Strictly Marketing Workshop

The Strictly Marketing Club programme is unashamedly one of my favourite business activities at Henmore and yesterday's workshop reinforced my fondness for it. Such a great team of members. They set aside valuable time, taking time out from the day to day stuff that earns them immediate money and instead came along to focus on marketing. Added to that they are generous in spirit; they don't just focus on their own marketing, they stretch their brains and their energy on each others' businesses too.

If you are a business owner, taking time to focus on marketing is vital but incredibly hard to do in an effective way. As Paul observed yesterday, he wants to brainstorm his ideas, have them sanity checked and then test the detail on other people. Fine to do in the Strictly workshop environment but hard to achieve in a busy work environment or at home of an evening.

Yesterday the group set about a task of coming up with marketing campaigns for a ficticious company that was facing a difficult challenge. With a given set of limited resources they created campaign ideas to flush out sales interest from a cold list and qualify them into a sales pipeline. In 15 mins there were a number of genuinely workable campaigns fully mapped out and discussed. I think it was Brendan that articulated the take-away thought of the exercise - we do have 15 minutes that we could set aside to achieve the same in our own businesses. . . the trouble is, without the fictitious boss, the deadline or pressing circumstances we rarely apply such a rigourous approach.

Back at HQ, without the relaxed environment at Dove Studios combined with the collective creativity and resourcefulness of the group, it is hard to get into the right frame of mind to find that 15 minutes. There were, however, a good many campaign ideas generated yesterday that could be taken back to HQ and put into action.

And although as businesses owners we don't have a boss, we do have the sheet of paper with all the actions we committed to taking prior to the next meeting on 8th September.