It’s that most wonderful time of the year: budget season.

You can tell it’s budget season because your boss says, “Hey, let’s have an offsite,” and next thing you know you’re holed up for 16 hours in the Paint-By-Number Hall of Fame arguing over whether hi-liters or golf balls align better with corporate objectives.

(Actually, the answer is Post-It Notes.)

It doesn’t have to be this way. Solid research and a commitment to customer experience can appropriately frame the discussions in an offsite or budget-planning meeting, and can make the process much more efficient and fulfilling, even if they can’t do a thing about those godawful hard chairs.

Here’s how to do it right.

Stick a stake

Any marketing offsite needs to start by sticking a stake in the ground: Here’s where we are.

Where is that? Research can answer that – 360-degree research that includes customer attitudes, brand recognition data, employee satisfaction, social metrics, SEO, prospect conversion, repeat purchases, market share, and more.

Gather your data and cook it down; make a picture worthy of the Paint-By-Number Hall of Fame. Do the same thing for the previous year, if you haven’t already.

Present the data clearly, without editorializing, and make sure everyone knows where you really are.

If you do this right, you’ll head off some of the most counterproductive arguments there are: The arguments about where you are as an organization.

Next!

Once everyone agrees where the organization is (and if you’ve done your research well, that discussion won’t take long), you can move on to the next question: Where do we want to go?

Again, research can show the way. What are other organizations in your market doing to move forward? What are organizations in similar verticals doing? How far ahead of you are they? What might it cost to get beyond where they are? Is it worth it?

Here’s where you put on your competitive-intelligence hat. CI sometimes gets pushed aside in favor of more navel-gazing sorts of measurements, but this is a time to get your head out of your … er, navel and look around.

Understanding what everyone else does is vital to determining what you can or should be doing. Even if you’re the iconoclast of the ages, it’s beneficial to know exactly what you’re walking away from.

Who knows? Kiefer’s First Law Of Innovation may come into play. You might turn out to be a lot less innovative than you thought.

(Fun fact: Kiefer’s First Law Of Innovation – “If it’s so innovative, how come you thought of it?” – is actually derived from Kiefer’s First Law Of Collectible Values, created when I was editing coin- and baseball-card-collecting magazines: If it’s so valuable, how come you have it?)

Bring in CX

Once you’ve determined where you are and where everyone else is compared to you, it’s time to decide the big one: Where do you want to go? And at this point, I’d like to make a pitch for my favorite marketing tactic that isn’t a marketing tactic at all: customer experience.

If you’re a smart bunch of offsiters, you’ll decide that what you want to be is the company that takes the best care of its customers.

Why is that smart? Because it’s so efficient. Take exceptional care of your customers and you’ll spend less on advertising, social media, public relations, SEO, and content marketing.

You can afford to spend less because your customers will take care of all of that for you.

I’ve said it before, but the No. 1 most effective marketing technique is having a repeat customer recommend you to others unsolicited.

I’m not talking about any of this review-farming garbage here. I’m talking about treating customers so well that they go ahead and tell others how great you are, without you even having to ask.

Every other marketing technique out there is an attempt to emulate the success of this sort of word-of-mouth, so why waste time on the imitations when you can cultivate the real thing?

Hmmmm?

Money invested in customer experience also has the added perk of improving the satisfaction of the front-line people delivering that experience.

If your call center is experiencing 110 percent turnover – or even if it isn’t – any money you invest in employee empowerment and satisfaction as part of an overall CX program is going to pay extra dividends in the form of reduced employee-recruitment and retention costs.

Imagine that: You can save on marketing and HR expenses by committing to customer experience. And everyone up and down the line will be happier.

Now, at this point in most offsites the naysayers will pipe up: “We can’t afford it.” “It’s impractical.” “It won’t fly internally.”

To which I channel my inner Rosalind Russell and reply: You can afford to plaster your name all over a stadium but you can’t afford to take better care of your customers? You can mandate company-wide screensavers but you can’t take better care of your customers? You mean there are actually people in your organization who don’t want to take better care of your customers?

Seriously; point them out to me. I want to talk with them.

Hey, I understand the way things work. Going all-in on CX probably is a little too iconoclastic to fly in your organization. But at the very least, it’s something powerful to think about and discuss at your next big planning meeting.

But is it more important than what you’re going to order from Panera for lunch? C’mon now; this is an offsite.

Turbocharge Your Next Offsite ... With Research (And Maybe A Sub Sandwich)!