Cal Partners

Business development involves listening to and responding to clients and building a relationship. The role of marketing is to raise profile, brand awareness and overall strategy - business development is about identifying and meeting clients’ needs, building trust and ultimately conversion. The professional services industry is becoming more competitive with discerning clients who, through the web, have access to more information and choice than ever before. Having a strong business development capability opens up significant opportunities and enables you to refine and develop your ideal client base.

Project management has been used and developed over many years in the manufacturing, healthcare, construction and IT industries as well as by the public sector. This strict approach to project planning and delivery is becoming increasingly relevant to professional services. Deployed correctly, project management is a systemised process to ensure that things happen on a staged and evaluated basis, at every step reviewing whether the business case for a project remains viable, within strict parameters and that all those involved have clear, defined roles and responsibilities ensuring that quality is never compromised.

We all have ideas and plans, marketing and business development is no exception and often excellent ideas simply end up in the “long grass” as there is never a defined beginning, middle and end to the process leading to a final product. Often terminal to many promising projects is the lack of ownership or clarity of roles and milestones.

The core to successful marketing is to determine your ideal target market, what it is they are after and then adapt and communicate your offering to suit them. Many professional services organisations have been introspective when developing their services often organically over many years and then expect clients to carry on purchasing them. Such organisations should look at their offering from a client's perspective.

With the opportunities in digital, any offer can be tailored, targeted and communicated exactly to the client's need, in turn providing a competitive advantage. Cal Partners can facilitate this process through detailed internal and external audit including competitor analysis, speaking to staff, stakeholders and engaging with existing clients and prospects. We can then prepare a realistic and achievable marketing plan, deploying the marketing mix tailored to suit the organisation, client base, budget and objectives.