Value proposition workshop ideas

Exercises worth running

• Everyone writes it down first. Before any discussion, each person writes one sentence describing what the company sells and who buys it. Read them out. The gap between them is the agenda for the rest of the day.
• The loss review. Take a deal you lost and reconstruct what the buyer chose instead. Groups discover surprisingly often that they lost to no decision rather than to a competitor, which changes what the proposition has to argue.
• The buyer's own words. Put quotes from customer interviews on the wall with no commentary. Ask the group which of them they could have predicted.
• Who we are not for. Ask the group to name the customer they should turn away. This is the hardest exercise of the day and the one that produces the clearest positioning, because a proposition that fits everybody persuades nobody.
• The sceptic. One person plays a buyer who already has a supplier they are happy with. Everyone else has to answer them without using a superlative.
• Say it without the deck. At the end, each person says the proposition from memory. Anything that cannot be remembered will not be repeated, and repetition is the only way this reaches a buying committee you never meet.

Questions people ask

How do you stop a group agreeing too early?

Agreement in the first hour usually means nobody has said what they think yet. The buyer evidence is what breaks it.

What if the chief executive dominates?

Everyone writing before anyone speaks handles most of it.