Making clients stick to the plan
Workshop outcomes need to make rational AND emotional sense for your clients
Despite the avalanche of stuff about to do Business(tm) in a rational way,
emotion still gets the best of us more often than not.
let me illustrate this with a story:
A fictional example (based on lots of real clients):
You work with a client to define their next steps to solve a problem.
They went through the workshop and it's now clear what must be done:
Your client needs to book calls with their customers to uncover their pain points. Your client will use that information to create better offers than address a real need and sell more.
Your client is giddy with anticipation. They cannot wait to get started.
They might even send you a middle-of-the-night email thanking you again for helping them. You feel competent and excited for them.
And then nothing.
Days go by. Tasks that seemed urgent AND important are now forgotten. Like amber flowing over an ant, your client's to-do list covered those plans with the demands of the current week.
Why don't they execute on the plan they co-created with you?
They were so eager to start!
Let's crawl into your client's brain and see what happened:
It's a cliché to repeat that emotions rule us. It is also something that we need relentless reminding of.
When you and your client go through a workshop, even when using a logical sequence of questions, exercises and decisions, they can still get lost.
Lost not on the logical structure, but lost on an emotional labyrinth of fears and desires.
Back to our example:
At the workshop your client can see why it makes sense to book calls with their customers. Their brain screams at them:
-THIS MAKES SENSE. LET'S DO THIS!
But the brain can only shout for a while. The emotional thrill of a great workshop runs out and the little voice in their heads remains. Not loud, but unwavering:
- I hate calling people on the phone. Reminds me of my career's early days and I don't think I'm even good at it.
As a result, your client will probably not follow up on that plan. They will feel bad about it in two ways: They don't like the idea AND they feel guilty about not executing on it.
Solving your client's emotional blocks to act
For workshops that are about planning I investigate:
what my client has done in the past and…
…what they'd like to Repeat, Try out or Avoid in the future.
By anchoring this three things in their lived experience we both instantly understand where to place our bets in the plan we are drafting.
Repeat and Avoid are areas of most certainty. For tasks in the Try out space you design a low-risk experiment.