Strategic planning is all about setting your business’s direction and figuring out how to use your resources to hit your goals. It starts with setting clear, achievable objectives, then taking a good look at both the inside and outside factors that could affect you. From there, it’s all about coming up with strategies to reach those goals and putting them into tactics by assigning tasks and managing resources.

We also need to keep an eye on progress and make tweaks as needed to stay on track. In short, it’s about understanding what you want to do and then creating a game plan for success and being flexible enough to adapt as things change.

There is always a complexity to building a relationship with your customer. It is not always just about the transaction and selling that just one aspect. In B2B it is about how you ensure you can understand what happens next with the development of the collaboration between you and your customer.

How do you keep your team aligned and adapt to the outcomes that you need to provide to your customer, how do you build a process that lets you know if you are at risk of changing relationships. Can you measure the success or changes to ensure you head the direction with your set with your customer? What is changing in their world that impacts your world?

Increasing demand on resources for sales teams leads to time spent in the office rather than in the field. How do we understand the effectiveness of the team? Normal reporting is being increasingly dominated by connection to financial and operational demands, losing focus on the sales and account teams reaching the customers at the right level. Understanding the real buying process and driving the right buying desires and time frames for sales needs teamwork.

Increasingly operations leaders are engaged in the sales process and often have less connection with how the contracts they operate connect back to the sales team. Leading to lost opportunity and declining relationships. We can work to ensure that your team can improve the connections to customers and internally and develop their skills in business development.

What does your company need to know and what does that do for you? Matching your CRM and sales forecasts with your business strategy can be a bit of a juggling act. Sometimes, the data entered into the CRM clashes with internal team views. How strong is the customer connection? Is the customer engagement going according to plan? Getting the most accurate understanding requires digging deep.

With multiple touchpoints to the customer and various demands on the B2B relationship, it’s crucial to know whether you’re seen as just another supplier or as an integrated partner. Clear account management is key to ensuring everything aligns with your strategy. Remember, customers always have options for sourcing. Analysing what you understand about your goals is more crucial now than ever.

CJConnect understands the importance of ensuring process in embedded in the customer relationship and business development function. This does not mean creating another convolution of a dashboard from your CRM. It means looking at the sales process from initiation through to implementation of the sale, and beyond. Are you living up to the promises made during sales process, are you understanding how to maximise the sales opportunities.

In essence, does your business really have a solid grip on the buyers’ understanding of what you do for them. The process you manage for the sales process helps the longevity of the relationship and the importance that you have with the customer. To often the relationship breaks down with the customer because the process of account management is unclear to your team.

Turning over the sale through to operations, and producing the outcome expected by the customer is sometimes not as easy as it appears. Setting out a clear understanding of what the business needs and connecting it to what the customer thought they were getting can challenge the best of the companies.

So implementation, mobilistation, start up, kickoff, fulfilment, bringing it to life however you want to call it, requires a strong handover and collaboration from the team. When you get on the good foot it sets up the strong and vibrant customer supplier team. When you start on the wrong foot – well, prepare for a bumpy ride.

When a consultant sets up a workshop facilitation, it’s all about creating a fun and engaging atmosphere where everyone can share ideas and learn together. The consultant starts by getting a clear understanding of what the client outcome is and what they want to achieve. They then put together a tailored agenda that hits those goals.

The workshop is designed to be interactive and encourages everyone to participate, share their thoughts, and stay focused on the outcomes. By using a mix of activities, discussions, and hands-on exercises, the consultant helps participants connect the dots between what they’re learning and developing. It’s all about making the workshop an enjoyable and valuable experience for everyone involved and walking away with the clarity of vision to understand the outcome.