In this episode of the Early Stage Marketer Podcast, the host asks a guest to share concrete advice for running a successful stakeholder workshop. The guest outlines four key recommendations: (1) clearly explain the workshop’s purpose and why each participant’s role matters, ensuring senior stakeholders see the value of their time; (2) make the session interactive by using worksheets or exercises rather than a lecture‑style format; (3) close the workshop by sharing the outcomes and demonstrating how the insights translate into real‑world marketing and sales actions; and (4) schedule the workshop at a time that respects senior participants’ availability and avoids feeling like a time drain. The conversation emphasizes the difficulty of gathering senior leaders and the importance of purposeful, engaging, and time‑efficient workshops.
Chapters
Hi, welcome to the Early Stage Marketer Podcast, where I speak to marketers in the trenches doing the work. In just 20 minutes, you hear the story of one challenge they faced, how they navigated it, and what they learned from it. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and share with a friend. Yeah, it does. I— before we move to the next question, I just want to dig a bit deeper into just one thing you said. You talked about workshop. So if someone wants to host a workshop for stakeholders, just with the same, with the same objective in mind, how would, what tips, what advice would you give them to help them host their first successful workshop?
I mean, that's a good question because all things considered, it can be very like, it can be difficult to bring people together, especially when they're like more like senior level, right? But I think the first thing is that you need to, they need to know like what is happening and why it matters so that they know that, oh yeah, they're actually like playing a role here and this is not going to be a waste of their time. Yeah. The second thing was that it was an, I made it into more like an exercise where there was actually like a worksheet that they could work on. So it was very like interactive. It wasn't like a, oh, like I'm just talking, asking questions and all of that. So it was interactive and everyone was like very involved in the process. And at the end of the day, like sharing like the outcome of that session, right? So like they could see like how, yeah, like the session really like was important. It was valuable. It was useful. And they can see like the insights that were gotten from like the insights discovered from just like that session and how it's like plays out in like real life, how we apply it. Um, on the marketing side, on like the sales side and like all of those things. So yeah, like those were like the, I think, 4 workshops. Um, and of course finding a time that works for everybody that also doesn't feel like it's just like eating into their time. Um, so yeah, I think those 4 things were, yeah, that's how I like, I went about like the workshop pretty much. Yeah.
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