Marketing Workshop

01The room

Who takes part, and what to bring

Get whoever writes, sells, or answers for the company: marketing, sales, founders, and the person who hears customer objections all day.

A small group works fine here. What matters is that sales and marketing are in the same room when the claims get sorted.

Setup

• The same kit: 90 minutes, whiteboards, stickies, Sharpies.
• Bring the evidence: won and lost deal notes, actual customer quotes, competitor pages printed out. Claims get checked against these in phase two.
• Set the frame: we're deciding what to say and to whom, not designing campaigns yet.

02Phase 1 · 30–45 min

Claims & audiences brainstorm

Use two sticky colors. First: every claim the company could make — capabilities, outcomes, differences, prices, proofs. 'Live in a week', 'no per-seat pricing', 'we answer the phone'. Second: every audience that might care, named specifically ('the ops lead who inherited the tool', not 'SMBs').

Include the uncomfortable claims: the ones competitors make, the ones sales makes that marketing wouldn't. Objections count as negative claims, so put them up too.

Ten-minute rounds until two minutes of silence.

03Phase 2 · 30–45 min

True and not us

Two sides: True (we can prove this today, with evidence in the room) and Not us (we can't, or wouldn't want to). Place every claim. An aspirational claim goes to Not us with a date attached; unproven counts as untrue for marketing purposes.

Most of the session goes to the discussions this sorting causes. When a claim won't settle:

Photograph the board and keep the True side. That's the raw material for every message.

When a claim gets stuck

• Ask for the proof — a named customer, a number, a screenshot. No proof, no claim.
• Invert it — if the opposite is something nobody would ever say ('we don't care about quality'), the claim is empty.
• Separate the claim from the wish — put a date on wishes and park them.
• Ask which competitors could say the same — if all of them can, it differentiates nothing.
• Skip it — a sharper claim later often absorbs it.

— Break —

04Phase 3 · 30–45 min

Message mapping

Second session. Put the audiences across the top of the board and cluster the True claims under the audience they matter to. Claims that matter to nobody come down; claims that apply to everyone are usually too generic to lead with.

For each audience, order its claims: the one that opens the conversation, the ones that support it, the proof that closes. Note the main objection each audience raises and pin the claim that answers it directly beneath.

05Phase 4 · 30–45 min

Distilling into the hierarchy

Transpose into a document: per audience — the lead message, supporting claims with their proofs, the objection and its answer. Limit it to four claims per audience so it stays usable.

Then match channels: for each audience, where do they already pay attention, and assign messages to channels, not the other way around. Close with tone anchors in the comparison format so everything written afterwards sounds like the same company.

Anchor examples

• More like a good engineer explaining than a keynote
• More like The Economist than BuzzFeed
• More like a chef's menu than a supermarket flyer

06What comes out

The document

A message hierarchy per audience with proof attached to every claim, the objection answers, a channel shortlist, and tone anchors.

Site copy, campaigns, sales decks, and lifecycle email all get written from this document instead of from scratch.