Thoughts on Brian's preferences when walking someone through a strategy session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_oTqsNxczc

Transcription

The dreaded strategy session.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I've worked a long time as a strategist and one of the things that are very common in the field and in the field of consulting is the concept of the strategy session.

When I first started, it was an uncommon term, but it has become synonymous. It's been everywhere, ubiquitous, I should say.

You see strategy sessions are offered all the time, are strategy sessions.

And I'm saying this from the perspective of somebody who uses strategy sessions, I still haven't renamed my strategy sessions, maybe by the time you're watching this will have a different name for it. Because I don't like to be painted in the same sense of how other strategy sessions are.

So I'm going to tell you, for those of you who don't know what they are, I'll explain that this is for people who have either been through one worthy recipient of strategy sessions, or for those who are putting on strategy sessions.

I like to talk with you because this is a really interesting concept.

When I first started out, I'll tell you how it happened is when I first started working in the field of consulting.

This concept of having a strategy session, and I can't remember what we were calling it originally something like a discovery meeting or something of that sort. And there's a handful of phrases that describe them out there.

And what they?

What they really are, in the long run is a sales pitch.

In most cases, they're a disguised sales pitch.

I went through one today, and I wanted to tell you more about it.

I was interested to see where it was going to go based on who was putting it on it was by a rather large company. And also, I wanted to see, you know, the process, I figured there would probably be some type of pitch toward the end that's in most cases, what happens. And I just wanted to see how that how it ended up working.

I love going in and being able to see this from the customer's point of view as much as possible. Because one thing that I found that works in a strategy session is to not pitch at all, at the end you offer a doorway to walk through if they're interested in having a further conversation about working with me, or what have you.

But try to offer as much value upfront, and then see where they go from there. That has worked out well for me, it's allowed me to be able to set aside people who would not make good clients, and partners, and also be able to have further conversations with the people that would and so it's really for my benefit, it's for their benefit because they get something out of it.

And that was always my goal is that give something and to eventually get something from the right people.

So that's kind of how business works, isn't it, but it tends to be used more and more as a sales tool and that's it.

And so you a lot of times people are put in this position, and there is a very specific process that they take you through of asking questions.

If the person's very skilled, they're good at asking questions following having follow-up questions, getting down to the meat.

And especially if you have a sale at the end,