We run dozens of distributor research and go-to-market consulting projects every year. If your market isn't on Hub yet, ask us for a proposal.

Facilitated workshops

We run the room
so your team can
be in it.

A facilitated session built on the Global Growth Canvas. Half a day for a single region, a full day for a global screen, on site or remote. You leave with a ranked shortlist and a research brief, not a set of photographs of a wall.

Why bring in
a facilitator at all.

The canvas is free and works perfectly well on a wall with your own team. Plenty of organisations run it themselves and get value from it. What an outside facilitator changes is the politics of the room rather than the mechanics of the tool.

Internal sessions tend to resolve toward whoever is most senior or most certain. Constraints get softened because raising them feels obstructive. Entry mode gets assumed because that is how it was done last time. A facilitator with no stake in the answer can ask the obvious question, and can keep asking it.

The second thing we bring is pattern recognition. We have run the search and entry work behind this canvas in more than forty countries, which usually means we can tell when a block is wrong — when a coverage claim does not survive contact with a warehouse list, or when a registration timeline is being quoted from an optimistic memory.

Formats.

Half day
Single region
One region or one category. Around four hours including breaks, six to ten people. The right format when the scope is already narrow and the question is which of these, in what order.
Full day
Global screen
The whole footprint, or a genuinely open question about where to go next. Eight to twelve people, with time to run several markets through the canvas and compare them properly. The most common choice.
Programme
Session, evidence, reconvene
A first session to frame and shortlist, research against the evidence gaps, then a second session to decide with the answers in hand. For decisions with real capital behind them.

Run on site or remotely on a shared whiteboard. Remote works better than most people expect for this format, because the canvas does the structuring that a room usually has to do for itself.

Who should
be in the room.

The single biggest predictor of whether a session produces something usable is who is sitting there. A room of commercial people will produce an optimistic canvas and a shortlist that cannot be delivered.

Commercial ownership
Whoever will actually carry the number. Usually international, regional or channel leadership.
Regulatory or quality
The registration timeline is a constraint, not a detail. It belongs in the room, not in a follow-up email.
Supply chain or operations
Whether you can actually serve a market, and at what cost to serve, changes which markets are attractive.
Finance
What capital is genuinely available and over what horizon. Without this, appetite gets assumed.
Someone who has done it before
A person who has run an entry, successfully or otherwise. They puncture more optimism than any framework.
A decision maker, ideally
Not essential, but sessions where the decision maker was present move considerably faster afterwards.

A full day, hour by hour.

Indicative rather than rigid. The shape holds; the timings move depending on how much disagreement surfaces, and disagreement surfacing is the point.

00:00
Framing
What we are deciding, what we are not, and what happens to the output. Ten minutes, and it saves an hour later.
00:15
The long list
Every market anyone in the room has a view on goes up, including the ones somebody will argue against. Nothing is screened yet.
00:45
Whether, first
We fill the capacity column before the opportunity column. Product readiness, organisational capacity, capital and appetite. This is where the list starts shortening.
01:30
Where
Demand signal, access conditions, competitive density, per surviving market. Evidence and belief marked differently as we go.
02:30
How
Entry mode, partner profile, commercial model. Usually the point where an assumed route gets challenged for the first time.
03:15
Sequencing
What goes first, what waits for evidence, what comes off the table. Argued openly rather than settled afterwards by whoever writes the deck.
03:45
Evidence gaps
What the room was guessing. Written down as questions, owned by names, with a view on which ones would change the decision.

What we do before,
and what you get after.

Before
  • A scoping call to agree the question and the attendee list
  • We pull what is already known on the candidate markets, so the room starts from evidence rather than a blank wall
  • Where a market is on DistributorIQ Hub, we bring the distributor picture with us
  • Pre-read circulated, deliberately short
After
  • The completed canvas, one per market, written up rather than photographed
  • A ranked shortlist of market and entry-mode combinations with the reasoning attached
  • The evidence gaps as a research brief, scoped and costed if you want it run
  • A short read-out you can put in front of a board without rewriting it

Common questions.

Do we need to have done any preparation?
No. Bring the views that already exist in the business, including the contradictory ones. Sessions where everyone arrives pre-aligned tend to produce less.
What if we already know which market we want?
Then the session is shorter and the value is in the How and Whether columns: whether the entry route is right and whether you can resource it. Several clients have arrived certain and left with a different sequence.
Can you run it without us buying anything else?
Yes. The session stands on its own and the output is yours. If the evidence gaps point at research you want done, we will quote for it, and you are free to take that brief elsewhere.
How much does it cost?
It depends on format, location and how much preparation the scope needs. We scope and price before we start, so there is a number in front of you before anyone commits.

Tell us what
you are weighing up.

The footprint under consideration and who would be in the room is enough to start. We will come back with a format, a date and a price. Or take the canvas and run it yourself — it is free, and that is a perfectly good outcome.

On site or remote · half day, full day or programme · scoped and priced before we start