Delivering high performance in marketing & business development

Recognise these challenges? You are not alone. Most professional services businesses struggle with how to balance fee earning work against the need to keep a sustained flow of leads, prospect meetings, proposals and contract wins.

As a business grows more capacity is needed in the business to generate opportunities and ensure the business is not dependent on the efforts of the Principals or Founding Partners/Directors.

Building an internal Marketing and Business Development team is one option, however this is a slow process and a costly business overhead. It can be difficult to find the right skillsets and experience to create an effective team that really understands your business and integrates seamlessly with the fee earning teams.

Senior fee earners are typically encouraged to be responsible for sales pipeline management and help implement ad-hoc marketing programmes. These efforts are often uncontrolled with a resultant depletion in immediate revenue earning capacity with limited positive impact on business development. It is not uncommon for fee earners to lack the requisite skills to be good business developers, yet using "professional" business development staff carries significant risks for the business.

At Shaping Business we have built a suite of advisory services and outsourced marketing solutions specifically for professional services businesses, to enable you to achieve high performance in marketing and business development to deliver a more effective sales pipeline:

• Growth Strategy – challenging preconceived ideas and enabling your business to formulate a robust and achievable growth strategy.
• Marketing Communications – increasing awareness of your brand and improving engagement with more prospective clients in your target market.
• Converting Leads – enabling your team to make better use of their time on business development and convert more leads into opportunities.
• Proposal Management – improving the effectiveness of your bid management processes to increase your proposal win rates, without undue overhead.
• Client Retention - building the capability into your business to systematically generate more repeat business and maximise client retention.

Each of our service propositions is tailored to your specific business needs to improve sales pipeline management and deliver business growth.