OUR APPROACH

SETTING YOUR SITES ON CLIENT IMPACT

How We Deliver This Service

We begin with an assessment of where you are today, where you want to be in the future and the gaps between the two. Usually our assessment will focus on the core of the challenge you are facing today, whether missed growth targets, slow new client acquisition, friction among team leaders, anemic promises to your market or revenue and profitability challenges. All of these are symptoms of larger issues. This will result in a series of stated objectives to be accomplished during our engagement.

We usually interview leaders at your firm who bear responsibility for each of the 3 critical functions: marketing, business development, delivery. We carefully examine the metrics by which their success is defined. We come to understand how they see the growth challenge and what strategies and tactics they’ve put in place to address the issues. We assess the effectiveness of those strategies and tactics.

We also review your ideal client profile. If you do not have an ideal client profile, we prefer to create this through our Marketing Positioning service offering before we deliver our Growth Planning service.

The idea client profile clearly shows us their top goals, opportunities and challenges. We then analyze the promises you make through your marketing, business development and delivery functions to see how closely these match up to your ideal clients goals, opportunities and challenges. This analysis can immediately identify areas where you need to make changes.

We analyze the in-bound trajectory of between 5 to 10 new clients you’ve acquired over the past 12 to 24 months. We recreate their in-bound experience, examining the promises made by all three functions. We review your website and marketing literature, the agreements the clients signed and the documentation, if available, from service delivery.

We then interview these clients and ask them about their experiences at all three phases: when consuming your marketing materials, when working with your business development team and when receiving services from your delivery team. Their comments are very insightful.

Usually these two analyses, the internal analysis with your 3 functions and the in-bound client experience, reveal the core of the issues holding you back from growth. Out of these analyses, we create a strategy to remediate the issues.

The timing for the delivery of our analyses is highly dependent on the schedules of your senior executives. We usually set a target to complete our analyses within 90 days. The remediation recommendations are then reviewed and a set of action steps are bought into by your leaders.

Creating Alignment Around Promises To Ideal Clients

Our remediation strategies usually break down into two categories: quick wins and longer-term strategies. The quick wins usually include a list of short-term actions that your functional leaders can implement within the next 30-60 days. Quick wins are relatively easy to implement, departmentally focused and deliver quick returns.

Longer-term strategies include a list of strategies that your leaders will commit to undertaking over time. These usually break down into recommendations for functional areas to implement on their own and recommendations for the three team leaders to implement in unison.

For instance, we often create a list of recommendations specific to the marketing, business development and delivery teams. We help team leaders define which recommendations they will adopt and a strategy for doing so that does not overwhelm them or their team. This produces meaningful and long-lasting change. We also help them draft schedules for when the changes will be implemented so they hold themselves accountable to make the changes.

Our recommendations usually also include a set of actions that functional leaders will take in unison. To create alignment between marketing, business development and delivery, these functional leaders will need to come together at defined points throughout the year to report their individual progress against goals and to further collaborate about how to serve ideal clients more effectively.

Our longer-term strategies will nearly always include specific metrics for each function to measure themselves against. By figuring out the right things to do, doing those things, measuring those things and then making course corrections, your 3 critical functions will focus on those activities that produce meaningful growth and client delight.

The Concerns Of Executives

The number one concern of executives considering this process is that their function will be seen as somehow at fault for growth barriers. The number two concern is that the remediation plan will add a whole new set of tasks to their already very-busy days.

Most executives who have gone through this process will report the exact opposite experience. Most executives learn, by hearing what clients say, what they’ve done very well. They also come to see how they can improve client impact by just changing a few things right away. Quick wins are very motivational and produce a lot great new energy and morale for functional team leaders.

Most executives are also pleasantly surprised at how little time and energy is required of them to fix the issues we identify in our remediation plan. Our remediation plans are custom-built for each client, depending on what our analyses unveil.

See What Can You Expect for details about the outcomes of this service.

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