Maximising your time
The challenge
Balancing fee earning time with business development time
Our approach
Time is possibly the biggest barrier of all for many of our clients. Good time management has two essential elements – planning and teamwork.
Firstly, we help individuals and teams to create a personal business development plan. We insist that time slots allocated to business development are rocks in the diary that don’t get moved or replaced.
Secondly, we make sure that individuals recognise that they can’t do everything on their own. Teamwork is essential. When you are flat out busy and you simply don’t have time, somebody else on the team has to step in to ‘keep the plates spinning’. Which means knowing your team, understanding each other’s expertise and planning your time wisely.
Turning the listening up to 11!
Now more than ever in Business Development, we need to listen to our clients to gain the insight that will help provide competitive advantage and close the deal.
Try our Espresso Shot Learning – Our 30 min live webinar to give your team the key points and latest thinking in Business Development and Client Relationship Management.
How to balance your time
Questas’s Gary Williams says:
“We have a client who takes time management to heart. Before he even opens his email in the morning, he takes 10 minutes just thinking about business development and writing the list of who he’s got to talk to, what he’s got to write, is he attending an event, has he got to get a publication piece finished. It’s the first thing he does every day. It relies on discipline, but it gets results.”
From our blog
Transforming your sales programme
Is it time your team changed its approach to sales? Read on to discover some practical advice about transforming your sales programme and making it a resounding success.
The challenge
Being too scattergun with marketing and business development
Our approach
The scattergun approach happens when the pressure’s on. It often manifests itself when lots of people from the same company are trying to drum up business. But because it’s adhoc and uncoordinated, it’s ineffective and often unprofessional.
We get the relevant people in a room and, using our ‘Growth Model’, we take them through the process of understanding what is happening in their marketplace, who the players are in that market and what is their share or their target within that market. We create a campaign of awareness and reputation building. Where are your strengths, where are your relationships already, where is your reputation? We help our clients to really narrow their focus to get the best return on business development activity.
The challenge
Not spending enough time and energy on the best clients
Our approach
Some clients are more important than others! Some are more profitable, some provide more work, some provide work in different disciplines, and some of them have a really good long term future. It’s crucial to segment your client base.
We help people identify which of their clients are most important and we create client plans to develop those relationships, with real objectives for building new opportunities. It all comes back to planning and analysis. Understanding who we know, what’s important to them, what’s their structure, what are their objectives. This is how to build a closer, stronger relationship with your client.
Getting to the ‘table’ of target clients
Are you targeting the right clients and speaking to them regularly? Don’t lose out to your competitors, develop your own action driven BD Plan.
Try our Espresso Shot Learning – Our 30 min live webinar to give your team the key points and latest thinking in Business Development and Client Relationship Management.
From our blog
Ten qualities of a highly successful key client manager
The most effective managers juggle a multitude of skills and wear a number of different hats, not least delivering work! Annabel Miller looks at the variety of skills needed to succeed.
Questas’s Gillian Sutherland says:
“There is a direct relationship between the amount of time and effort we put into a client and the return on that investment.”
Free consultation
Have questions for us? Get your team started today and gain a new competitive advantage.
