Episode 35: Key Takeaways from Running a Marketing Retreat

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, everyone, Julie here. Hope you're doing amazing today. I want to talk to you about running your own marketing or team retreat. In fact, it doesn't really have to be a marketing retreat. It can be any sort of team retreat in your business, whether you're just just a team of two, team of three, team of 10. One of the reasons why it's been so long since I recorded a podcast is because I've only been home three days in the last two weeks. And that's because I went to Boise to run the first ever marketing retreat for Click Funnels. I came home for two days, three days, and then turned around and went and spoke at clancon. So I've got lots of stuff to catch you up with, so I'm going to go ahead and just dive right in. So about two weeks ago, I ran the first marketing retreat for ClickFunnels, and I want to talk to you about some of the things that we implemented that you can implement in your retreats and your team meetings. The first thing is that we wanted to make sure that we had taken the dedicated time to actually get to know each other. So that's sort of one of the reasons that we did this retreat in the first place. Because we get so busy and we're running, we're running super fast. We're all over the country and we add new team members, and it can be very, very difficult to bond, especially in that setting. And we all know that teams that have bonded together are going to perform much better than teams that are all sort of disconnected. One of the things that you need to do in order to create and facilitate that sort of bonding that happens at a retreat is to make sure that you set it at outside of a normal location that people are used to. So we specifically did not do it in the Boise office. We did not do it anywhere where people typically work. We rented a home and got everybody in the home together. A home also fosters a lot More intimacy than, say, a hotel conference where everyone can sort of scatter. It forced us to have our meals together. And there were lots of different, like, nooks and crannies in the house where people could hang out. So those two things alone, like making the time to help and make sure that your team really knows and communicates well. And also setting aside a location that's not a location that you normally hang out with. So the next thing I want to talk to you about is creating the atmosphere for creativity and growth. So one of the things that we did right at the beginning of the week is I introduced the concept of the six hats. This is number one, not my invention. Now, of course, the name escapes me of the person who wrote the book, but it's a brainstorming principle that helps people understand what hat they wear. When you're in a meeting where you're discussing a new idea. So there are six hats. Let me run through them really fast. So the blue hat is the hat that is very planning based, writes lists, organizes things. So, you know, since we're talking about a business, this is a business and marketing podcast. If you were planning a funnel or a business, the blue hat would be the hat that you'd wear when you're in your project management software, putting out deadlines, writing checklists, et cetera, et cetera. The white hat is the factual hat. This is the statistics and analysis. So again, if you're building a funnel, the white hat is going to look at conversion percentages, benchmark statistics, the budget of how much traffic you would run and what you could expect as a return on ad spend. So the white hat is very analytical. It's not really concerned with emotion. Speaking of the next hat, we've got the red hat next. The red hat is the emotional hat. That's the hat that you know when you're responding to an idea, business idea, or maybe a hook or a story or an offer, you're thinking about, what's that emotional reaction I have to this new product? The green hat is the creative, the possibility hat. This is, I joke. This is the hat that Russell wears so well. He always has new ideas. Well, what if we did it this way? Or what if we did it that way? And so the green hat is just the hat of possibility. Okay. The next hat is the yellow hat. The yellow hat is what you would expect. Positive, sunny, really. This is the hat that you use when you're brainstorming the positive results, values, benefits of whatever it is that you're planning. And then we Come to the black hat. And the black hat is the hat that looks for problems, looks for the difficulties, looks for the holes. And so all these six hats are needed to have an effective project like, you know, taken from ideation all the way to execution. So I explained that to the team. And so a couple things that we did during the marketing retreat that really helped. The first thing is I identified when a meeting was very blue hat oriented or green hat oriented. And that was really helpful because if someone is in the green mode, they're in the creative mode, and someone comes in with blue, it can feel really stifling, it can feel like suffocating. And so I would say, okay, this is a green hat moment. Let's all just like think about the possibilities. And then in other times, I'd say, all right, this is a blue hat meeting. We're really going to iron out deadlines and details that pre frame changes everything when you're dealing with a group. The other thing is that it creates the opportunity to express yourself without feeling judged. Right? And it's, it's nerve wracking to speak up in a group. It's nerve wracking to say, hey, wait a second, I see a problem. But if it's pre framed in, hey, let's put on our black hats and let's look for the problems, then all of a sudden there's safety and space to actually communicate that. And so something super fun happened in the meeting organically. And we were brainstorming, we were in green hat mode and brainstorming and ideas, and we were writing on the right board. And then eventually our ideas ran out. And so I noticed the transition happening in the retreat and I said, let's transition to black hat. Let's look for all the problems. And so we started listing out all the problems. And what happened is when you can appreciate that role in someone, it all of a sudden sparked more ideas. Because the minute you heard a problem, someone who's very, very gifted in the green hat thinking will all of a sudden start thinking of an idea to solve the problem. And so we actually went back to green after black because black stirred the waters again. And so I thought that was a cool way to look at the, the benefit of being the black hat and why it's really important we don't get stuck in any one particular hat because then our brainstorming is very like 2D, two dimensional. Okay, so we did that. So setting that stage is really helpful. The other thing that we did as a company, as a team, is that we invited representatives from other departments to come to our marketing retreat. So, you know, we had all the marketing team, but we invited people like from product and product are the developers and the engineers that work on the software. And this was amazing. It gave us a really good connection point so that the departments can start to communicate and give feedback to one another. And it also created better communication channel and new ideas for the way marketing can help product and product can help marketing. So if you have a team and you have different departments, invite other people from the other departments to mingle with whatever retreat you're focusing on because you might find new avenues and new ways to bring in more revenue and reduce refunds or whatever the issues are that your business is facing. We also shared our meals together. Really helpful people who share meals together connect differently than people who don't. So whenever you run a retreat, make sure that you have meals planned. I would also suggest that you find time to cowork and chill in a retreat. Now, our retreat was five days long. I would say we had probably two solid days of brainstorm planning mode before we started to fatigue. And so I think probably the ideal scenario for a retreat is, you know, three to four days. We went five days, so it was definitely longer. But what we realized quickly in that is that we needed to just create several hours of time each day for people to actually work, chill out, kind of let the ideas marinate before we came back together in a group. The last thing that I want to share about the retreat that I thought was super fun was we definitely took an entire day just to do team building exercises. And I led this, and I will probably go into this in other podcast episodes later because they will be too long to explain here. But, but we did some personality work in the morning. And I would encourage you if you do not, if you do not understand personality stuff or you haven't geeked out on it, I would. You know, someone who's really fun, who geeks out a lot on personality stuff is James Friel. And so anyway, there's all different kinds of tests. There's Myers Briggs, there's 16, I'm sorry, disc, there's the enneagram. But understanding personality types really helps. Not just in love, relationships and family, but also in work relationships as well. So we did that. Then we did a very, very fun exercise about communication. And I'll share this because I think it's really fun. It's the peanut butter and jelly game. And the idea is I broke everybody up into a team. We had four teams and the instructions were simple. It said, an alien has come down from another planet, knows nothing about our planet. I need you to write up the instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I gave everybody, it was about 20 minutes they had, and they worked together to write the instructions. And on first glance, that doesn't seem that difficult, right? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich is pretty easy. Well, once it was done, then what we did is we had everyone read the instructions and we had four different people attempt to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich based on the instructions. And the results were hilarious because, number one, nobody actually was able to complete making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Number two, the levels of completion and what the peanut butter and jelly sandwich looked like were entirely different. In fact, one team couldn't even get their peanut butter and jelly sandwich even close to made. And the whole point of this exercise, besides laughing hysterically, and I really hope that our video team creates a little like micro episode on it, because it was really fun to watch, is that the way we communicate, the way we give instruction and the way we hear instruction is subject to wild amounts of interpretation. And so if you go to someone on your team and you say, this is urgent, what urgent means to you and what urgent means to them is entirely different. If you don't set things in concrete mode or you speak in sort of endless amounts of vagueness, you are subjecting yourself and your team member to misunderstanding what you need and what you want. And so it's the importance of giving really accurate feedback. And so that game was really fun. And then in the afternoon, we did some exercises where we created a safe space to talk about problems and issues and things that we see that we need to be better at. And we created that safe space using anonymity, so they were able to write out the problems on post it notes with no names. And then we went through an exercise where we looked at who has ownership of the problem, what the problem is, why the problem is happening, and who can help resolve the problem. That's what we did in our marketing retreat. We came away with incredible amounts of ideas, brainstorms, project plans, new bonding experiences, connection, and a new awareness of who we were as, who we are as people and how we communicate. So I encourage you to get with your team once or twice a year, to set aside time to get out of the office or wherever you normally work, to rent a home, and to really focus on each other, your team building and your project plan. So I hope that's helpful. As always. Appreciate you guys. Talk soon. Bye. 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