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Having the right team in place, empowered and upskilled to do their job, is transformative.
LockSmith offers both functional and leadership skills training courses that can be run off the shelf or mixed and matched to your needs.
You can find out more about our most popular courses below, or alternatively get in touch to discuss your requirements if you’re looking for something complete bespoke. We’re always writing new material and we love a challenge!
Our functional skills training courses are designed to create a competitive advantage for your business by upskilling your team into best-in-class marketers.
Our leadership skills training courses cover transitioning from manager to leader, how to get stuff done and how to unlock the potential in everyone. Alex is an accredited DISC practitioner which means each course includes the opportunity to include behavioural profiling, a tool designed to improve team dynamics and foster greater self-awareness.
Courses
A strong foundation in brand management skills, suitable for all levels up to Marketing Manager. Covering the full annual cycle. Strategy, activity planning, execution, measurement and evaluation.
- Introduction to brand management
- Core marketing principles
- Situation analysis
- Defining issues & insights
- Targeting and segmentation
- Writing a strategy
- The annual planning process
- Activity selection
- How to brief and get the most out of agencies
- Evaluating creative and providing feedback
- Media planning
- Full funnel marketing
- Measurement & evaluation
A critical foundation in developing innovation strategies and pipelines, suitable for all levels. Covering the full innovation cycle. Strategy, concept development, launch, measurement and evaluation.
- The role of innovation
- The innovation process
- Innovation project management
- Identifying opportunities and defining territories
- Getting to great ideas
- Concept writing & product development
- Concept testing
- Innovation value chains and selling propositions
- Innovation launch planning and execution
- Measurement and evaluation
A strong foundation in customer and shopper marketing skills, suitable for all levels up to Marketing Manager.
- What is customer marketing?
- Customer marketing principles
- Situation analysis and understanding the buyer’s journey
- Writing a customer marketing strategy
- The planning process
- Activity selection
- Developing PoS that really works
- Managing customer marketing admin
- Managing commercial relationships
- Category development and category management
- Pricing and promotion strategy
- Writing a sell-in presentation
- Flawless execution
- Measurement and evaluation
A practical course to help marketers write and deliver great briefs. It covers the critical inputs, the written brief & delivering the brief.
- Why briefing matters
- The foundations of a good brief
- Situation analysis and audience understanding
- Insights
- Strategy and activity selection
- Writing and delivering the brief
- How to avoid common pitfalls
A myth-busting course unlocking insight, one of the most over-used and least-understood terms in marketing.
- The power of insights
- Defining the issue
- Identifying barriers and opportunities
- Generating insights
- Using insights
A course that equips marketers with the commercial skills they need to be successful.
- What is commercial marketing and why is it important?
- The link between commercial goals and consumer behaviour
- Understanding, owning and managing the P&L
- Writing a business case
- Pricing and promotion strategy
- Understanding sales teams & retailer needs
- Getting the most from your finance & supply teams
- Writing compelling customer propositions
- Data, analytics and storytelling
A practical course covering everything you need to know and do to develop and write a successful annual plan.
- Core marketing principles
- The annual planning process
- Situation analysis
- Insights
- Portfolio planning
- Channel planning
- How to write a growth strategy
- Activity selection
- Budget & KPI planning
- Writing the plan on the page
A practical course teaching agency teams how to understand their clients better – and deliver better work as a result.
- How to understand your client’s reality and critical business cycles
- How to understand your client’s business model – and metrics that matter
- How to identify and use personas
- What are the components of a good brief?
- How to approach a creative review
- How to give and receive feedback
- Helping your client sell-in an idea to the busines
- How to create and nurture great relationships
You can be the most highly skilled marketer in the world but it’s useless unless you can work well with others to execute your plans – we call this ‘how’. This practical course covers everything you need to seamlessly get things done.
- Project management
- Stakeholder management
- Decision making
- Communication
- Influencing
- Storytelling
- Building great relationships
- Conflict management
- Navigating a matrix or complex organisational structure
Having spent over 20 years helping countless people progress from manager to leader within some of the world’s most successful businesses, we’ve designed this programme to set your team up for success at this pivotal point in their careers.
- Understanding what makes good leadership
- Defining your authentic leadership style
- Leading leaders
- Creating possibilities
- Building high performing teams
Many marketers learn how to line manage by learning from their own experiences. Having been people managers and leaders for over 2o years, we know there’s a better way.
This course will teach you everything we know about getting the most out of your team from the get go.
- How to be a great line manager
- How to leverage strengths
- Team dynamics
- Feedback
- Difficult conversations
Experience
The courses are based on best practice blended from multinationals and start-ups
Practical
We work on live business issues for your business, making every lesson something that can be applied immediately
Relevant
We remain actively hands-on, delivering real marketing solutions for clients. These courses aren’t academic, they feature the latest case studies
Atmosphere
It’s a fun and safe environment to learn in. Supportive. Immersive. We’re very proud of the community we’ve built during each course
Embedding
We put an emphasis on ensuring the training embeds and is used day to day, by working with line managers and marketing leaders to build a structured programme of accountability
Experience
The courses are based on best practice blended from multinationals and start-ups
Practical
We work on live business issues for your business, making every lesson something that can be applied immediately
Relevant
We remain actively hands-on, delivering real marketing solutions for clients. These courses aren’t academic
Atmosphere
It’s a fun and safe environment to learn in. Supportive. Immersive. We’re very proud of the community we’ve built during each course
Embedding
We put an emphasis on ensuring the training embeds and is used day to day, by working with line managers and marketing leaders to build a structured programme of accountability
But don’t just take our word for it. Listen to what these lovely people have to say.
“By far the best training course I've ever done. Chris and Alex are such engaging and passionate teachers and created a lovely, supportive atmosphere too. The course covered everything I hoped it would and has provided me with an invaluable toolkit to help me day-to-day and given me confidence to face future challenges with.”
``I can’t recommend Chris and Alex O highly enough. The Marcomms training they provided for UKTV through Locksmith was rich, impactful, educational and entertaining all rolled into one. They are experts in their field and you’d be hard pressed to beat them.``
“I’m thrilled to say that Chris & Alex have COMPLETELY exceeded my expectations. The content is really engaging and so practical that it can literally be used immediately back in the office.”
``We needed an inspiring course to upskill our marketing community and provide a common set of tools, frameworks & language for us to use across all the teams. Chris Lock and Alex O'Rourke (nee Smith) knocked it out of the park with a deeply engaging course that successfully blended their expertise with our internal processes and language.``
“Chris and Alex have a wealth of industry experience between them and have created brilliantly engaging content punctuated with memorable anecdotes and sage advice. I’m looking forward to embedding what I’ve learned into my day job.”
“ Alex and Chris have delivered such amazing weekly classes in such a structured manner, with such impressive passion for what they do that it is just really difficult not to find everything fascinating and to want to delve into it even more.”
Chris and Alex designed and ran a brilliant course for the brand & category teams at Bugaboo. The teams needed upskilling and refreshing on the foundations of marketing and we also used the course as an opportunity to promote better cross-team work and collaboration. I’m delighted to say it was a huge success.
“An excellent course for any marketeer or founder working to build a financially driven marketing plan and a tight knit company culture.”
LockSmith Clients
