# CoreQuest Workshop ## Moderator's Guide *CoreQuest Workshop © by Teresa Patrick, licensed under [CC BY-SA 4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).* --- ## Introduction "I need you to create a website that makes it clear [we are awesome] from the moment a visitor first lands on our page." "Great! I'm taking notes. Why should customers choose you?" Can you answer that question in a few profoundly simple statements for the products and services you are building and/or marketing? If not, the CoreQuest workshop can help. Designed with technical product and service companies in mind, the CoreQuest method helps teams break through common mental and communication barriers to develop simple, compelling messaging for complex products. You know you offer compelling value — but quickly explaining that value to prospects requires a surprisingly deep understanding of the connection between what you make and what customers need, want and believe. The CoreQuest workshop brings cross-functional teams together to walk through your product or service offering from your customers' point of view (POV) and then connect that POV to your offerings. The result: new insights that drive extraordinary content and profoundly simple, but effective messaging. While designed to improve marketing, insights from past workshops have shaped product decisions, improved operations, shortened sales cycles and more. When you equip your people with insight, they use that insight to solve problems across your org. Every insight the workshop surfaces now has a second, compounding destination: written down clearly, it becomes standing context for your company's AI tools — the difference between AI output that sounds like everyone and AI output that knows your business. Your AI is only as smart as what your company has written down. This workshop is how you write down what only your people know. ## How to Use the Worksheets There are three ways to run CoreQuest, and they share the same worksheets and the same sequence: 1. **Cross-functional workshop** — the full version: a human moderator, the right people in one room (or one call), described below. 2. **Solo or small team with an AI moderator** — copy the AI Moderator Prompt (included in this kit) into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and run the full sequence in a sitting. The ideal moderator was always someone with limited product knowledge who asks the dumb questions — which describes an AI meeting your business for the first time, exactly. 3. **Asynchronous team session** — use CoreQuest Session, the free tool at corequest.net: every answer is recorded with its author's name automatically, colleagues build on each other's attributed notes, and the deliverables are generated with provenance assembled. See "The Asynchronous Option" below. Whichever mode you choose, the destination is the same: completed worksheets that become both your messaging foundation and the AI Context Pack that grounds your company's AI tools. ### Cross-Functional Workshop The best use of these workshop materials is in the context of a cross-functional meeting with participants who represent your customers, sales teams, product development, operations, marketing and business strategy. A moderator steps the group through each of the worksheets, keeping the meeting on task, asking clarifying questions and summarizing the group's responses. We recommend using a moderator with limited product knowledge who can ask the "dumb questions" that require simple explanations. This approach also fills important gaps for less experienced team members who often feel uncomfortable asking "obvious" questions. Workshops have been run successfully as a single three-hour meeting, a series of three one-hour meetings and as a three-day off-site. Online meetings are best limited to a maximum of two hours per session. The moderator might consider holding a series of one-on-one meetings with one or two people in each functional area ahead of the workshop. This helps the moderator identify the most productive discussion areas which, in turn, makes the workshop more focused and efficient. The worksheets can be adapted for your needs but **the sequence is important**: **Customers.** The first set of worksheets focus on defining your customers and then exploring their mindset, job responsibilities and motivations. A "customer" can be a person who makes the decision to purchase, an individual who champions the sale, or anyone else in the buying process. You should define their role and level of influence in your customer description. You can run this exercise with other stakeholders such as investors, media or job candidates to help inform messaging and marketing strategy for those audiences. It is advisable to complete the customer exercises before adapting for other audiences. Your primary customer value proposition drives everything else. **Products and Services.** The next set is a deep dive into your products and services. It is important in this section for product experts to get specific about what the product or service does and does not do. There is often a desire to "market ahead of capabilities" — or market as though future product enhancements are already present. For the purposes of this meeting, it is important to be straightforward about current product truth vs roadmap. Your sales and marketing team members will be better partners if they are equipped with a clear understanding of "real" vs "aspirational" features and benefits. This is also the place to describe the competitive landscape and how your product or service offers differentiated value. **Connections.** The third set of worksheets explore the connections between the customer and your offerings. This is where new ideas around messaging and positioning typically begin to take shape. **Messaging and Positioning.** The fourth set of worksheets guide the development of a key outcome of the process: effective messaging and positioning that connects with customers and drives engagement. This set of worksheets is NOT intended to be completed in a group setting. Give your creatives time to reflect with access to subject matter experts as needed. Drafts can be reviewed and refined with the larger team. It's fine for any and all participants to suggest specific messaging and content, but your messaging creators and marketing strategists need space for reflection, integration and refinement. ### Individual or Small Group While cross-functional workshops are ideal, individuals and small teams can follow the same process on their own. If possible, schedule a series of short meetings with co-workers in sales, operations, product development, customer service, etc. to review relevant questions. Post the populated worksheets online to invite additional collaboration and be available for follow-up meetings to field any new ideas the process may have sparked. Think of the process as taking your product or service apart, examining it from different angles and then reassembling it. You are pushing your brain to make new connections; to spark new insights from familiar knowledge. The AI Moderator Prompt in this kit runs this same process with an AI assistant asking the questions — the fastest way for one or two people to complete the full sequence. ### The Asynchronous Option: Automatic Credit Cross-functional calendars are hard to align, quiet experts get talked over in rooms, and — the deeper problem — credit assigned by memory after the fact depends on someone remembering. An asynchronous run addresses all three, and it changes the nature of attribution: instead of a practice the organization must honor, credit becomes a property of the record itself. **How it works.** Post the worksheets in a tool that stamps every contribution with a name and a timestamp — a shared document with comments, a discussion thread, a channel per worksheet. Seed each worksheet with one or two starter answers. Invite contributors role by role, and prompt across roles: "Maria in sales engineering says prospects stall at the security review — does support see the aftermath of that?" One person's answer becomes the prompt for the next. This is the water-cooler moment, distributed across a week instead of compressed into three hours — and unlike the live room, every contribution arrives pre-attributed by the platform. **The purpose-built option.** CoreQuest Session, the free tool at corequest.net, implements this protocol directly: every answer is stamped with its author's name the moment it's written, colleagues build on each other's attributed notes, and the AI Context Pack is generated with the provenance section assembled automatically. No accounts, no server — the session lives in a file your team owns. **Compiling (if you're using your own platform instead).** When the thread has run its course, give the full record — names included — to your AI along with the AI Context Pack template, with the instruction to preserve every contributor name in the provenance section. Attribution assembles itself; removing it would take deliberate effort. The moderator's job shifts from running a room to tending a thread: asking the whys, connecting contributions across roles, and drawing out the people who haven't spoken yet. **The trade-off, honestly.** Async loses the live collision energy of a room — the moment someone builds on an idea seconds after hearing it. The strongest format is hybrid: run the worksheets asynchronously first, then hold a short live session to chase the sparks the thread surfaced. Note that the method's built-in reflection time comes free in the async format. ## Process Notes ### Process Stages **Goals.** The first step in planning for a workshop is defining your goals. A common request from nervous managers is a list of outcomes you expect from the workshop. The challenge and the magic of this process is that you don't know in advance what insights will surface nor what the impact will be. A reasonable list of expected outcomes for a CoreQuest Workshop includes: - **Messaging direction.** Focusing on the connections between key customer and product truths will equip creatives to build more effective messaging and design assets. - **Specific deliverables built from workshop insights.** Examples include a messaging grid, value proposition statements, content marketing strategy documents, and the AI Context Pack that grounds your company's AI tools in the workshop's insight. - **Improved alignment** between marketing and its stakeholders and partners in sales and product development. - **Improved onboarding** of marketing partners and new hires. The completed worksheets make excellent onboarding material to help new marketing colleagues develop better marketing content and campaigns. They are onboarding material for your AI, too. **Getting buy-in.** Workshops empower employees and external marketing partners to be better at their jobs. The impact is both powerful and intangible. The steps required to gain buy-in for a workshop will be different for every company, but as a general rule it is useful to advocate the value of the workshop process with partners in marketing, sales, product development as well as the leadership team that needs to approve. The greater the frustration with the status quo, the easier it may be to gain champions. Asking leadership to approve a three-hour meeting with multiple busy people from across the organization is a hard sell without a lot of context. It involves reputational risk. Engaging a cross-functional group in an ineffective process is a very public failure. You need to create confidence that the workshop will be focused, well-executed and effective. **Running the workshop.** - **The Moderator.** Selecting an effective moderator is key. You want a moderator who will inspire engagement, draw out the quiet skeptics, follow up on important insights and keep the meeting moving forward. A good moderator will set the stage, explaining why the specific participants were selected and ask them to lean into the process. - **The Opening.** A great way to open the meeting is with a powerful example of an important customer truth. A one-minute video highlighting the problem your product solves or a common misconception you need to overcome, a compelling story or a live testimonial can all engage the group quickly and start everyone off with the right mindset. - **Asking Why.** During the meeting, it's important to demonstrate curiosity — asking multiple "why" questions at key moments to move past easy, obvious answers to uncover deeper insights. - **Time management.** For a three-hour workshop run either in one afternoon or across three days, each hour is allocated, in order, to: 1) Customers, 2) Your Product/Service, 3) Connections between the two. For longer sessions you may choose to allocate more time to customers and connections and less to the product/service itself. **Follow-up.** It's a good idea to follow up the meeting with a readout that reiterates the goals, process and participants and then summarizes key insights. If you post the worksheets publicly, you can link to them and invite additional collaboration. If you are developing messaging grids, value proposition statements etc. from the workshop insights, you might explain your timing and process for review, approval and deployment. **Extending the benefits.** The worksheets can be posted for public access and comments. This allows the larger organization to benefit from the insights surfaced and to add their own. Revisiting the worksheets periodically can be a useful tool for improving collaboration between teams. ### A Warning: Don't Train Customers Not to Trust You You can present something in marketing materials that is technically true but functionally untenable. Product marketing tends to love the glamor of the unique claim — but if customers bite and then realize they've been had, you hit a short-term goal at the cost of long-term trust. Every untenable claim is a lesson you teach your customers: *don't believe us.* Customers learn fast, and they teach each other. A note for leadership: organizations incentivize this behavior when they push product marketing managers to hit specific marketing targets quickly. If the number is due this quarter and the honest claim won't move it, someone will find a technically-true claim that will. The moderator should watch for this pressure in the room — the "real vs. aspirational" discipline in the Product worksheets exists to counteract it, but the incentive problem is above the workshop's pay grade. It belongs to whoever sets the targets. The interest rate on trust debt has gone up, in both directions. On the way out: an AI grounded on hype-adjacent context doesn't know a claim is untenable — it will generate that claim at scale, in every channel, with perfect confidence. On the way back: the disappointment no longer stays private. Burned customers write the reviews, forum posts, and comparison threads that AI assistants read when the next prospect asks who to trust. A misleading claim used to cost you one customer and their immediate circle; now it becomes part of your machine-readable reputation, repeated to every future customer by the very sources at the top of their chain of trust. Three practical controls: - **In Exploring Solutions (Worksheet 14):** when you test what AI assistants say about you, note whether they surface past disappointment — "users report that…" language is trust debt coming due. - **In the AI Context Pack (Worksheet 15):** the shipped-vs-roadmap split is a trust control, not just an accuracy control. Treat it that way in review, and update it every release. - **For leadership:** if the quarter's number can only be hit with a claim the product can't keep, the workshop can surface that tension — but only leadership can remove the incentive. That conversation belongs above the workshop. ### Selecting Workshop Participants Running a great workshop starts with selecting the right participants. For each category, a good strategy is to ask several people who they would turn to in each group if they had a question. Or ask, "who is the most insightful person you know on this team?" The same name or couple of names will typically come up repeatedly. Those are the people you want. - **Marketing.** Your marketing team or vendor is probably organizing and running the workshop. It's a good idea to allow as many folks on the creative team as possible to participate or view the session. The first-hand insight will improve their ability to create great content and strategies. - **Customer Representation.** You need someone in the room who can represent the customer. This might be someone in the org who has held a customer role or an actual customer who agrees to help out. - **Sales.** You need one or more successful sales reps in the room. Your salespeople know how sales get closed and what the common blockers are. They know who answers the phone, who accepts meetings and why. They know what their customer has to go through to get a sale approved, what the competitive landscape looks like and the most common barriers to sales. They also have first-hand experience delivering the messaging that marketing has tossed over the fence to them and are viscerally familiar with how well it was or was not received. A common objection to including salespeople in marketing discussions is that they are "coin operated" and only care about programs that will help them close sales today rather than positioning that will also help future offerings or planned strategic shifts. While this may be true, your marketing colleagues should be smart enough to filter for this. Salespeople have critical, revenue-impacting insight that you need in the room. - **Business and Product Strategy.** You need people in the room who understand core business and product strategies and can help keep the conversation focused on areas in which the business needs and intends to invest. This could, but doesn't need to, be an executive. Too strong an executive presence is risky as it can stifle sharing or motivate posturing behaviors. It's important to be mindful of the politics in the room. - **Product Development.** You need people who know the product or service inside and out. They know what it does and doesn't do today as well as the current roadmap. They also have a good idea of what new features are easy to add and what would require significant investment in development or training or new hires. - **Customer Service.** It can be helpful to have folks in the room who can speak to frustrations customers encounter deploying and using your products. ### Engagement The best workshops consist of participants who are engaged, active contributors. Tips to improve engagement include: - **Executive sponsorship.** Request a short supporting statement from an executive for the meeting invitation. A pre-taped expression of support that can be played at the workshop kick-off is also helpful. - **Demonstrate interest and respect.** You are running this workshop because you believe the people you invited have important insights to share. Tell them that upfront. Show genuine interest in their experiences and contributions. - **Highlight the brain science.** Some of your participants will appreciate understanding the brain science behind this process: your brain is 3% of your body's mass but uses 20% of available glucose. Essentially, your brain is an energy pig. To survive, our brains have adapted to reduce energy demands by reverting to pattern-based thinking whenever possible. The more experience you have with something, the more your brain will try to rely on existing knowledge rather than forge new connections. The CoreQuest process works to circumvent these shortcuts by asking everyone to look at familiar things in new ways. The people in the room all carry the seeds of powerful insights. You are asking them to lean in to a process that will help them unlock more of their own intellectual potential. - **Engage the cynics.** Look for the skeptic scowling in the back of the room with their arms crossed — and draw them out with specific questions. Some of the smartest, most insightful folks in your org may be frustrated by past experiences with having their ideas dismissed. The scowl indicates they still care. If they believe you are ready to hear what they have to say, they will open up. - **Stay curious.** You selected smart, experienced people. You created an environment in which people can share freely and build off each other's ideas. So what happens when someone starts to champion a truly bad idea? Dig deeper. It is possible you are wrong and they are right. It is also possible you are right, but they are responding to an important issue you missed. What is motivating this idea? What problem are they trying to solve? The specific idea being championed is less important than the thinking behind it. In general, don't get frustrated. Get curious. ### Credit It can be hard to pinpoint the origin of breakthrough ideas. That said, it is important to make an effort to credit individuals and teams for their contributions as much as possible. This is more than simple fairness. Great ideas can come from anywhere in your organization. In particular, individuals closest to your customers often have high-value perspectives to share but may lack high-status job titles. Failing to credit contributors can harm motivation and team cohesiveness. Continuous, conscientious credit sharing, on the other hand, increases motivation and improves collaboration. Some ideas for credit sharing: - Name workshop participants in writing when communicating results - Call out individuals who articulated key ideas - Call out teams for specific contributions - Continue to credit contributors as the ideas move through the organization, changing in scope and shape - Find ways to credit contributors when discussing or distributing key workshop deliverables like the messaging grid or value proposition worksheet - Acknowledge that a complete accounting of who contributed what is impossible and provide opportunities for people to step forward to give themselves or others credit if they wish to do so **Credit matters more when AI is involved, not less.** When insight flows into a shared context document or an AI tool, the contributor's fingerprints vanish by default — and rational people respond by hoarding what they know. A company full of insight-hoarders will have very fluent, very generic AI. The countermeasure: credit travels *inside the artifacts that feed the AI*: - Name contributors, with their specific insights, inside the AI Context Pack itself (Worksheet 15, Section 9). Provenance then survives every derivative use. - When the AI's answer isn't enough — and it regularly won't be — the pack doubles as a directory of who the real expert is. The person who articulated the insight becomes the named source, consulted by name. That is more visible than knowledge that only ever lived in hallway conversations. - When the pack is updated, announce whose insight drove the update. **Two kinds of contributors — and what to measure.** Organizations are learning to spot their workflow-builders: the people who wire AI into processes and become the celebrated 100x employees. Usage dashboards find them automatically — they generate the tokens. But partnerships have a second side no dashboard sees: the people who hold the market truth, the customer truth, the product-market-fit truth that makes a workflow's output worth shipping. Some of them will never build a workflow. Their contribution arrives as insight, not throughput — and if the only rewarded behavior is tool fluency, they will rationally disengage. Measure accordingly: rewarding token usage rewards motion. Reward the training wins — contributed insight that demonstrably lands in effective output. The workshop, the Context Pack's provenance section, and the Session tool exist to make exactly those wins visible and attributable. You need both kinds of people. Only one of them shows up in the metrics on their own. Be honest with contributors about the tension: in some organizations, for some people, sharing hard-won knowledge genuinely does reduce individual leverage. A process that builds attribution in from the start doesn't eliminate that risk — but it is meaningfully better than the default, which is silent absorption. Say that out loud in the room. People trust a process that acknowledges its trade-offs. **And where possible, make attribution automatic rather than procedural.** A named credit that depends on someone remembering to record it is fragile. The Asynchronous Option (above) makes attribution structural: contributions arrive pre-stamped with names by the platform they're made in, and the AI is instructed to carry those names into the context pack. Honesty requires saying that no method can *force* an organization to honor credit — but a record where names are attached at the moment of contribution is far harder to quietly strip than a memory of who said what in a meeting. --- # CoreQuest Workshop ## The Worksheets *CoreQuest Workshop © by Teresa Patrick, licensed under [CC BY-SA 4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). The Marketing Deliverables frameworks are commonly used industry frameworks included for convenience and are not part of the license.* Work through the worksheets **in order**. The sequence is the method: Customers first, then your Product/Service, then the Connections between the two. Messaging comes last, and not in a group setting. --- # Part 1: Customer Focus The purpose of this section is to focus the attention of your team on your customer. It is important to have people in the room who can effectively represent your customers' point of view. Ideally, team members will gain new insight into your customers' wants, needs, motivations, constraints, mindset and priorities. Even if the information is not entirely new to all of you, spending time focused on the details of your customers' world will help shift your team's frame of reference during subsequent conversations about products and customer benefits. New insights often come from looking at familiar information in new ways. The more you focus on the context in which your buyers work and make decisions, the better you will be able to develop compelling messaging and effective campaign strategies to reach them. ## Worksheet 1: Customer Descriptions List and describe your top ten customers. Customers can include individuals who are empowered to make buying decisions as well as individuals who strongly influence sales by recommending or advocating for your product or services with the ultimate buyer. Define each person's role and level of influence. 1. Title/Role — Description: 2. Title/Role — Description: 3. Title/Role — Description: 4. Title/Role — Description: 5. Title/Role — Description: 6. Title/Role — Description: 7. Title/Role — Description: 8. Title/Role — Description: 9. Title/Role — Description: 10. Title/Role — Description: ## Worksheet 2: Customer Responsibilities Select a specific customer or related set of customers from the previous list. What are the top ten job responsibilities they need to fulfill in any given month or quarter? Selected customer (from Worksheet 1): ______________ 1. Responsibility — Description: 2. Responsibility — Description: 3. Responsibility — Description: 4. Responsibility — Description: 5. Responsibility — Description: 6. Responsibility — Description: 7. Responsibility — Description: 8. Responsibility — Description: 9. Responsibility — Description: 10. Responsibility — Description: ## Worksheet 3: Customer Tasks For a given customer or related set of customers, what are ten job tasks they need to accomplish in a typical quarter? Selected customer (from Worksheet 1): ______________ 1. Task — Description: 2. Task — Description: 3. Task — Description: 4. Task — Description: 5. Task — Description: 6. Task — Description: 7. Task — Description: 8. Task — Description: 9. Task — Description: 10. Task — Description: ## Worksheet 4: Customer Challenges For a given customer or related set of customers, what are the top challenges they need to overcome in any given month or quarter? You could run this exercise as: **top things that could get your customer fired or derail your customer's career.** The point is to get everyone focused on specific problems that motivate action. Selected customer (from Worksheet 1): ______________ 1. Challenge — Description: 2. Challenge — Description: 3. Challenge — Description: 4. Challenge — Description: 5. Challenge — Description: 6. Challenge — Description: 7. Challenge — Description: 8. Challenge — Description: 9. Challenge — Description: 10. Challenge — Description: ## Worksheet 5: Customer Motivations For a given customer or related set of customers, what are ten top personal motivations to consider? This exercise could be run as: **what are the top ten things that could get this person promoted, reduce their job stress, or help them gain status** — whatever makes the most sense for your customer base. Selected customer (from Worksheet 1): ______________ 1. Motivation — Description: 2. Motivation — Description: 3. Motivation — Description: 4. Motivation — Description: 5. Motivation — Description: 6. Motivation — Description: 7. Motivation — Description: 8. Motivation — Description: 9. Motivation — Description: 10. Motivation — Description: ## Worksheet 6: Customer Chain of Trust Who do your customers trust? For a given customer describe the top ten trusted sources of information and recommendations for products or services related to your offering. Why are they trusted? This exercise is especially useful for marketing strategy decisions. **Note:** AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) sit on nearly every customer's chain of trust — often above analysts and review sites. Include them; Worksheet 14's Exploring Solutions step covers how to assess what those assistants actually say about you. Also ask: **where in this chain might a prospect lose trust and disengage before ever contacting us?** There is no transcript of a conversation that didn't happen — this worksheet is the only place that insight gets captured. Selected customer (from Worksheet 1): ______________ 1. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 2. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 3. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 4. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 5. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 6. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 7. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 8. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 9. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): 10. Trusted Source — Description, why trusted, level of influence (high–low): --- # Part 2: Product/Service Focus Finally! It's time to talk about your company, product or service. In this section we will start with a detailed description of your offering. This section also provides an opportunity to discuss the competitive landscape. It sets the stage for the high-value conversations to follow around the connections between what your customers want and need and what your products or services offer. Why bother spending time describing your product or services when everyone in the room already knows what you sell? Because the more familiar you are with something, the harder it is to find unique ways of describing or promoting it. No one knows your stuff better than you do, but it takes focused effort to force your brain to think about it in fresh ways. That is why "brainstorming" around high-familiarity topics is often ineffective. The CoreQuest program is designed around the concept of **"framestorming"** — finding new frames of reference for describing familiar concepts. **Please note:** Sometimes marketing can get so clever and benefits-oriented that potential buyers have no idea what product or service you are offering. Sure, I'd like to increase revenue, get fit faster and turn my own customer base into cult followers who will rise as one thunderous multitude, proclaiming the greatness of me and my product. But what, specifically, are you proposing to give me in return for my money, email or attention? Specific, detailed product descriptions help your team avoid this common mistake. **A second warning: don't train customers not to trust you.** A claim can be technically true but functionally untenable — glamorous in the deck, disappointing in week two. If customers bite and then realize they've been had, you hit a short-term goal at the cost of long-term trust. The "current truth vs. roadmap" discipline in these worksheets is the antidote; use it on your claims, not just your features. ## Worksheet 7: Product Description What is your product or service? In other words, what will a customer get in exchange for money (or time, community contributions, etc.)? Product or Service Name: ______________ 1. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 2. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 3. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 4. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 5. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 6. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 7. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 8. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 9. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: 10. Specific thing your customer will get — Description: ## Worksheet 8: Product Features For your product or service offering, what are the top ten features that benefit customers? **Note:** be relentless about current truth vs roadmap here. Features that ship today go on this list. Roadmap items go on a separate, clearly labeled list. An AI grounded on a document that blurs the two will confidently market vaporware. Product or Service Name: ______________ 1. Feature — Description: 2. Feature — Description: 3. Feature — Description: 4. Feature — Description: 5. Feature — Description: 6. Feature — Description: 7. Feature — Description: 8. Feature — Description: 9. Feature — Description: 10. Feature — Description: ## Worksheet 9: Competitors and Alternatives What are the top alternatives to your product or service? One alternative may be "doing nothing." If so, your description should include key reasons to "do nothing" rather than seek and select a solution. Product or Service Name: ______________ 1. Alternative — Description: 2. Alternative — Description: 3. Alternative — Description: 4. Alternative — Description: 5. Alternative — Description: 6. Alternative — Description: 7. Alternative — Description: 8. Alternative — Description: 9. Alternative — Description: 10. Alternative — Description: --- # Part 3: Connections Focus This section lays the groundwork for both messaging and marketing strategy. In it, you will explore the connections between what you sell and what customers want and need. **Process note:** It is common for ideas for specific messaging or marketing campaigns to surface during this exercise. Sometimes ideas are so compelling that some team members want to cut short the connections discussion so that they can begin iterating on those ideas. The recommended approach is to write down new ideas as they come up and then continue with the connections exercises. Allow at least a day for reflection before engaging in follow-up discussions of the new ideas. Continuing the connections discussion and allowing time for reflection typically results in a richer and more productive message development process. ## Worksheet 10: Product Connections For your product or service offering, how does what you sell connect to customer wants and needs? Product or Service Name: ______________ 1. Connection — Description: 2. Connection — Description: 3. Connection — Description: 4. Connection — Description: 5. Connection — Description: 6. Connection — Description: 7. Connection — Description: 8. Connection — Description: 9. Connection — Description: 10. Connection — Description: ## Worksheet 11: Product Benefits For your product or service offering, what are the top ten benefits customers receive? This section will help you turn the previous connections discussion into benefit statements — in the customer's own language — for use in marketing materials. Product or Service Name: ______________ 1. Benefit — Description: 2. Benefit — Description: 3. Benefit — Description: 4. Benefit — Description: 5. Benefit — Description: 6. Benefit — Description: 7. Benefit — Description: 8. Benefit — Description: 9. Benefit — Description: 10. Benefit — Description: --- # Part 4: Deliverables This section turns your completed worksheets into two working deliverables: messaging and positioning statements for your human channels, and the AI Context Pack (Worksheet 15) that grounds your AI tools. They're built from the same insight; create both. The goal of every deliverable here is what marketers call a **quick get**: messaging so simple and clear that customers instantly understand your offer, why it matters to them, and what to do next. The quest is slow and human. The get is instant. But a quick get must also be a **fair get**. Test every claim: is it not just technically true but functionally tenable — will the customer's week-two experience match it? A quick get built on an untenable claim is just a fast way to teach customers (and future AI tools providing product recommendations) not to trust you. **Note:** It generally takes twelve to eighteen months of consistent marketing efforts to "land" a message in the market to the point that your target audience is generally aware of your messaging and associates it with your brand. Ongoing refinements to wording and design in response to customer feedback and behavior make sense, but be aware that frequent shifts in core messaging can create confusion in your market. **Do not complete this section in a group setting.** Give your creatives time to reflect, with access to subject matter experts as needed. Drafts can be reviewed and refined with the larger team. *The deliverables materials below are commonly used frameworks included for convenience. They are not included in the Creative Commons license.* ## Worksheet 12: Messaging and Positioning Framework **Purpose.** Provide [Your Company] positioning and messaging guidance for [define target audience]. **Strategy.** [Your company]'s strategy is to target [audience], providing [value] to address [unmet need]. **Primary Audience.** The primary audience is [x], characterized by [activities or job responsibilities]. Adjacent audiences also targeted include [...], characterized by [activities, needs and/or job responsibilities]. The more specific your audience definition, the easier it is to craft effective messaging targeted for that audience. **Perception — Current.** What is the current level of awareness of your company and/or product/offering among your target audience? If the answer is "zero," what is the current level of awareness of the solution space you are in? Are you a new entrant in an established category or are you creating a new category? **Perception — Future.** What do you want your target audience to know or believe about your company or offering in the future? **Customer Challenges.** - Problem your target audience faces that your offering helps address — description of the problem and its impact - Problem your target audience faces that your offering helps address — description of the problem and its impact *Note: challenges can also include problems that could impact your audience's buying decision — creating objections that you need to overcome.* **Tagline:** **10–25 word Value Prop.** A value proposition is a short statement that expresses the value your product or service offers from your customers' point of view. It is not a description of features. **75 word Value Prop:** **150 word Value Prop:** **Pillars.** A Pillar is a short phrase that represents a high-priority value proposition that you want to land with your audience. **Key Messages (aligned to each Pillar).** Key messages are short statements that describe the value you deliver aligned with the Pillar phrase. ## Worksheet 13: Positioning Statement and Value Propositions *Adapted from a framework developed by Hank Barnes.* ### Positioning Statement A positioning statement should succinctly express your business/product/service strategy — from your customers' point of view. Primarily used internally to ensure public-facing content and messaging is strategically aligned. A useful framework: > For [customer description], who need [problem they need to solve] and want [social and emotional motivations], [product/service name] is [product description or category] that [what it does]. Unlike [competitors and alternative approaches], [your product/service name] [description of how/why it is a better solution]. **Example:** > For marketing professionals who need to develop targeted, effective marketing messaging and want to collaborate more closely with clients and colleagues, the CoreQuest Process is a business collaboration tool that elicits key insights about why customers want and need your products and services to inform effective marketing strategy and message development. Unlike traditional brainstorming sessions or product briefings, the CoreQuest Process creates the conditions under which product, sales and marketing experts are able to bypass unconscious pattern-based thinking processes to unlock fresh, innovative ideas. ### Value Proposition Statements A value proposition is a short statement or series of statements that express the value your product or service offers to a specific customer category. Value proposition statements may be repeated as written in public-facing content. Creating multiple versions of different lengths allows for insertion in a wide variety of channels from ad copy to social media to white papers and product brochures. - **10 word value proposition:** - **25 word value proposition:** - **75 word value proposition:** - **150 word value proposition:** ## Worksheet 14: Customer Journey Friction Assessment How easy is it for customers to access your service? How easy is it to acquire, learn, use and get value from a competitor service? What are switching costs? What about ecosystem benefits? Is psychological safety a factor (e.g. you can't get fired for buying IBM)? How easy is it for your customers to get through internal budget approval and vendor onboarding processes? **Awareness.** How easy is it to learn about your product? What might hinder a customer from discovering your offering? What misconceptions might they have? - Awareness program 1 — Description, assessment: - Awareness program 2 — Description, assessment: - Awareness program 3 — Description, assessment: **Exploring Solutions.** How readily can potential customers find your product/service in response to a relevant problem-solving question? Your customers ask these questions of AI assistants as well as search engines, so test both. For each question — phrased verbatim in your customers' words, drawn from the Challenges worksheet — check your search ranking, then ask the major AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot) and record: - Does the assistant mention your company/product? If yes: is the description accurate, and is it current truth or two years stale? - Who does it recommend instead? That's your real competitive set for this question. - What sources do the answers appear to draw on — reviews, docs, comparison articles, your own site? - Does it surface past disappointment ("users report that…")? That's trust debt coming due. Repeat for at least five questions; patterns matter more than any single answer. Then discuss: where you're absent, what content would need to exist — publicly, in plain customer language — for that to change? Where you're described inaccurately, what is the assistant reading, and what should it be reading instead? *Moderator's note: this exercise is often the moment skeptics lean in. Watching an AI recommend a competitor makes the cost of unwritten insight concrete in a way no slide deck can.* - Problem-solving question — search rank / assistant answers / gaps: - Problem-solving question — search rank / assistant answers / gaps: - Problem-solving question — search rank / assistant answers / gaps: **Evaluating Alternatives.** How readily can potential customers get the information they need to evaluate your product/service? - Evaluation option — description and assessment: - Evaluation option — description and assessment: - Evaluation option — description and assessment: **Justification.** Primarily relevant to enterprise sales. What steps must customers take to get approval to purchase (budget approval, legal review, security review, operations approval)? What can you provide to simplify that process for them? - Justification step — description and suggestions for simplification: - Justification step — description and suggestions for simplification: - Justification step — description and suggestions for simplification: **Acquisition.** How easily can customers purchase or acquire your product/service? What are the steps involved and how can you streamline them? - Acquisition step — notes on friction points: - Acquisition step — notes on friction points: - Acquisition step — notes on friction points: **Implementation.** What are the steps involved in deploying and using your product? How can you streamline them? - Implementation step — notes on friction points: - Implementation step — notes on friction points: - Implementation step — notes on friction points: **Expansion.** Does your product or service require employee training? Does it need to be evangelized internally in order to gain traction? - Expansion requirement — notes on friction points: - Expansion requirement — notes on friction points: - Expansion requirement — notes on friction points: **Customer Service.** How easy is it for customers to get needed support — either directly from you or from a community-based system? - Step in support process — notes on friction points: - Step in support process — notes on friction points: - Step in support process — notes on friction points: **Upgrades.** What are the steps required to upgrade, from awareness of upgrade availability to acquisition and deployment? - Step in upgrade process — notes on friction points: - Step in upgrade process — notes on friction points: - Step in upgrade process — notes on friction points: **Upselling.** How easily can customers learn about other offers from your company that might be useful to them? - Upselling opportunity — notes on friction points: - Upselling opportunity — notes on friction points: - Upselling opportunity — notes on friction points: ## Worksheet 15: The AI Context Pack The second deliverable, and for many teams the more consequential one: your completed worksheets, assembled into a set of plain-text documents formatted for the AI tools your team uses — a Claude Project, a custom GPT, a sales-enablement tool. Once deployed, every email, landing page and campaign your AI drafts is grounded in the workshop's insight instead of generic filler. The completed worksheets have always made excellent onboarding material for new colleagues; this is the same onboarding, for your AI. **Format principles:** - **Plain text or Markdown.** No slides, no design. AI tools ingest simple structured text best. - **Customer language, not internal language.** Use the exact words that surfaced in the Customer worksheets. - **Current truth, flagged and dated.** Distinguish shipped from roadmap explicitly. Date the pack; stale context produces confident errors. - **Attribution stays in.** Name the contributors next to their insights. Provenance is the point. - **Density beats volume.** Keep each section to one page or less. **The nine sections** (a fill-in template is included in this kit as the AI Context Pack Template): 1. **Who We Serve** — from Customer Descriptions, Responsibilities, Tasks 2. **What Keeps Them Up at Night** — from Challenges and Motivations 3. **Who They Trust** — from Chain of Trust, including known trust gaps 4. **What We Actually Sell — Current Truth** — from Product Description and Features, shipped and roadmap clearly split and dated 5. **The Real Alternatives** — from Competitors and Alternatives, including "doing nothing" 6. **Why It Matters to Them** — from Connections and Benefits 7. **How to Sound Like Us — and Like Them** — positioning, value propositions, and the customer-language glossary from Worksheets 12–13 8. **Where the Journey Breaks** — from the Friction Assessment above 9. **Contributors and Provenance** — who contributed which insight; questions about any section go to its named contributor **Deploying the pack:** drop it into your team's shared AI workspace so every team member's AI drafts start from the same ground truth. Review quarterly and after every release — an outdated Section 4 is worse than no Section 4. When the pack changes, credit the person whose new insight changed it. (If your team used CoreQuest Session, the pack is generated for you, attribution included.) --- # The CoreQuest AI Moderator Prompt Copy everything below the line into a fresh conversation with a capable AI assistant (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or similar). Work through the session in one sitting or across several. Save the transcript — it becomes the raw material for your worksheets and your AI Context Pack. *From the CoreQuest Workshop © by Teresa Patrick, licensed under [CC BY-SA 4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).* --- You are the moderator for a CoreQuest Workshop, a structured process for helping teams break through expert blindness and develop simple, compelling messaging for complex products. Your job is to walk me through a fixed sequence of worksheets, in order, and to push me past easy answers. **Your moderation style:** - You have limited knowledge of my product, and that is your superpower. Ask the "dumb questions" that force simple explanations. If I use jargon, stop me and ask what it means in plain language. - Ask "why" repeatedly at key moments. First answers are usually pattern-based and shallow. Dig for the insight underneath. - If I try to skip ahead to messaging ideas or campaign concepts, write the idea down in a "parking lot," tell me it's captured, and return me to the sequence. The sequence is the method. - Push for specifics. "Enterprise IT leaders" is not a customer description. "The infrastructure director who gets blamed when the migration fails" is. - When I describe my product, distinguish relentlessly between what ships today and what's on the roadmap. Flag any answer that sounds aspirational and ask: "Is that true today, or is that the plan?" - Challenge claims that are technically true but functionally untenable. If a claim sounds like something a customer would feel misled by after buying, ask: "What does the customer actually experience in week two?" A claim my product can't keep trains customers not to trust me. - Stay curious, not agreeable. If my answer seems thin, say so and ask again from a different angle. **The sequence (do not reorder):** 1. **Customer Descriptions** — my top ten customers by role, including buyers and influencers, with their level of influence on the sale. 2. **Customer Responsibilities** — for one selected customer: their top ten job responsibilities in a typical quarter. 3. **Customer Tasks** — ten specific tasks that customer must accomplish in a typical quarter. 4. **Customer Challenges** — the top challenges they face. Frame it as: what could get this person fired or derail their career? 5. **Customer Motivations** — what could get this person promoted, reduce their stress, or raise their status? 6. **Customer Chain of Trust** — the top ten sources this customer trusts for information and recommendations, ranked by influence, and why each is trusted. Include AI assistants if customers use them to research solutions. Then ask me: where in this chain might a prospect lose trust and disengage before ever contacting us? 7. **Product Description** — what, specifically, does the customer get in exchange for money? Concrete deliverables, not benefits language. 8. **Product Features** — top ten features, current truth only. Roadmap items go in a separate, clearly labeled list. 9. **Competitors and Alternatives** — top alternatives, including "do nothing," and the honest reasons a customer might choose each. 10. **Product Connections** — for each major customer want or need from steps 4–5, how does what I sell connect to it? Take this slowly; this is where insights surface. 11. **Product Benefits** — turn the connections into benefit statements in the customer's own language. **After the sequence:** - Summarize the three to five most surprising or valuable insights that surfaced, and note which of my answers produced them. - Then, and only then, help me draft: (a) a positioning statement using this frame: "For [customer] who need [problem] and want [motivation], [product] is [category] that [what it does]. Unlike [alternatives], [product] [why it's better]." (b) 10-, 25-, 75-, and 150-word value propositions. (c) An AI Context Pack: a structured plain-text summary of everything above, formatted for me to save and load into my AI tools as standing context. - Remind me to let the messaging drafts rest for at least a day before finalizing. Reflection time is part of the method. Begin by asking me to briefly describe my business in two or three sentences — then start worksheet 1. --- **A note from the method's author:** the AI will be a diligent question-asker, but it cannot notice what you avoid talking about. If you find yourself speeding through a section, filling in the blanks with superficial answers, slow down. That is a sign you may have settled into pattern-based thinking. If you force yourself and your team to take a fresh look, compelling new, actionable insight just might emerge. --- # The AI Context Pack Template An AI Context Pack is a set of plain-text documents assembled from your completed CoreQuest worksheets, formatted so they can be dropped directly into the AI tools your team uses — a Claude Project, a custom GPT, an AI writing assistant, a sales-enablement tool. Once in place, every email, landing page and campaign your AI drafts is grounded in your workshop's insight instead of generic filler. *From the CoreQuest Workshop © by Teresa Patrick, licensed under [CC BY-SA 4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).* ## Format Principles - **Plain text or Markdown.** No slides, no design. AI tools ingest simple structured text best. - **Customer language, not internal language.** Use the exact words that surfaced in the Customer worksheets. - **Current truth, flagged and dated.** Distinguish shipped from roadmap explicitly. Date the pack; stale context produces confident errors. - **Attribution stays in.** Name the contributors next to their insights. - **Density beats volume.** Keep each section to one page or less. --- # [Company Name] AI Context Pack *Developed in a CoreQuest workshop on [date]. Last updated [date].* ## 1. Who We Serve *(from Customer Descriptions, Responsibilities, Tasks worksheets)* Our primary customer is [role], responsible for [top responsibilities]. In a typical quarter they must [key tasks]. Adjacent buyers and influencers include [roles and their influence on the sale]. ## 2. What Keeps Them Up at Night *(from Customer Challenges and Motivations worksheets)* The problems that motivate action — including career stakes: - [Challenge]: [impact on the customer if unsolved] - [Challenge]: [impact on the customer if unsolved] What advances their career / reduces their stress / raises their status: - [Motivation] - [Motivation] *These are the emotional and professional stakes behind the purchase. They rarely appear in any corporate document, which is exactly why the AI needs them stated here.* ## 3. Who They Trust *(from Customer Chain of Trust worksheet)* Before buying, our customer consults, in rough order of influence: 1. [Trusted source] — trusted because [reason] 2. [Trusted source] — trusted because [reason] 3. [Trusted source] — trusted because [reason] Known trust gaps — points where prospects disengage before ever contacting us: - [Describe the gap and the missing trust-building step] ## 4. What We Actually Sell — Current Truth *(from Product Description and Features worksheets)* As of [date]: **Shipping today:** - [Specific thing the customer gets] - [Specific thing the customer gets] **On the roadmap — NOT yet available. Do not market as current:** - [Roadmap item] - [Roadmap item] *This section prevents your AI from confidently marketing vaporware. Update it every release.* ## 5. The Real Alternatives *(from Competitors and Alternatives worksheet)* Customers comparing us also consider: - [Alternative] — honest reasons a customer might choose it: [reasons] - Doing nothing — why it appeals: [reasons] ## 6. Why It Matters to Them *(from Product Connections and Benefits worksheets)* - [Feature] → serves [customer want/need] → benefit in customer language: [statement] - [Feature] → serves [customer want/need] → benefit in customer language: [statement] ## 7. How to Sound Like Us — and Like Them *(from Messaging framework and workshop language notes)* **Words our customers use:** [glossary of their terms] **Internal jargon to avoid in customer-facing content:** [list] **Positioning statement:** [from the Positioning worksheet] **Value propositions:** - 10 words: [statement] - 25 words: [statement] - 75 words: [statement] ## 8. Where the Journey Breaks *(from Customer Journey Friction Assessment)* Known friction points, from awareness through upgrade: [top findings] Content and messaging should actively address: [misconceptions, justification hurdles, onboarding friction] ## 9. Contributors and Provenance This context pack was developed in a CoreQuest workshop on [date]. Key insights contributed by: - [Name, role] — [the specific insight they surfaced] - [Name, role] — [the specific insight they surfaced] Questions about any section should go to the named contributor — they are the expert behind it. --- ## Deploying the Pack - Drop the pack into your team's shared AI workspace (Claude Project instructions, custom GPT knowledge, or equivalent) so every team member's AI drafts start from the same ground truth. - If your worksheets were completed asynchronously in a tool that stamps contributions with names (shared doc comments, threads), instruct your AI to preserve every contributor name when compiling this pack — attribution should be carried forward automatically, not reconstructed from memory. - Review quarterly, and after every major release. An outdated Section 4 is worse than no Section 4. - When the pack changes, credit the person whose new insight changed it.