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"The Meahana platform enabled me to capture the attention, participation and imagination of a group of 140 of our most senior leaders at a recent off site. This platform has the potential to be a game changer in our distributed and increasingly digital workplace."
With the Olympics surrounding us, it's worth reflecting on the ways athletes train over a lifetime to achieve greatness. In sports we know the final game performance is the ultimate goal, but gaining mastery requires TONS of practice on the smallest scale possible.
Selling is no different.
While "pitch competitions" have been a staple ingredient at SKOs and sales summits for years, our experience has taught us how inefficient and ineffective they are in making any real different in performance post event.
🤔 Its generally based on a fictitious case study scenario, rather than my own account or reality.
🙄 I get scored based on a complex rubric for how "someone great" has sold historically. I end up trying to following the "expected approach" to win.
😃 I don't get to play the role of the customer to feel how the content lands from a different perspective.
😣 The prep time and actual pitches are quite long and therefore hard to get enough cycles to see trends/gaps in mine and other's performance.
Micro Role Plays are designed with simplicity in mind. A group of 2-5 individuals simply choose a buyer and a seller and the rest are observers who will evaluate both the seller and the content. The practice rounds are short (1-2 minutes) allowing for rapid drilling/skilling on topics such as responding to an objection, asking a thoughtful discovery question, introducing myself, an elevator pitch, etc.
The reason video games are so fun and effective is there is constant feedback and constant practice. You fail, your character dies, you learn from it and start again. You do this over and over until you've mastered that task and are ready for the next. Imagine you are a leader being evaluated on a long role play to judge your "executive presence". The practice round is long, intense and scores you against a complex rubric of 10 items. It's too much for anyone to gain any real incremental progress. Now, imagine you are just being evaluated on simply your eye contact in a micro role play. That's it. Just eye contact. Your heart rate slows down, you are more focused, you listen better. After doing this for a few rounds of practice, you are a pro at this skill and are ready to move to the next. In your next meeting, your customers / employees notice how much more focused you seem and it has a surprisingly strong impact on them and your credibility as a seller and leader.
One of our core beliefs at Meahana - is the concept that no-one is smarter than everyone. As a result, we believe in crowdsourcing or crowd creating sales artifacts.
In the book "The Business Artist" strong research and experience proves that the best sellers/leaders bring their own unique artistry into the sales process, rather than being a coverband of someone else or an avatar/robot of a script, list of questions, how to respond to objections, etc..
How crazy it is then, that often we create playbooks, battlecards, etc. by hiring consultants to do interviews of the "chosen ones" or the ones that were free in Q4. The consultants then report back "interview findings", which largely validate what we already know. We then use this input to create content and train it to everyone.
In cases where you will have a large group together, why not use the collective knowledge of the audience to build on what is great, bang on that, validate it, stress it, add to it, or even use Micro-Role Plays to practice specific items or behaviors. After saying it out loud a bunch of times, the content that seemed good, might not be. We've seen this countless times.
Imagine having a group of renowned artists like Beyoncé, Steven Spielberg, Adele, and Quentin Tarantino all gathered in a room. Instead of harnessing their collective creativity and allowing them to collaborate, innovate, and share their unique ideas and best practices, you restrict them to a single prescribed method, "the way." By doing so, you not only stifle their individual artistry and potential for groundbreaking innovation but also miss out on the extraordinary synergy that could arise from their diverse perspectives and talents.
Crowdsourcing fosters a sense of ownership and engagement among participants. When team members contribute to the creation of sales artifacts like playbooks and battlecards, they are more likely to be invested in the outcomes and committed to implementing the strategies developed. This participatory approach enhances buy-in and morale.
The Meahana approach uses flexible approaches and techniques, making the resulting sales artifacts more robust and versatile and easy to adapt to different sales situations and customer needs
A core belief of Meahana - don't talk at your people. Engage them. Take advantage of the fact that your event has live attendees and don't fall into the temptation to do too much "knowledge transfer" that could be done offline.
We believe that every participant at your offsite should feel deeply connected and empowered, no matter where they are or how they’re joining in. When you gather such remarkable talent, it’s not about rehashing the past or delivering monologues filled with data and charts. It's about seizing the opportunity to harness the collective intelligence of your organization.
You want to "hear every voice", but what if there are hundreds of voices coming together at once, and it sounds more like a scream? Distilling down large amounts of qualitative inputs from an audience can be made simple with the benefit of AI Clustering, which will process and organize large volumes of input quickly, clustering similar ideas and concepts together. AI helps identify common themes and patterns that might not be immediately apparent. With ideas grouped into coherent clusters, leaders can more easily compare and contrast different concepts. Lastly, by highlighting connections between seemingly disparate ideas, AI clustering can spark new creative insights.
Forget PowerPoint and stage parades. Move beyond fireside chats and routine Q&As. Instead, engage your employees in shaping the future. Let them articulate the execution of strategies in their own words, empowering them to take these ideas forward with enthusiasm. With smart design and smarter technology, we help you make this dynamic interaction a reality, turning engagement into a powerful tool for transformation.
In theory, offsites are a great tool to align your team with your strategy and new workflows. Leaders excel at defining the WHAT and quickly move on to the HOW, usually through activities or simulations designed by folks who sit far from daily operations. However, the WHY is frequently overlooked, leaving little room for team members to grasp what these changes mean for them personally and professionally.
As a team of seasoned ex-consultants, we know the power of driving alignment behind a new initiative and how to use technology to best support it, moving the audience from "hearing it" to internalizing and understanding the WHY behind the change and instilling the motivation to lean into execution. Take advantage of publicly available templates, such as the MOO Method below or stitch together your own set of activities to build your own.
We believe your offsite should prioritize the WHY— clarifying the reasons behind decisions and encouraging participants to reflect on what these changes mean for them and their role in implementation. Your team should feel involved in designing the HOW, not just subjected to changes. By creating spaces for reflection and collaborative planning, addressing dissent openly and constructively, your offsite can transform into a dynamic session where every voice contributes to meaningful dialogue, rather than just a series of presentations.