Wrap Up

There is no post work associated with the workshop. Any follow up work to support post-workshop activity is under a separate agreement and based on the scope of work to be provided.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Architect Your Measurable and Customer-Centric Plan Workshop

customer-centric measurable plan workshop

Learn a process by which to architect a customer-centric outcome-based measurable plan.

LEARN MORE

In the mid-1990’s, Arthur Andersen conducted a survey which found that companies with a written plan had 63% higher revenues growth and 100% more profit than those companies without a plan.

A well-architected plan provides focus and helps organizations anticipate change.

Outcomes

As a result of the Customer-Centric Measurable Plan Workshop (PFP), you will have a rough draft of a plan that includes addresses the following:

Mission: What is the purpose of the strategic business unit (SBU)?
Market: What market is served and how the market will change?
Competition: Who are the major competitors and what are their strengths and weaknesses?
Self-evaluation: What are your strengths and weakness?
Opportunities and Threats: What opportunities exist on which you can capitalize and what threats must be countered?
Outcomes: What measurable outcomes does the SBU plan to initiate to accomplish the mission?
Strategies: How will the SBU intend to achieve its objectives?
Objectives and Tactics: What activities are required to implement the strategies?
Resources: What people, facilities, equipment and funds are required to carry out the plan?
Measures and Financials: What revenue and profits can be expected as a result of the plan? How will success of the plan be measured?

Deliverables

A Word document is generated containing notes from the workshop that includes all the key elements of the plan. Any post-workshop efforts require a separate statement of work.

Ideally the company will have conducted customer, market and competitive research in advance of this workshop. Work associated with research requires a separate statement of work.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Marketing Accountability Workshop

Master new performance measurement skills. In the one day program, you’ll learn how to create a strong logic chain between activity, output and outcome measures and business outcomes, to prove the value of Marketing’s strategic role. Add on a day to learn how to use these chains as the foundation for your dashboard.

LEARN MORE

You and Your Team will Learn:

Current best practices for marketing measurement and performance management
Marketing metrics categories, and how to use them to construct metric chains between activities and business outcomes
How to use metrics chains to lay the foundation for your dashboard

Why this Workshop is Key to Your Success:

It’s more important than ever before to demonstrate the value, impact, and contribution of Marketing to the C-Suite. That it’s not just about pipeline and operational efficiencies. Marketing has a strategic role: increasing market share, customer acquisition and value, and innovation; and influencing product decisions.

Learning and adopting current best practices for marketing measurement and performance management allows you to do just that.

Use this workshop to ensure you have created a strong logic chain between campaign activity, output metrics, and business outcomes. These chains form the foundation for your scorecards and dashboard.

Best-in-Class (BIC) marketers have cracked the code when it comes to being able to demonstrate their value, impact, and contribution to the C-Suite. These marketers serve a strategic role for market, customer, and product decisions.

They focus their efforts on more than pipeline and operational efficiencies; they are in constant pursuit of market share, customer value, and innovation.

They achieve this by knowing what measures, metrics, and key performance indicators they need. The right measures, metrics, and KPIs form the links between activities, investments and business results.

The key is to define the measures that enable Marketing to positively impact customer value and business growth, high customer acquisition, share of wallet, win rates and sales pipeline values, and improve performance. The measures and metrics created form the foundation for your scorecard and dashboard.

Want to know what it takes to join this elite group? Well Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a day will get you started!

The Marketing Accountability workshop is devoted to understanding Marketing metrics, and how to create a strong chain between campaign activity, output metrics, and business outcomes. This workshop provides you with the perspective needed to select metrics that prove Marketing’s value.

During the Marketing Accountability Workshop, you and your team will:

Review what Best-In-Class Marketers do better and differently when it comes to marketing measurement and performance management
Learn the categories of various marketing metrics and how to use them to construct the chain between activities and outcomes
Understand the metrics chains to support the connection of marketing investments and programs with business results
Lay the foundation for your metrics chains and frame up your marketing scorecards and dashboard.

Deliverables

The creation of the metrics chains and a "back of the envelope" dashboard are the outputs from this workshop.

It is common for participants to move from this working session to a fast-track Collaboratory and licensing of the Accelance® application.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Market & Customer Segmentation Workshop

Use this workshop to learn a process to prioritize multiple market opportunities or focus sparse resources on those market segments with highest business potential.

LEARN MORE

The Market & Customer Segmentation Workshop (MCS) is an interactive work session designed to help organizations establish criteria for ideal segments and identify segments that would best meet this criteria. The following ground is covered: product category, pain points, market segmentation, criteria, ranking and weighting, segment selection.

Companies choose this workshop to gain expert assistance for developing market and customer segmentation and to define a method to prioritize multiple market opportunities or focus sparse resources on those market segments with highest business potential.

The workshop uses a proprietary model that avoids the common mistake of chasing markets based on size alone.

Outcomes

As a result of the MCS, you will have a market segmentation model suitable for use with each of your products. For the specific product on which the workshop focused you will have:

Identified the segmentation criteria
Determined ranking and weighting for the criteria
Selected segments to evaluate
A rough draft for an action plan to support a segmentation strategy

Deliverables

A Word document is generated containing notes from the workshop that include the market segmentation criteria, the weighting and ranking for the criteria, and initial segments to research and plot. Support for research requires an additional statement of work.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

The workshop is designed to identify the incremental behaviors that demonstrate the journey a customer persona takes, the channels they use, the touch points they prefer, and the content they consume as they move from contact to a member of your customer community.

LEARN MORE

The more you understand your customer’s journey the better you can address opportunities to improve key business results, such as product/service adoption, expanded share of wallet, customer loyalty and advocacy. This is the value of custome journey mapping.

Map the Customer Journey from Investigation to Purchase

What tools you use to create your visual map isn’t as important as how you create your map. The foundation of any journey map is capturing your customer’s steps and what we call the “incremental behavioral commitments”, from investigation and identification to evaluation and selection and ultimately to decision and purchase.Different personas may approach a sub-journey differently. They may have different motivations and may react differently to situations.

And while you’re add it, this is a good time to capture the channels and touch points they prefer at each part of the journey. While good maps leverage outside research to ensure validity, it is common to begin the mapping effort by collaboratively capturing what you believe is the journey. Mapping the entire end-to-end journey can be a very daunting undertaking. It may make sense to parse the journey into sub journeys.

Four of the most common sub-journeys are Pre-sales/Demand Gen; Sales/The Journey of the Deal; Consumption/ The Journey of Usage and Community/The Post-Sales Experience.

The Customer Journey Mapping Workshop (CJM) is an interactive work session designed to identify the incremental behaviors that reflect the journey a prospect is making from investigation to purchase, the channels they use, the touch points they prefer, and the content they consume.

Prior to the workshop, existing data, such as customer satisfaction data that reveals potential breaking points, voice of customer data about buying preferences, sales data such as win/loss analysis, marketing data related to what did or didn’t produce action are reviewed to identify the most important sub-journeys or stage within the overall journey.

Outcomes

As a result of the CJM, you will have:

A customer journey map ready for validation.
An initial set of metrics for how you will measure the success of map implementation.
Insight into breakpoints that affect the journey and preliminary plans for how to address and prioritize these breakpoints.
Ideas for content (a revision in the help or qualification scripts), touch points (call center, internal technical support, inside sales), and channel (phone, online chat, etc.) needed to support each step in the journey.
A preliminary action plan for bringing the map to life.

Deliverables

A Word document is provided within 3-5 business days of the workshop that captures what a persona does at each stage, what moves them to the next stage, what emotions they are experiencing and thoughts they are having at that stage, what questions, issues, or challenges they are likely to experience at that stage that might deter them from moving forward.

REQUEST A QUOTE

Engagement and Experience Touch Points Workshop

Pipeline Engineering for Marketing and Sales Alignment Workshop

Scenario Analysis to Plan for "What If"

Workshop

scenario analysis scenario planning competitive intelligence competitive insights customer experience

What are some things your company can do to begin to understand how to improve customer experience and engagement? We have found that companies truly focused on improving customer engagement do at least two things: they identify all the key touch points a customer has with their company, measure their effectiveness and use them to create a map of the customer experience.

The key to Marketing and Sales alignment is have both organizations calibrated around the mission, the customer, the market, and the business outcomes. Armed with this perspective, the workshop uses the process of engineering the pipeline as an alignment tool.

What if...your customers do X? What if your competitors do Y? What if the market does X? Anticipation is essential for any company striving to be more agile. How can you improve your ability to anticipate? By becoming more adept at using the concept of scenario analysis.

LEARN MORE

Each of us can recall good and bad customer experiences – whether onpremise or via an online buying experience - the responsiveness from a supplier or the encounter with someone on the front line. As business professions we understand the importance of every single interaction a customer or prospect has with an organization, especially in today’s environment of intense competition, low switching costs, and increased commoditization.

Customer experience and engagement have evolved from table stakes to points of differentiation, as indicated by the flurry of customer experience/relationship scores and indexes now being published. More and more evidence strongly suggests that there is a link between customer experience/engagement and the financial success of the company.

So what are some things your company can do to begin to understand how to improve customer experience and engagement? We have found that companies truly focused on improving customer engagement do at least two things: they identify all the key touch points a customer has with their company, measure their effectiveness and use them to create a map of the customer experience.

Your touch point effectiveness is the key to managing customer experience and engagement. This is the purpose of the interactive Touch Point Effectiveness Workshop (TPE).

Outcomes

As a result of the TPE Workshop, you will have

The initial inventory of touch points customers encounter throughout their life cycle along with its operation role and purpose within the customer experience,
The initial scoring of the value of each touch point in terms of its impact on the experience
An initial assessment of each touch points effectiveness.

Deliverables

A Word document is generated containing notes from the workshop that includes the initial inventory of your organization’s touch points, a map of the touch points as they relate to the customer life cycle, and a 2X2 grid that depicts how each touch point relates to the operational and customer experience effectiveness.

LEARN MORE

Common issues such as long sales cycles, lack of qualified opportunities, and stagnate pipelines often suggest that there is a need for the organizaiton to address their pipeline engineering process. This process reflects how the internal organization will function and is synched to the customer buying process.

In many organizations Marketing is charged with “generating opportunities” and Sales is charged with “closing deals.” What should be a highly collaborative effort often becomes a lightning rod for inter-department friction. The cause of this friction is most often traced to several factors:

The lack of a systematic approach for managing opportunities from contact to customer can result in.
Inconsistent or vague definitions for the various stages of the sales cycle.
Lack of understanding of what stages exist between an initial contact and a closed sales order.
Inability to accurately forecast the necessary quantity of qualified opportunities to be generated.
Inability to accurately forecast the number of closed sales for any given month.

The key to Marketing and Sales alignment is having both organizations calibrated around the mission, the customer, the market, and the business outcomes.This workshop takes this approach to engineer the pipeline that is also an alignment tool. The Pipeline Engineering for Alignment Workshop (PEW) is an interactive work session designed to help companies engineer a systematic buying pipeline model that can function as the single most important performance dashboard how well Marketing and Sales are working together to achieve the mission and business outcomes. In addition to facilitating alignment between Marketing and Sales, participants find the workshop serves as a terrific vehicle for aligning company strategies and tactics associated with improving discoverability, engagement, and new deals.

Outcomes

As a result of the Pipeline Engineering worskhop, the Marketing and Sales organizations will have alignment around:

The market strategy for customer acquisition, growth, and retention
How success for customer acquisition, growth, and retention will be measured and the expected contribution by each organization
A customer-centric pipeline that reflects how the organizations work together and are aligned around customer buying process
Clear definitions for each stage of the process, lines of responsibility for each stage in the pipeline and what constitutes when an opportunity can move forward in a stage
Marketing and Sales measures and tactics associated with each stage

Deliverables

A Word document is generated containing notes from the pipeline engineering workshop that include the how the internal process aligns to the customer buying journey, estimated conversion rates at each phase, number of contacts required for each sales order, and preliminary tactics, responsibilities and measures assigned to each phase of the pipeline.

This workshop is often paired with the Customer Journey Mapping workshop and the Touch Point Effectiveness workshops.

LEARN MORE

Scenario analysis is a valuable data and analytics tool every company can use to help hone their skills at anticipating and preparing for a variety of business situations and outcomes, including competitor moves, customer experience and market dynamic.

This workshops explores how to employ scenario analysis to help you revisit your strategies, challenge your assumptions, stimulate internal discussion, and detect early warning signals needed to insure your company continues to remain competitive, creates the desired customer experience, and is prepared for possible market changes.

Outcomes

As a result of the Scenario Analysis workshop your team will learn how to:

Plan for and anticipate the unexpected
Deliver on the promise of customer experience
Understand the value of creating scenarios
Learn the steps for scenario creation
Address a potential scenario and its possible variations and impact to your organization.

Deliverables

The output from this workshop is captured and provided in a PowerPoint.

REQUEST A QUOTE

INVEST IN YOUR PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS WITH INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS

Expand, Freshen, Fine-Tune Your Skills

Prime the Pump: Interactive Workshops

Everyday is a Good Day for Professional Development

Most In-Demand Workshops

Positioning and Messaging Workshop

Set Your Strategic Direction for Growth Workshop

Set Your Strategic Direction Workshop Structure

Architect Your Measurable and Customer-Centric Plan Workshop

Outcomes

Deliverables

Marketing Accountability Workshop

You and Your Team will Learn:

Why this Workshop is Key to Your Success:

During the Marketing Accountability Workshop, you and your team will:

Deliverables

Market & Customer Segmentation Workshop

Outcomes

Deliverables

Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Deliverables

Engagement and Experience Touch Points Workshop

Pipeline Engineering for Marketing and Sales Alignment Workshop

Scenario Analysis to Plan for "What If"

Workshop

Deliverables

Deliverables

Deliverables

Step 1

Schedule A Meeting

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Together we'll finalize the plan and spring into action!

Most Popular Pages

Resources

Engage

Start a Conversation

INVEST IN YOUR PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS WITH INTERACTIVE WORKSHOPS

Expand, Freshen, Fine-Tune Your Skills

Prime the Pump: Interactive Workshops

Everyday is a Good Day for Professional Development

Most In-Demand Workshops

Positioning and Messaging Workshop

Set Your Strategic Direction for Growth Workshop

Architect Your Measurable and Customer-Centric Plan Workshop

Marketing Accountability Workshop

Market & Customer Segmentation Workshop

Customer Journey Mapping Workshop

Engagement and Experience Touch Points Workshop

Pipeline Engineering for Marketing and Sales Alignment Workshop

Scenario Analysis to Plan for "What If"

Workshop

Step 1

Schedule A Meeting

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Together we'll finalize the plan and spring into action!

Most Popular Pages

Resources

Engage

Start a Conversation

5 Ways Customers Value VEM