Turning Thought Leadership into Results:
How A Workshop Idea Turned into a Multi-Million Dollar Pipeline

It usually starts with an idea. Mine was simple: let’s make an often-overcomplicated platform accessible to influencers and decision-makers. Thus, the Jira Align and Focus workshops were born. The result: $20.6M in attributed revenue with 20% pipeline growth YOY.

By The Numbers:

  • 11 In-Person Workshops
  • 13 Virtual Workshops
  • 53 Net-New opportunities (2024)
  • $20.6M in Associated Deal Value
  • $4.9M in attributed revenue
  • Advertising Budget: $100,000.00

When Atlassian purchased Agilecraft and rebranded it to Jira Align, they were faced with an enormous investment in client and partner enablement. After partner bootcamps, massive amounts of partner documentation, and continued meetings, there was just one problem. Our pipeline didn’t reflect the time, effort, and expense we were spending on the same old content types: articles, e-books, and webinars.

I aggregated my notes from multiple client qualification and discovery calls and a pattern became almost immediately obvious. With a platform as large and complicated as Jira Align, our prospects were leery of making the type of investment needed. They wanted to understand the what and the how so they could bring the why to unlock budget. 

The first iteration was simple: How Business Leaders Connect Strategy to Execution in Jira Align. Since 90% of enterprises fail to execute on their strategy, the premise spoke to the actual pain points we’d heard from our clients. And we offered it for free. Why? Because learning budgets are tricky and difficult to access. All you needed to attend was to pre-register and be curious. 

The marketing team was immediately in. Seeing the potential success of something no other partner in our space had done, it took little convincing. They supported every aspect of the content development process: backing me into deadlines for content ready, content design, and content published. The marketing team relied on me for subject-matter expertise while I relied on them to bring the funnel. 

The sales organization was skeptical at first. Marketing and I provided a dedicated, 30-minute learning session to help the account executives understand the value. We needed them to fill the seats. And they brought the heat. Attendees from Nike, Mutual of Omaha, Ricoh USA and others attended the first-ever session. And it spread like wildfire. Other attendees included Disney, DIRECTV, CHG Healthcare, Anthem, Key Bank, Wells Fargo, Maxar, Visa, and even Atlassian themselves. 

Every new experiment is not without some issues. I quickly pivoted away from hands-on-keyboard exercises in-platform. After all, a workshop is supposed to be no more than a few hours. Also, the market kept getting smarter and the product kept changing. New client challenges needed to be addressed. We moved from Connecting Strategy to Execution in Jira Align to Modeling Strategy in Jira Align to Why Strategy Fails to Get Your Strategy Right in 2025. 

For those that couldn’t attend in person, marketing asked if I could make the workshops virtual. And while the answer was a resounding yes, we quickly needed to recreate a virtual collaboration space for attendees. Leveraging Miro, I created a guided space not only for folks to engage in the exercises, but to learn more about Jira Align and Focus while also engaging with additional content from trusted learning sources such as Harvard Business Review Harvard Business Review and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon. 

The overall investment to fill the funnel was mostly in advertising with Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and sponsored social posts. Adjacent content was ghost written when needed. Spend was less than 1% of attributed deal value and less than 2% of attributed revenue. This was a massive return and provided significant value both to clients and our business. 

If you’re interested in providing thoughtful, impactful workshops for your organization, I’d love to walk you through winning content strategies based on your clients’ needs. Feel free to reach out at the contact form below.

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