LEAD GENERATION & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
LEAD GENERATION
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Lead generation is the process that includes attracting and converting prospects into a lead that will ultimately become a purchaser of the products and services your company has to offer.
We find qualified leads by the following process:
• Perform an Audit
• Clarify your Objectives
• Identify Key Decisions
• Identify the most Appropriate Contact Strategy
• Devise a Campaign Strategy
• Implementation
• Results Monitoring
• Reporting
• Review, Adapt and Refine
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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
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Highly engaged customers buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty. Providing a high-quality customer experience is an important component in your customer engagement strategy. 1st Thought Business Support can help you to develop and maintain your customer engagement strategy, through email marketing, face to face, telecoms and social media.
STRATEGY
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1st Thought Business Support can help you with your business strategy by:
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Gathering the facts with you
To know where you’re heading, you have to know where you are right now. So before you start looking ahead, you should review the past performance, or the current situation
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Help to develop a vision statement
This statement should describe the future direction of the business and its aims in the medium to long term. It’s about describing the organisation’s purpose and values
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Help to develop a mission statement
Like the vision statement, this defines the organisation’s purpose, but it also outlines its primary objectives. This focuses on what needs done in the short term to realise the long term vision
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Identify strategic objectives
Highlight the priorities and implement the plans that will ensure delivery of the company’s vision and mission
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Develop Tactical Plans
Now is the time to put some meat on the bones of your strategy
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Performance Management
All the planning and hard work may have been done, but it’s vital to continually review all objectives and action plans to make sure you’re still on track to achieve that overall goal
PROJECT PLANNING
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1st Thought Business Support can help you set up and manage your project plan.
There are hundreds of project plan tools available and a project can be as complicated as you want it to be, a project plan is a set of documents that can change over the course of a project.
The plan provides an overall direction for the project. If unexpected issues arise (e.g. delivery delays), the plan can be adjusted by the PM.
A project plan is coordinated by the PM with input from stakeholders and team members.
CRM & NETWORKING
NETWORKING
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Professional networking is about making contacts and building relationships that can lead to jobs or other work-related opportunities.
Thoughtful networking provides a focused way to talk to people about your business.
Done right, it can help you obtain leads, referrals, advice, information, and support.
However networking can be overwhelming and you may not know where to start. Or perhaps you need to attend lots of networking events and you aren't able to do all of them. You may need to network online, or find people to network with.
1st Thought can help you with all of the above and with plenty of experience building connections, can attend on your behalf, or with you if you need support, and can start connecting and networking online for you.
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EVENTS
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1st Thought Business Support has years of experience developing and running events.
From CRM and ticket management, white labelling events, creating and gaining sponsorship and partners, media management before and during, to on the day event management, looking after your sponsors, partners and speakers; we can help you develop and run a successful event and turn your attendees into repeat visitors or customers.
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CRM DEVELOPMENT & MANAGEMENT
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Have you just started your business?
Attended lots of networking and met and obtained customers before you even have had a chance to start a CRM?
1st Thought Business Support can help.
With experience in a number of CRM systems from small to large businesses, we can help you source and set up the right CRM for you.
We can make sure that your CRM is set up professionally and if you don't have time, can continue to manage it for you. Or maybe you already have a system but it needs streamlining or data cleansing, we can help with that too.
OPERATIONS & ADMINISTRATION
INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT
A business infrastructure plan creates a road map that is used to start and run a company. This road map consists of a three part plan: daily operations, processes, and employees. Each component of the business infrastructure should be created and analyzed independently of the others.
1st Thought Business Support has been involved in a number of different business infrastructures and helped businesses from the start up stage to becoming fully fledged operational businesses with staff of 500+. If you are not sure where to start with your infrastructure, have already started but want to dot the I's and cross the T's, or need help to continue developing, then 1st Thought Business Support can help.
OPERATIONAL PROCESSES
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Perhaps the most frequently used and the most important type of processes in any company are the operational processes. These are processes which define the primary activities that a company needs to perform in order to successfully execute its business.
1st Thought Business Support can help your business develop and maintain its operational processes. Two of the most fundamental things in operations that define the rest of your business and whether it will succeed or fail, is making sure you always search for the best practice in your company. To implement this, you need to create a Standard Operating Procedure, meaning that once the process is decided it is documented and created as a manual for others who work, or join, to follow, so best practice is followed by everyone.
BUSINESS ANALYSIS
1st Thought Business Support can help identify your business needs and determine solutions to your business problems. We can evaluate your business and support you with
solutions consisting of process improvements, organisational changes or strategic planning and policy development.
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We will take a holistic view of your business systems and situation. This may include examining elements of the organisation structures and staff development issues as well as current processes and IT systems. It’s not always possible to know there is a better way of doing something but by looking through your process, 1st Thought Business Support can recommend new processes to potentially save time or money.
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We can use systems such as excel dashboards enabling you to automate management information reports, utilizing data from different sources. We can create dashboards that will display your data in an intuitive way for your business.
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1st Thought Business Support will develop a basic trend analysis using smoothing techniques on data to identify underlying trends. Finding behaviour in your data such as seasonality can be used to predict future demand, enabling you to decide when it may be best to acquire more resources.
ADMINISTRATION
From data entry to invoices, or diary and email management, we can help. No job is too small (or too large!) We can mop up all of the day to day things you have to do in your business to keep the cogs moving, but that can take up so much of your precious time, enabling you to focus only on the core activities that take your business to the next level and let you maximise productivity and revenue.
DATA MANAGEMENT
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Data Management can create feelings of dread and images in your head of endless boredom, yet is one of the key pivotal activities in your company. Without data you wouldn't know what or why you offer the services and products you do and to whom.
But data can easily get out of control if not managed properly and a strict best practice regime form the beginning is always the best.
But we all start with good intentions right?
But before you know it, it all spirals out of control and then its too difficult to fix, right? Wrong!
1st Thought Business Support offer a number of different services to get it all back under control and for you to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to business.
We offer:
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Data cleaning
Before doing anything with your data, your data can sometimes need a 'wash' to have clean useful stuff. This is usually the most time-consuming process of any data project. We can transform it into shiny usable data.
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Web scrapping
If data is collected through a website API, this data can usually be downloaded. Now we all know that doing this from numerous websites can also be quite a time-consuming process. Using web scrapping the data download can be automated, allowing you to get the data on a regular basis and for campaign analysis or presenting in dashboards.
BRANDING & MARKETING
​MARKETING
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Marketing, where to start?
1st Thought Business Support can help you through the whole process of marketing your business and maintaining engagement with your current and prospective customers.
We offer Email and Campaign marketing, Social Media management and SEO optimisation, we can also help you with your content!
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BRANDING
Our branding & design specialist can provide the following:
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Start up branding package
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Brand review and development
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Re-branding
We also provide a full design service including:
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Images & logo resizing for social media
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Providing artwork for all print collateral
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Print management through to delivery
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WEBSITE PACKAGES
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Build your own:
We can provide either 1 to 1 online or face to face training sessions with a Wix Trainer, empowering you with the skills & tools to get your website right from the start.
You will be guided through an in-depth briefing guide and receive branding assistance throughout.
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Full build service:
If you really don't think building your own website is the best use of your time, we can build it for you on Wix, and train you to do your own updates. That way, you get the site you need at an affordable price, with the knowledge that you're fully in control moving forward.
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Full build & hosting service:
Ongoing hosting and maintenance packages are available to meet your specific requirements - starting at £595 initial cost and monthly hosting starting from £35/month (includes 5 hrs of updates per year). Please call to discuss.
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CAMPAIGN STRATEGY & MANAGEMENT
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We offer independent Google Analytics and Campaign analysis packages on your previous or future marketing.
Adding Google analytic cookies to your website will allow you to find where customers are coming from, whether it is organic i.e. directly to your website, via third party websites, or via search engine’s.
Google analytics can help you understand where customers are dropping off on your website and then help you decide where more work is needed to potentially increase the number of customers that make it to purchase. When running campaigns to increase sales, Google analytics can be used to analyse how a campaign is going and then analyse how much profit has been made by running the campaign.
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