Checklist: 25 practical and professional skills for marketing and business development assistants (2015)

Posted on: November 20, 2015

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?