What makes a workshop great? 3 techniques I use in most workshops

3 techniques
Have you been at, or are you going to, our upcoming Unlocking Growth marketing & sales workshop? You will recognise these techniques to get to a better outcome:

1. Structured introductions
Most workshops allow you to introduce yourself briefly (between 1 and 5 min). Typically used as icebreaker, this can be much more! Structuring what people share (and helping to say what they want) facilitates 1) more networking: you can reach out to relevant people 2) increases empathy and participation: you want others to succeed, or see we are all in the same boat 3) fosters participation: you cannot suffice by stating your name and lean back, people will ask follow up questions.
Successful questions depend on the context, I liked the (pre-shared) format Marcel Wijermars from No More Networking uses: (name company, your business in 1/2 sentences, concrete goal, what you are working on now)

2. Stated goals
Having everyone state their goal for this workshop (or if you want to save time, state the goal and ask for agreement) and circling back to it in the end auto-builds in a summary of what happend during the workshop, aligns nicely to the Peak-end theory, and again demands participant to turn their presence into a concrete stated action.

3. No QA
I hate QA's. Or the ubiquitous end slide of most presentations with "are there any questions", in the past with a Word Art "?", now most of time with a microphone. Why? They are usually either awkward (no one asks a question, then the speaker says "so it was all clear then") or very unguided. Your audience (expect for the asker and speaker) does not want questions, they want a discussion.
How to get it? It increases quality of the questions if 1) questions are aligned to the topic at hand, creating multiple explicit question points, 2) inviting everyone to ask questions whenever they want (but being able to shelf or not answer all directly, a hard skill indeed!) 3) asking questions to the audience or indicating a participation moment is coming up and 4) pre baking in time for this discussion, by not covering some content to make room for good discussion (also hard to do btw).

Why are they successful?
The common element is turning a passive audience into active participants. Active people with a stated goal are more likely to achieve it, and therefor like the workshop.

Why should I believe this?
Our workshops Unlocking Growth for Startups and Scale ups is rated 9/10 or +50 NPS by +30 participants, feedback indicates high level of participation is a main driver for this.