 Making decisions is one of the most difficult parts of collaboration and working in a team, especially when you're working on a new project or campaign. In this video, you will learn how to make decisions without unnecessary discussions using simple voting techniques. Let's go! Hi, I'm Dom, Growth Marketing Lead at AJN Smart. The video you're watching right now is part five 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 that you can watch on its own to learn an exercise that will help you solve different problems. If you missed the previous video, you can go to this playlist here and learn how to sketch a concept without having to be creative. If you have any questions about the voting techniques in this video, please leave them in the comments below. Now, back to the video. Voting is a crucial step in every workshop. It will help you make decisions in a group without all the unnecessary discussions and also help you narrow down a lot of options to just a few. For voting, we recommend getting some voting dots, just like these. So at AJN Smart, we like using the small red dots and the bigger green dots. But the main idea is that the colors are very different and also the shape, so you can tell them apart easily. Now imagine that we're running a marketing strategy workshop to create a landing page for our Black Friday campaign. And our main challenge is we want to stand out from all the Black Friday noise out there from other companies' ads and products. Now, at this stage of the workshop, each participant should have created a concept that mimics this landing page that we want to have for the campaign and also put them on the wall kind of like here in the background. And to decide which concept we'll use for the campaign, we will use three simple voting techniques. These are called heat map voting, straw poll voting, and the decider vote. So the first step is to run a heat map voting exercise. This exercise is a great start when you need to select one big idea out of many, but each idea has a lot of different details, kind of like in our concept, it's full of text, it's full of drawings, it's full of annotations. So instead of asking participants to make a big decision right of the bat, the heat map voting will serve as a great visual summary of where the best parts of each concept is. The point of this exercise is to make sure each participant goes through each concept, including their own, and use the votes to call out any important part that stuck out to them. For this exercise, we usually give each participant an entire sheet of red voting dots and we encourage them to use them all. So what they should do is they walk over to a concept, they see an area that they like, and they should just use as many voting dots as they want on that area to highlight that it's very good, they like it. They can even vote on their own concept if they want to. Unlike other voting exercises, the heat map is not binding, it's just about showing interest. So your participants shouldn't feel like they need to make a final decision, it's only about highlighting areas that they really like. Also, it's an effective way to make sure that they read every concept. Once you've explained this exercise, set the timer to approximately 20 minutes, and ask all your participants to walk up to the concepts, look at them, read them through, and put voting dots to the areas that they like the most. Throughout this exercise, encourage your participants to use up all their voting dots, even if it means putting multiple dots next to specific areas. Also, make sure you remind them of the initial challenge you had, and ask them to put voting dots around the areas that address it the most. Once the time is up and a team is done with heat map voting, it's time to move to the next stage, straw poll voting. Now, unlike heat map voting, straw poll voting is a final binding vote that each of your participants will give to the concept they think will best solve the challenge. Unlike many other workshop exercises, straw poll voting is not anonymous. Each participant will receive a big voting dot with their initials on it. So, for example, my name is Dom, I would have a D on my voting dot. Also, each participant will have to present their vote and also explain why they chose that concept to the decider. First, you ask each participant to take around 5 minutes, go around the room, and scan all the concepts. And while doing so, they should also think which one they want to choose. However, at this stage you should ask them not to cast their votes yet, instead, give them each a rectangular sticky note and ask them to write the reasons why they want to choose that concept. As the participants are doing this, you as the facilitator should remind them of the initial challenge and ask them to vote for the concept that they think will solve the challenge most effectively and not simply vote on an exciting idea that is irrelevant to the challenge. So, in our example workshop, we're trying to create an engaging landing page for our Black Friday campaign. I would ask my participants to pick the concept that they think will be the most effective in attracting and converting our target audience. Once the time is up, it's time to vote. To avoid group bias, the participants will vote at the same time. So, count down, 3, 2, 1, and ask your participants to silently place a voting dot on the concept that they decided to go for. You should also tell them that it's totally fine to vote for their own concept. Once all the participants have casted their votes, ask each of them one by one to take one minute and explain why they chose that specific concept to the decider. This will help the decider understand the reasoning behind each member's choice. It's important to keep in mind that in this exercise, the decider is not going to cast a vote. They are taking more of a passive role here and only listen to the reasons why other participants decided to choose a certain concept. So, now that participants explain the reason behind choosing a specific concept, it's time to move on to the decider vote. The decider vote is one of the most important parts of the workshop. Because once the decider chooses a concept, the team will take it away and start working on implementing it. So, you as the facilitator should give the decider one final vote, so one of these with their initial on it, and ask them to put it on the winning concept of their choice. Also, you should give them two additional votes, with stars on them that they can use to highlight any area from other concepts that they really like and want to bring into the winning concept. So, here's how you run this exercise. Give the voting dots to your decider and tell them that they should take around 10 minutes to think about which concept they want to pick. During these 10 minutes, they can consult the team, talk to them, but once it's over, they really have to make their decision. Then, when the time is up, ask the decider to place their vote on the final concept they want to move forward with, and also ask them to briefly explain why to the whole team. All right, now you've picked the concept you want to move forward with. And remember those extra two votes you gave your decider that they could use to put on other elements of other concepts? They can now take those elements and just tape it to the concept they chose. Okay, so this is how you can make decisions in a group without any unnecessary discussions. If you have more questions about voting techniques, leave them in the comments below, or you can also head over to our free facilitation community and ask your fellow facilitators for more insights. The link is in the description below. Okay, now that you've chosen a concept to go forward with, it's time for you to map out all the assets necessary for this campaign and also assigning responsibilities for your team members using the user flow exercise. If you want to learn how to do that, check out the video that's on the screen right now. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.