Discovery is essential to all B2B sales cycles. It allows us to tailor our approach with the client throughout their buying process to ensure a solution will satisfy their needs and their current pain points. In many smaller deals, one or more discovery calls is sufficient to get the information required to propose a solution.  

However, what if you are selling a solution that will be rolled out globally to thousands of users? What if no one person could possibly make design decisions because each business unit has different challenges and requirements? What if you have so many stakeholders that you need them to discuss their challenges altogether rather than conducting discovery calls with just one or two individuals at a time? 

This is the value of a Discovery Workshop.  

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What is a Discovery Workshop? 

A Discovery Workshop allows a large number of stakeholders to come together to collaboratively discuss their needs. It is often where a project sponsor will uncover the complexities of a challenge or even discover new challenges in regions or markets.  

Despite the advantages of running a Discovery Workshop, they also introduce new challenges when compared to a more traditional discovery call with just a couple of stakeholders. That’s why I’ve written some tips from my experience when running a Discovery Workshop. The three areas are (1) increasing audience interaction, (2) identifying the relevant roles for running the workshop and (3) the logistics to allow your workshop to run smoothly.  

Audience interaction 

A common aim for a discovery workshop or value workshop is to have a two-way exchange of knowledge and information. From the vendor’s side, this might be a recap of the product for new stakeholders, detailing an indicative project plan or explaining the scope of required stakeholders. From the client side, they will be discussing their current challenges and feeding into the project rollout design.   

However, getting this balance right can be a significant challenge. If there is too much content from the client, new stakeholders who have not been involved in the entire process may not have a good enough understanding of the potential project or product. If there is too much information from the vendor, the client stakeholder will likely become disengaged and disinterested.  

Previously, when we could run discovery workshops on a client’s site, it was easy to see when people were starting to switch off. That would give us the indication required to change some of the content to increase participation. In the virtual world, however, this can be very challenging.  

Webcams 

The first tip to help overcome this challenge is to ask participants to keep their webcams on for the entirety of the session. You can then better judge the reactions of your audience. If your audience is starting to look bored or if they are looking away from the screen, this is your leading indicator that engagement needs to increase in the session.  

Calling out names 

Second, even when there is good audience participation, it can easily become just a handful of stakeholders who are sharing their thoughts. For this reason, I find calling out individual names can help involve everyone. This may feel unnatural at first. After all, it’s unlikely we would do this in a face to face meeting. But after a while, it helps the quieter attendees to get their voices heard.  

Polls 

For large workshops where it may be impractical to give everyone a voice, regular polls can works wonders.  

Tools such as Menti, allow participants to vote in a poll, add words to a word cloud or even ask questions via their phone. The results of these polls can be embedded live within your PowerPoint with Menti’s plugin.  

When conducting discovery en mass, you can ask participants to enter their current challenges around a specific topic and see them populated in real-time on the screen. These pain points could then be grouped into categories such as technology, people, process and data. This screen can then work as a guide for an interactive discussion to determine priorities amongst the users.  

Breakouts 

With all meetings being conducted remotely due to the pandemic, many video conferencing tools have really had to up their game.  

Zoom, for example, has recently added the feature for breakout rooms during a meeting. For very large discovery workshops (think 20+ attendees), breakout rooms can be essential to drive up audience participation. Taking the results from an earlier poll, these can be discussed in depth in smaller breakout groups, whereby points are documented and fed back to the wider group.  

Different roles of a discovery workshop 

No one can run a successful Discovery Workshop on their own. A team is needed to work seamlessly together to create a smooth and engaging experience for the audience.

Compère or Facilitator

This person will introduce the day and round-up at the end. They will be in charge of introductions and will introduce each topic. They are likely to be the key relationship manager for the client such as the Account Executive or Sales Manager.  

Administrator 

This person is essential to the smooth running of the session. They can run the slides to avoid clunky change-overs between presenters. They will administer break-out rooms such as which attendees will be sent to which rooms. They will also run the overall conference call such as admitting people from the lobby, militantly muting anyone who forgets to turn off their microphone and will run the regular polling questions.  

Scribe 

There should be a vast amount of knowledge and information that is gathered from a large-scale discovery workshop that will need to be documented. Having someone from your company act as a scribe is important because listening back to the recording of a full-day zoom call is entirely impractical. The best candidate for this role is someone who understands the product and has some background on the client such as a junior Solutions Consultant or Value Engineer. That way, any acronyms can be translated and any product implications can be documented rather than just a word-for-word transcript.  

This person could also be in charge of timekeeping and, where necessary, messaging the internal messaging channel to keep everything running on time. Equally, this role could be performed by your administrator.  

SMEs to run different sessions 

Having a single person hosting the workshop for a full day can quickly become boring. By having frequent changes in speaker it can keep the session lively. The additional benefit of this can be that each different speaker can be introduced as a specialist in each topic, thus bolstering their credibility.  

For example, if your company sells multiple products, you may split the discovery workshop into multiple sessions. Having a different speaker for each product can show their individual authority in their area of expertise.  

Logistics 

Invitation email 

This is a great way to set expectations for the session. If you want to have all attendees with their webcams on a ready to speak, I find it really helps to explicitly call this out in the meeting invite. It reminds people to get dressed for the day rather than having a full day blocked out in their calendars where they don’t need to do any work! 

Scheduling 

It is unfortunately common for people to turn up to a remote meeting so I allowing for this. Although the calendar invite will be for 10 am, when participants log in, they will be greeted with a message that the meeting will begin at 10:05 am. During this time, you can have some media which plays as attendees file in.  

Along with some light background music, this could be a rolling PowerPoint presentation that showcases some of the work that you have already done for that client, or it could be the agenda for the day.  

When considering the agenda, it might be that not every person is required to attend every session. If this is the case, you can set each agenda item as a separate calendar invite, but with a single Zoom link. That way, the single session can run continuously, but attendees can manage their calendar so they can have other meetings in the sessions they are not invited to.  

Meeting setup 

It is important that everyone from your team can test their connection and their slides well before the client stakeholder join. To accomplish this, you can send a calendar invite to your team that begins 30 minutes before the workshop for setup. Most conferencing tools have a ‘lock’ functionality that can be used to prevent unintended guests from entering too early. At the top of the hour, the session can be ‘unlocked’ to allow participants to join.  

Internal messaging channel 

From my experience when running a large-scale discovery workshop, it is essential to have an internal messaging channel. This can be used to communicate times, changes to the agenda, who is presenting next or anything else you don’t want the audience members to see.  

This channel can be managed by the administrator or scribe to keep people to time. To avoid the risk of any messages popping up on anyone’s screen during the meeting, I have seen WhatsApp used to great success as this removes any risk of unwanted notifications on laptops.  

Final Thoughts 

As you can see, there are a lot of points to consider when running a large-scale Discovery Workshop. However, with the right preparation and planning, they can be an overwhelming success.  

There is nothing that beats getting all of your stakeholders in the same room to discuss their challenges and how you, your organisation and your product will add value to their company.