 We often feel the need to come up with ideas from scratch every time we look for solutions to our challenges. But you don't need to reinvent the wheel, you can just get inspired by other successful solutions to create your own. In this video, you'll learn exactly how to do that. Hi, I'm Dom, growth marketing lead at AJN Smart, and in this video you will learn how to run the lightning demos exercise. This exercise is a great way of getting your team inspired by looking at examples of how other companies are solving a challenge that's similar to yours. What tools, tricks, and workflows are they using? What do you like about it? And what can you adapt for your campaign? Reflecting on the way someone else has already solved the challenge is great for getting into solution mode while taking the creative pressure off. It also allows you to leverage great ideas while giving them your own spin. The video you're watching right now is part three of our marketing workshop series where you will learn how to run an entire marketing strategy workshop yourself and boost any of your campaigns immediately. However, every video in this series is also a standalone video where you will learn a workshop exercise to solve different problems. If you missed the previous videos, you can go to this playlist and learn how to collect the correct team and properly introduce them a challenge. While you're watching this video, if you have any questions about the lightning demos exercise, please leave them in the comments below. The lightning demos exercise will take approximately 30 to 45 minutes, depending on how many participants you have in your workshop. At the end of this exercise, your team will have gathered inspiration and references from existing solutions and compile the list of tangible features and attributes that can be applied to your challenge. Now, if you're running this exercise in person, you'll need a few materials. Every participant should have a device that can connect to the Internet. That can be a laptop or tablet or a mobile phone. The main thing is that they can use this to search for inspiration during the exercise. Also, every participant will need a yellow rectangular sticky note and a thick marker that's not too thick, but also not too thin. We like to use the Sharpie. This is because we want participants to use as few words as possible on their sticky notes. It would also be optimal if you'd have access to a projector, a TV or a big screen where every participant can show their examples. And everyone is able to see it very clearly. If you don't have one, no worries. Your participants can just show their examples on their own device. And lastly, you'll need a plain surface where you can stick your ideas on. This can be a flip chart, a whiteboard or just a wall. All right. So here are the steps for running this exercise. Step one, explain the exercise to your team. So, for example, you would say something like this, Hey team, for the next 45 minutes, we'll be running the Lightning Demos exercise. The goal of this exercise is to collect as many great examples from other companies and industries, solving a similar challenge to ours as possible. You can think of this exercise as a short research session. You're not restricted to our industry only. You can actually create Lightning Demos from any industry, from any company on the planet. The crucial step in this exercise is showing the examples to your team in the end, making all these new ideas tangible. Now, for the next 20 minutes, you're going to be looking for one to three products, companies or people who solve the similar problem to ours. Now, once you found an example that you like, you're going to write it down in this manner. You're going to write the name of the example in the top left corner of your sticky note and underneath the big idea. And then a few things that you think is worth mentioning. Also remember that you're going to present this idea to the team later. So make sure you save the link or bookmark it, take a screenshot, just make sure you save it somewhere so you can show it to the others. Step two, explain how to do the exercise by giving an example. Participants will be used to share ideas with their colleagues independently, but it's unlikely they've been put on the spot before like this to find examples so quickly and then show them to the rest of the team. They may also be unused to thinking laterally about a problem and look outside of their sector for inspiration. So make sure you give them an example of a Lightning demo before they start. Here's how I would start my example as a facilitator. I would actually remind my team of the challenge. Hey team, remember the challenge we're trying to solve is the following. We're working on our seasonal Black Friday campaign. Black Friday is very important for us because it brings in 30% of yearly revenue and allows us to expand our customer pool and reactivate parts of our old audiences. Black Friday is a hyper competitive time of the year and we won't only be competing with our direct competitors, but with all the deals and offers available out there as well. So that's why we came up with this challenge statement. How might we create a Black Friday campaign that stands out and attracts our ideal clients? Now for this exercise, I would also ask my team to narrow down their focus and look for examples for landing page experiences that they find inspiring for our challenge. So we're looking to build a landing page that people can visit when they receive an email from us and it includes a link or they see an ad from us and they click away and this landing page should include our entire Black Friday deal. Of course, you can also use the same exact exercise for finding inspiration for your marketing email sequences or the ads themselves, but for the sake of just explaining this exercise clearly, we will focus on this, the landing page experience. Next, I would show an example of a lightning demo to the team. So once you found a good example, it's time for you to fill out your rectangular sticky note. So remember, this is how you fill it out. You put the name of the company in the top left hand side corner, then the big idea underneath and list a few things that you really liked about it and that applies to your problem. So for example, I found Memoraisly, this is the company name, I put this on the top left. The main idea is that they show a lot of happy customers on their page. How they achieve that is by posting pictures from coaching calls, vertical video testimonials and written testimonials. All of these I think would be great for our own campaign as well. Next up, you have to present it to the team. So remember, you have your device and you can either connect it to a projector, but if you don't have access to that, you would just turn your laptop around or whatever device you have. For example, Memoraisly is the company I found. This is the page of Memoraisly, this is what I would say. So the big idea here is that Memoraisly shows a lot of happy customers on their website and they do that by showing happy customer faces and also they post vertical video testimonials on the page, which I think is a very great way of showcasing your happy customers and underneath, they also post a lot of written testimonials. I think we could take inspiration from this for our campaign, for our Black Friday campaign. That's pretty much it, you're done. That's one of your lightning demos. Now, before you move on, it's probably a good idea to open up the room for any questions they might have because you might have explained it very well, very clearly with an example, but in case they misunderstood something, it's good to get them out of the way at this point. It also allows the team to create, find better examples. Step three, run the exercise. After you explain the exercise, set the timer to 15 or 20 minutes and let the group get started with their lightning demos research and remind them once again, they should use their devices to look out for one to three products, companies or people who already solved a similar problem before. It's also important to point out that there are no right or wrong examples because the main aim of this exercise is to find inspiration quickly. You should also let them know that lightning demos are run in a together alone mode. Together alone means that everybody sits in the room together, but they are working individually on the task in silence. So that means no discussion, no idea or information sharing is happening between the participants. It's your job as a facilitator to reinforce the rule and gently remind your participants in case they start talking. Now, working in silence without talking to each other might feel weird to your team. So to make the atmosphere less awkward, you can put on a non-distracting playlist. We actually created one. It's on Spotify. If you search for AJ and smart workshops, you'll find it. It's a great playlist. And as a pro tip, you as a facilitator can start walking around the room in the middle of the exercise and check if everyone's found at least one example already. And if they haven't, just ask them if they feel stuck and if you can help them in any way. That will really help with the flow of this exercise. Once the time is up, give each participant two minutes to present their lightning demos and show them once again how you presented your example in step two. At this point, you should also encourage your participants to take notes while others are presenting so they can collect some ideas already during this phase that they can later incorporate into their concept. Step five, stick the notes on the wall. At the end of the presentations, you should ask each participant to take their lightning demos and stick them on the wall so they can revisit them and get inspired later in the process. And there you have it. Now you have a structured and effective way of getting inspired by other company's solutions without having to come up with the perfect solution yourself from scratch. If you like this video and want to see more videos about facilitation and workshopping, subscribe and hit the bell. If you have more questions about the lightning demos exercise, you can leave them in the comments below or you can head over to a free facilitation community and ask your fellow facilitators for more insights. The link to the community is in the description below. Okay, so now that your team got inspired by all these newfound ideas, they are eager to implement them into their own concepts. But how are they even supposed to do this concept without drawing or design skills? Check out a video that's on the screen right now to find out. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video. There is no such thing as an original idea. Mark Twain. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Pablo Picasso, maybe.