How do you align Leadership, Sales, Marketing and Development in one day?

A little while back, I was asked by a major software company to help them kick start development of a radical new set of mobile/tablet apps across their alliance and partner organisations aimed at the enterprise market.

We had found that these Software Vendors, Consultancy Firms, and Integrators had been toying with the idea, but since it wasn’t mainstream investment was going elsewhere. But the market was changing, so how could we help them shape out an innovative solution

We structured the workshop around 5 areas from looking at the current state, thinking about potential apps, working out the value of them, and then a 90-day action plan

One key element was to flesh out each business opportunity, and then then the actions required by each team (which we then transferred to a 90 day plan)

The follow up from the workshop was an ROI Calculator to then think about building a basic cashflow model for the application linked to the sales plan


The benefits of this workshops were:

  1. Bringing leadership, sales, marketing and development in one room
  2. Validation of the business idea for its value to customers, market potential, and effort to the business
  3. A clear action plan from the team for the next 90 days

So, what How does this help?

This one-day business opportunity workshop can help resolve a number of problems in an organisation:

  1. Innovative ideas don’t percolate in the business
    We saw that many larger organisations had innovative development teams but they were risk adverse in developing something ground changing. By bringing leadership together with the development team, it gave them a safe space to dream, and then ground that on reality
  2. Features are not grounded on commercial reality
    The opportunity definition section of the workshop looked at the number of customers out there, who the first 3 would be, and what they might pay. This helped ground the idea into what could generate sales
  3. Sales, Marketing, Product and Development don’t work seamlessly together
    The 90 day plan set commitments from leadership, sales, marketing and development, and uncovered dependencies on each team. It also helped shape the plans to build the tools to help sales beyond just the app. It also made it clear to the leadership to commit resources for success
  4. The Change only gets as far as a plan
    We used the ROI calculator and John Kotter’s 8 stage model, to help the leadership develop their action plan about how to make sure the rest of the business bought into and acted on plan to deliver the new app and revenue

If your team could benefit from someone outside helping get focus, alignment and planning then contact me to discuss the issues you are trying to resolve.

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