# 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.