Dublin was about 'Uncovering Creativity and Breaking Business Barriers'. We worked with author Martin Roper to understand the art of writing, Artist Siobhan McDonald to open up our mind to creativity. Gerard O'Neil to turn insights into foresight and Brian Moore on how to exploit our and our agency team's personal and business networks.

 

Martin Roper explained the principals of good writing and through a series of exercises showed us that we can all write. He also demonstrated that in a great book 'its all on the front page' and we need to be honest and say something on every page - a lesson for us all in preparing presentations!

 

Siobhan McDonald showed how artists get their inspiration and through a series of exercises had us all behaving as artists! The culmination of which was that each group produced a 4ft x 4ft canvas of a story created from the insights that we got from the earlier exercises.

 

Gerard O'Neil talked about the Future Consumer, The Future Client and the Future Agency and how they all inter-relate. He took us through the 'Circle of Trust' and demonstrated how we could improve trust through engagement and the fact that engagement is the new sales training.

 

Brian Moore showed us how to build a 'relationship referral program' based around people you know, like and trust and who know our prospects and have a better relationship with them than we do, to overcome the problem that we all love to buy but hate to be sold to. We left with a plan on how to build our referral network, identify people who do business with the same people we do and an understanding of the 5 steps of the referral process - Trust, Business Knowledge, Need Identification, Solution, Appointment.