Facilitating in six rules
- Your job is questions, not answers. Wherever the room can produce the content, throw it to them. Present only what's genuinely news to them.
- Silent writing before open discussion. Two minutes on stickies before anyone speaks. Stops the loudest voice setting the agenda; gets the quiet people on the wall.
- Appoint a scribe, keep a parking lot. Recruit the scribe in advance. Off-topic goes on a visible list — honoured, not debated. Gaps and gripes get parked for Mark's Magic Wand session.
- Timebox out loud. "Fifteen minutes for this, then we move." Say it at the start of each block; give a 2-minute warning.
- Manage the room, gently. Dominator: "let's hear from someone we haven't heard yet." Silent person: round-robin early — whoever speaks in the first ten minutes keeps speaking. Skeptic: make them the stress-tester.
- End with something written down. Close by reading the output back and naming who takes it forward.
Session 1 · Wednesday
How to Sell What We Already Have
Facilitated by you · after Mark's Jobs to Be Done session · run it as: the bigger menu — spot it, route it
Why this framing: the room is onboarding, operations and customer success — plus Tom (partnerships) and Ingrid (marketing). Nobody there does outbound corporate sales, so pitch training would be theatre. But they hear client conversations all day, which makes them the best opportunity-detection network CT has — if they know the menu and know what a need sounds like. The deeper goal: the team stops seeing CT as "a great rate for Saudi expats" and starts seeing a multi-capability payments platform.
What each person should leave with
- Onboarding / ops / CS The menu in their heads, the trigger phrases that signal each item, one follow-up question to ask, and one place to route it. They never sell — they spot and pass.
- Tom (partnerships) A mapping of the menu onto his Spanish property agents: forwards against completion dates, same-currency EUR operations, possibly developer lending when it lands.
- Ingrid (marketing) One or two capabilities that earn a landing page or lifecycle email — lending is the obvious first, stablecoin settlement the second.
00:00 – 00:05Frame it
Kill the fear of a sales session in the first minute, then set the shape: menu → triggers → audit → routing.
"Nobody in this room is being asked to become a salesperson. But between us we have hundreds of client conversations a month, and I think we're leaving opportunities on the table — not because we don't have the products, but because we don't always recognise the moment a client tells us they need one. Today: I show you the full menu — some of it will be new — we work out together what a client sounds like when they need each item, and we agree exactly what you do in that moment. Spot it, route it. That's the whole ask."
00:05 – 00:20The bigger menu — you present
This is the one block where presenting is right: the content is genuinely news. One slide per item, one line each — what it is, who it's for. Keep to five items; the provider grid below is your appendix, not your script.
- Corporate lending (pending partner) — working-capital loans for corporate clients, available to clients worldwide. Not signed yet: positioned as "coming", strictly not client-facing.
- Forwards as a package — they know forwards exist; the news is we want them offered deliberately when a client has a known future payment, not left for the client to ask.
- Same-currency payments + AP — we can run a client's payment operations, not just their conversions.
- PayPlexo — the AR side: collecting invoice payments from their overseas customers.
- Stablecoin settlement via Riva — USDC/USDT on/off-ramp, plus rails we've never had: mobile money, local rails in 37+ countries. New partnership; corridors where banks are slow or blocked.
Two traps. (1) The lending partner is unsigned — say explicitly "this stays in this room and off client calls until I say so." (2) Fifteen minutes, hard stop — the moment this becomes a lecture, the workshop energy is gone. Menu, not manual.
00:20 – 00:40Trigger workshop — they build the ears
Split into small groups, one or two menu items each. Each group answers: "What does a client actually say, in a normal conversation, that tells you they need this?" — plus the one follow-up question you'd ask to confirm it. This is where ops and CS shine: they know how clients really talk. Groups report back; you capture on the wall.
"You've all heard a client say 'we're just waiting on an invoice to clear before we can pay you.' That sentence is a lending trigger and we've been letting it float past. What are the other sentences?"
Running short? One menu item per group and skip the weakest report-backs.
Pocket triggers — seed if a group stalls
- Lending: "cash flow's tight until this lands" · "we're delaying the payment run" · "we're funding a big stock order this quarter"
- Forwards: "completion is in March" · "we'll need to pay them again in six months" · "worried where the rate will be by then"
- Same-currency / AP: "we also pay our EUR suppliers from our EUR account" · "our finance person loses a day to every payment run"
- PayPlexo / AR: "chasing overseas customers to pay us is painful" · "our customers complain about paying into a UK account"
- Stablecoin / Riva rails: "the supplier needs it same-day" · "getting money into [country] is a nightmare" · "our counterparty asked about USDC" · anything settling on a weekend
00:40 – 00:52The last-month audit
Silent, individual, two minutes: "Scan your memory of the last month of client conversations. Which of these triggers did you hear — and let pass?" Then round the room: everyone shares at least one. Count them on the wall. This is the moment the session proves itself — a dozen missed triggers in one month makes the case better than any speech. (And if the count is genuinely low, that's real data too: it tells you the opportunity lives with Tom and Ingrid, not the service team.)
00:52 – 01:05Routing — answer "so what do I do?"
The question every spot-and-route session must answer explicitly, or nothing changes on Monday. For each menu item agree: who owns the lead (a name, in the room or not) and how it's passed — keep the mechanism stupid-simple, e.g. one Slack channel where you drop "Client X said Y", owner picks it up within a day. Meanwhile the two special tracks work in parallel: Tom maps the menu to his property-agent partners; Ingrid drafts which capabilities get marketing treatment and in what order.
Don't leave any menu item ownerless — an unowned capability is exactly how these things stay unsold. If there's no natural owner for lending leads yet, take it yourself explicitly until the partner signs.
01:05 – 01:15Close on the trigger card
Scribe reads back the one-pager: capability · sounds like · ask this · route to — one row per menu item. Name the owner who polishes and circulates it within a week. That card is the session's deliverable and the thing that makes the knowledge stick.
Provider capability grid — your appendix, not a slide
The inverse-flow idea: we send providers our trades, but we've never systematically asked what of theirs we don't use. Fill the blanks with each account manager before Wednesday if you can; otherwise the ask itself becomes a post-offsite action. Public-knowledge entries below still need confirming against CT's actual agreements.
| Provider | Capability menu | Worth exploring for CT |
|---|
| Riva |
Multi-currency accounts on local rails + SWIFT; FX; global payouts; USDC/USDT on/off-ramp; mobile money rails; wallets; 37+ countries / 40+ currencies; EU payment-institution licence (Swedish FSA) + Swiss VASP. confirm CT's slice |
Stablecoin settlement for slow/blocked corridors; mobile-money payouts; weekend/same-day settlement. Ask Riva which corridors beat our current rails on cost. |
| Currencycloud |
Named/virtual collection accounts, multi-currency wallets, conversions, broad payout network. confirm with AM |
Named accounts are the known deal-winner we under-use — which client types could get one today? |
| Corpay |
Cross-border payouts at scale, mass payments, forwards/hedging programmes. confirm with AM |
Packaged forward/hedging offers for clients with recurring exposure; mass-payment runs as a product. |
| Clear Treasury |
Deliverable FX, spot, forwards, market orders. confirm with AM |
Where do they price corridors better than the rest of the panel? |
| Lending partner |
Working-capital loans to corporate clients, worldwide. pending — not signed |
Trigger card entry now; Ingrid's landing page ready to ship the day it signs. |
Before Wednesday — your prep
- Ask Riva what CT's integration actually covers vs their public menu, and their best corridors
- Ping each provider AM: "what can you do that we never route to you?" (grid above)
- Pull Compass/trade data: which capabilities does our own flow say we could be using but don't (forwards-eligible repeat payments, corridors routed suboptimally)
- Decide the exact wording allowed about the lending partner + confidentiality line
- Five menu slides, one line each; trigger-card worksheet printed (capability / sounds like / ask this / route to)
- Scribe recruited; stickies, sharpies, wall space; parking lot sheet
Hand out: the blank trigger-card worksheet only. On screen: the five menu slides, then each exercise instruction as its block starts. The provider grid and this run-sheet stay with you.
Session 2 · Thursday
AI and Automation: CT in 2026 and 2027
Led by you · runs right before Mark's Objectives Sep–Dec session — your output should hand him candidate objectives with owners.
Different mode from Wednesday: here you lead. You're the credible AI person in the room, so a short demo is expected and earns you the right to run the exercise after it. Show what's possible, let the team tell you where the pain is, converge on a 2026 quick-win list and one or two 2027 bets. The output is a ranked backlog Mark can turn into owned objectives an hour later.
00:00 – 00:12Demo, don't lecture
Open with something real and CT-shaped, live if at all possible — e.g. an agent drafting a client follow-up from a meeting note, or the WhatsApp quote-and-book concept if you're ready to show it. One demo done well beats ten slides about AI trends. Then one framing slide only: 2026 = automate what we already do (weeks, not quarters). 2027 = capabilities that change how we serve clients and grow.
"None of this is about doing more with fewer people. It's about deleting the boring 20% of your week so the interesting 80% gets your full attention — and giving clients responses in minutes instead of hours. What I can't know from where I sit is where your boring 20% actually is. That's this session."
The unspoken question in every AI session is "is this about replacing me?" Kill it explicitly in the first five minutes — the line above does it — or you'll get polite, useless answers all hour.
00:12 – 00:27Time audit
Silent, individual: "Write your three most repetitive or annoying tasks — things you do weekly that follow roughly the same steps every time — with a rough hours-per-week guess on each." Three minutes writing, then round-robin: everyone reads theirs out, stickies go on the wall. Cluster duplicates as you go — duplicated pain across roles is gold: automate once, save everyone.
Running short? Two tasks each. Never cut the round-robin — hearing everyone's pain builds the buy-in.
Pocket prompts — if the room blanks
- Chasing clients for onboarding documents
- Drafting follow-up emails and call summaries after client conversations
- Rate-watch and market-update messages assembled by hand
- Copy-pasting between inbox, spreadsheets and the platform
- Reporting and reconciliation runs
- First drafts of marketing and partner content (worth asking Ingrid directly)
- Answering the same client questions repeatedly — the FAQ that lives in people's heads
00:27 – 00:42Map it: impact × effort
Draw a 2×2 — impact (hours saved or client experience) vertical, effort horizontal. As a group, place the clusters. You're the calibrator on effort: the room will overestimate some ("that's a week of work now") and underestimate others ("that needs the dev team and a quarter"). High impact + low effort is your 2026 list; high impact + high effort is your 2027 capabilities list.
Don't commit dev-team capacity live in the room — Kamen's team has a full plate. Sort candidates into "buildable with AI tools around the edges, no platform work" vs "needs platform work, I'll scope with the dev team" and only promise the first kind on 2026 timelines.
00:42 – 00:55Vote and pick
Dot-vote: three dots each on the low-effort/high-impact quadrant. Top three become the 2026 quick-win commitments. Then you nominate one or two 2027 capability bets from the high-effort column — a leadership call, not a vote — e.g. a conversational client channel (the WhatsApp direction) or AI-assisted client communications at scale. Two sentences of reasoning each.
Running short? Skip formal voting — call the top three from the clustering, check for objections.
00:55 – 01:10Commit and hand to Mark
For each of the three quick wins: an owner (the person who feels the pain, not necessarily the builder), a first step, and a "working by" month — written in the same format Mark will use in the objectives session. Close by physically handing the list over.
"Three things working by [month], with names on them, and two bigger bets I'll scope for 2027. Mark — these want to be on the Sep–Dec objectives list."
Night-before checklist — Session 2
- Demo tested twice, plus a screen-recording fallback if wifi dies
- One framing slide (2026 vs 2027), nothing else
- 2×2 drawn on flipchart before people arrive
- Dot stickers (or marker dots), stickies, sharpies
- Your two 2027 bets pre-chosen, with two sentences of reasoning each
- Scribe recruited; output format matches Mark's objectives format
- Day before, one line to the team: "notice the tasks you do that follow the same steps every time"
Hand out: the time-audit worksheet (task / same steps every time? / hrs per week × 3) and the commitment sheet (quick win / owner / first step / working by). On screen: the demo and the single framing slide. The 2×2 lives on the flipchart.