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?