Yesterday saw another successful training session for PM Forum with delegates from legal, accountancy and property firms at the “Practical and Professional Skills for marketing and business development assistants” http://www.pmforum.co.uk/training/
Summarising the discussion, here is a checklist of 25 practical and professional skills for marketing and business development assistants.
Perception
- How do you perceive yourself? You need to have confidence in yourself if you expect others to have confidence in you.
- How might others perceive you? Do you convey the right attributes and messages about yourself? Do you project an image for the role that you want?
- How do you perceive others? Do you have empathy with those you work for and with?
- Do you ‘label’ people negatively so that you do filter out other perceptions about them?
- Are you confident that you understand “BrandMe”? Your strengths and differentiators?
Knowledge
- Have you sufficient professional knowledge about business development? In all spheres including marketing, selling and relationship management? Marketing technology? Analytics?
- Do you understand the products and services provided by your firm?
- Are you familiar with the business plans, marketing plans and personal plans of your firm and the teams that you work with? Their financial targets?
- How much do you know about the markets and clients that your firm serves?
- Are you genuinely curious?
Goals
- Do you understand the goals of your firm and the teams you work with sufficiently so that you can align your support to help with their achievement?
- Are you clear what goals you work to in the short term so that your day-to day activity and effort is focused and results-oriented?
- Are you clear about your medium and long term goals for your own career and personal development requirements?
- Is everything you do aligned to firm, team and personal goals?
- Are your goals SMART so that you can measure your effectiveness?
Plans
- Do you take a structured, planned and focused approach to all of your activity?
- Is your success measured on outputs and outcomes rather than inputs?
- Can you guide fee-earners through the research and planning process?
- Do you maintain momentum on plan implementation? Can you motivate people?
- Are you confident when plans need to change to meet changing environmental, professional, financial or personal needs?
Relationships
- Have you invested time and effort in building strong relationships with others in the business development team?
- Do you consider how you personally add value to all relationships?
- Are you effective at developing empathy, trust and good working relationships with the fee-earners that you support?
- To what extent do you know and have relationships with those in your market – whether influencers, referrers, clients and potential clients?
- Do you invest time in developing your own professional network both face-to-face and online?
