How Remedy's messaging workshops help growth-stage tech companies build a go-to-market foundation
Dean Ward is well tuned in to the precise moment a growth-stage technology business starts to outgrow its own story. As the founder of sales and go-to-market consultancy Dean Ward & Associates, he works with founder-led companies (typically pre-Series A) to build the commercial GTM infrastructure they need in order to scale. He specialises in SaaS and early stage tech companies, but across every sector he sees the exact same pattern. Strong products and promising early traction all to often run into the limits of founder-led selling. Teams cannot just hire their way to the next stage of growth, and it’s often time to shape up and sharpen up.
He often sees a marketing gap. Founders are often great engineers and product specialists who have had little reason in the past to think about branding, messaging or marketing in any structured way. Bringing in an experienced marketing hire is expensive but not doing so leaves a risky gap. His answer is often to bring in Remedy, and usually to begin with a messaging workshop that gives the leadership team a shared foundation to build from.
That way founders can stay focused on pipeline and product rather than trying to learn how to become a marketer or trusting it all to AI.
In Dean’s experience the calibre of the people in the room and the breadth they bring to the conversation makes all the difference.
“Sue and the Remedy team bring a degree of experience, professionalism and credibility to these conversations that is hard to replicate any other way. I often describe her as an outsourced CMO, because she’s got that view across the whole picture.”
The workshop itself is a structured, in-person session built around the fundamental questions every growth company needs to answer from who they are really selling to and the problem they genuinely solve, through to what makes them different and how the sales story should be landing at each stage of the funnel. Dean has taken clients through the Remedy workshop process across care technology, deep data tech and software-as-a-service. The sectors may differ, but the impact stays consistent.
One exercise comes up in almost every conversation he has about the workshops – a box exercise where participants are asked imagine their solution as a physical item on a shelf and design its packaging. They have to decide what it says on each face of the box, think who it is for and what might incentivise someone to pick it off the shelf. The point is to surface how differently people on the same leadership team can see the same product, since bringing those differences into the open is often where the real work begins.
“The Remedy workshops create the conditions for an agreed approach to powerful, focused messaging. In so doing, they grow alignment between different members of the management team who may have very different perspectives.”
The value does not fade once the session ends – that’s something Dean returns to again and again when he describes the lasting effect on the businesses he advises.
“I find that, even months or a year later, my clients are still referencing their Remedy workshop. They use it as a template and a reference point. It becomes like a North Star for every marketing and sales decision that follows.”
He is clear-eyed about why this cannot be easily replicated with an online template or a do-it-yourself approach, and he has a favourite way of explaining the difference to anyone who raises it: “People sometimes say to me, ‘But you can go online and plan your own workshop.’ I say, you can find a recipe for anything online these days, but when you make it, I can guarantee it won’t taste like Michel Roux, and with good reason.”
For Dean, the recommendation comes without hesitation because the personalisation, depth of experience and proven execution Remedy brings are precisely the things a founder cannot find in a guide to doing it themselves. He sums it up quite nicely, saying:
“I would recommend Sue and the Remedy team in a heartbeat. If you want to work with someone who is trustworthy, who has done this before, who brings real credibility, this is going to be the best choice you make.”
