Supporting you to achieve your business goals

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Who is supporting you to achieve your business goals? As a procurement coach, it’s all about communication, influencing and delivering your business goals through facilitation, coaching & development.  Interestingly, being  procurement specialists really does help you with business development success.

We explain below our approach to mentoring and detail specifically what we would propose to achieve as outcomes (we are happy to accept accountabilities for performance) from our activities.  The proposed intangible – and tangible, financial – outcomes include:

•             Financial goals including specific income and earnings

•             Enhance writing skills and marketing/tendering collateral

•             Enhance business and contractual knowledge and skills

•             Develop a measurable integrated business development plan

•             Enhance customer engagement skills

•             Increase income streams from existing customers, specific minimum income and earnings

Our Approach

At Brian Farrington Ltd (BFL), we work against the Kirkpatrick Model to ensure that maximum impact is gained in developing your business development competencies and organisation’s business goals.

We have invested heavily in better understanding how to optimise the effectiveness of learning. By ‘learning’ we mean acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesising different types of information.  Identifying this ‘how’ of learning informs our approach to embedding learning and the tools we use to optimise effectiveness.

For successful learning, please see the diagram below, there are four main factors in play.

supporting you to achieve your business goals brian farrington ltd procurement coaching

They are as follows:

I.            Wanting to learn is important. When people really want something, they usually get it sooner or later (whether or not it’s good for them!).  A key element of the resonance of our approach to enhancing learning is the mentoring skills of our procurement coaching. We support you in achieving your business goals by working together to transfer this key characteristic to your programme. The ability to engage and influence is a key tool to embedding learning.

II.            Learning by doing Learning by doing is how most people learn, including by trial and error, practice, and learning from mistakes. Academics refer to this as ‘experiential learning’. We can plan in episodes of each of these into the programme. A good example is for our procurement coach to accompany you on one or more actual appointments with an identified prospect, having previously agreed a meeting strategy and tactics.

III.           Learning through feedback: ‘other people’s reactions’ is the most frequent reply about how people account for having developed positive feelings. Ignore our feelings about learning at our peril! Feedback comes from all directions including internal and external stakeholders, learning resources and the proposed mentor. It takes courage and awareness to accept that everyone is supporting you to achieve your busienss goals. A good example would be the feedback on performance can be provided to hone your customer engagement, listening and questioning and proposal-making competencies.

IV.          ‘Making sense’ of what has been learned. It is often said that the important step in this area is ‘getting my head round it’. It’s tempting to use the word ‘understanding’ for this, but it’s not the best word. The problem with ‘understanding’ is lack of a shared view of what the word really means. More appropriate is the word digesting for the ‘making sense of it’ dimension of learning. This facet of learning reinforces the need for regular and consistent exploration of business development competencies, rather than a ‘big-bang approach’.

Next steps

You already know (many of) the things that will make you more successful and help to achieve the intangible and tangible, financial outcomes. They’re not complex. They’re not mysteries. Things like regularly keeping in touch with prospects and customers. Things like regularly going out and networking (if that’s a strategy that is included in the measurable integrated marketing plan). Or regularly getting up on stage to present, regularly writing blog posts and articles. The secret – if there is one – is consistency. It’s doing these simple things week in, week out. Success in business development is not determined by big, one-off, complex new strategies. Our approach will be to work with you to iteratively develop your competencies through small actions consistently implemented – aligned with achieving your organisation’s business goals.

Pick up the phone, drop an email  – We look forward to hearing from you to figure out the best way of supporting you to achieve your business goals.

If you would like to learn more about how we might be able to help you achieve your procurement goals, please contact me and we can have an informal chat to discuss your areas of interest.

Alternatively you can call me on 01744 20698.

Thanks

Steve