The Marketing Leaders - Using Management Standards to maximize your potential for meeting clients needs

How can you use management and leadership standards to meet the needs of your clients? Perhaps it depends on how you measure and assess things? Let’s see if this is the case.

In an ever shrinking business world, making comparisons and evaluating performances with competing markets and competitors is fast becoming an even harder pastime for the UK Sales & Marketing profession, let alone keeping up to date with local needs and trends of our clients to maintain current business levels.

For our clients though their immediate measurement is how their approach to our company was dealt with.

• Was the request quickly dealt with?
• Was the request professionally dealt with?
• Did the response to the request meet their needs correctly?
• Did the request result in good communication links?

As a potential client or even an existing client these considerations could have made the difference of a potential business transaction even before the common 4 P’s even came into the equation.

The best we can give

Whether we are responsible for Sales & Marketing, General Management or Finance the importance of ensuring our response to our clients is the best we can give is paramount for the continuing existence of our business

Over the last few years a lot of research and discussion has gone into the development of work related competencies including those for Sales & Marketing Management, General Management and Team Leading. Within these discussions a lot of time has been given to the needs of the clients and their minimum expectations as well as understanding the feasibility of transferring their needs into positive development processes for us the suppliers/partners.

The following lists show the main recognised competencies required within certain roles:

• Acting Assertively
• Behaving Ethically
• Building teams
• Communicating
• Focusing on Results
• Influencing Others
• Thinking and Taking Decisions
• Searching for Information
• Managing Self
• Acting Strategically

• Know your available market
• Successful Sales Planning
• Understanding Financial Issues
• Managing teams
• Effective Communications
• Create feasible opportunities
• Understand the sales cycle
• Importance of good sales support (post order)
• Developing and Managing customer relationships

• Provide marketing intelligence and customer insight
• Provide strategic marketing direction for the organization
• Develop the customer proposition
• Manage and provide marketing communications
• Use and develop marketing and customer information
• Lead marketing operations and programmes
• Work closely with other business functions and third parties
• Manage and develop teams and individuals

Having recognized the common activities within roles the next stage is to encourage their use as a method for meeting the needs of our clients.

The diagram that follows gives a clear guideline on the natural progression that follows once it has been decided that the use of standards and competency frameworks deserve to be at the centre of any evaluation required to build future success.

The standards are used to write up the role descriptions/job specifications from which individuals become clearly aware of what is expected of them. These are based not only on what may have been the main components of the role that someone is doing or has done but is based on the market intelligence requirements from the many years of research that have gone into the standards.

This leads naturally to a method of evaluation to ensure employees are maintaining a high level of awareness and compatibility in the role. This typically equates to an Annual appraisal that evaluates individual performance but again should be based on the standards rather than just past requirements/past performance or just agreed SMART measurable which is often the case today.

Having established where your employee or team is in relation to the needs of the standards enables you to decide on the best method of meeting their development plans. Ideally you will have established a training provider network which fully supports the competency framework approach and offers training based on them as well as meeting your perceived needs.

The additional thought/development process will include the method of measuring the outcome of the training to maximize the time as well as financial investment made in training/development of your employees. The current growth in recognition for development programmes leading to either a VRQ or NVQ accreditation indicates how the framework structures are gaining in popularity. (Full details of available programmes are available from Awarding Body web sites such as www.i-l-m.com or from the MSSSB web site).

In turn this will encourage thinking ahead in relation to business planning and potential growth as more and more individuals undertake development processes that feed back into the measurable changes/recommendations that work based projects bring to the training process.

In the past potential sponsors of training and development have been concerned about managing the perceived expectations of those who undertook training. Their concerns centered on requests for promotion that were not available which in turn may result in loosing employees to competitors having invested time and money in their development.

Giving recognition to focused training through NVQ or VRQ Qualifications is in itself a measurable recognition of an employee showing commitment to their own development and can also be promoted as a reward structure by the employer as they fund the cost of training. In turn offering training and development based on the right competencies supported by recognized qualifications leads to higher recruitment possibilities, longer retention possibilities and suitable recognition/rewards.

Making the most of available standards in all areas of management will lead to an improvement in management performance and place your business on the right track to meet the needs of your clients so that when they make that initial assessment of how you responded to their initial request the chances of converting enquiries into real business is more secure.

Tony Pearson is a Business Manager for the Institute of Leadership and Management and works with Training Providers and Employers to ensure training solutions in the Management Arena meet the requirements of the relevant frameworks to meet programme requirements leading to ILM Qualifications.



		Using Management Standards to maximize your potential for meeting clients needs