free Business Growth Challenge

About the challenge

Hosted by business growth transformation and training organisation Growth Ignition on behalf of the Dept for Business and Trade - the challenge is made up of five sessions that take you through the life-cycle of planning for, and executing on, a successful growth strategy. We start with strategy development, working through how to conduct market research, writing your business plan and in week two – developing your marketing strategy. We then move in the following weeks into execution of the strategy through tactics in developing value propositions for clients, pitching and presenting and finally best practices in bidding and negotiating deals.

Each week attendees will be issued with templates and tools to complete as well as access to recordings of the sessions.

Week 1

• Challenge kick-off & business growth strategy

  Jeremy will open the five-week free challenge with a kick-off briefing on the challenge and then a module on developing your business growth strategy. This will cover how to conduct market research, business planning and a structured model for executing your strategy. In this session you will also get a free business planning template to use across the challenge.

Week 2

• Marketing 101 for non-marketeers

  Jules will guide you through building an international marketing strategy and developing a better understanding of your ideal overseas customer base. Jules will demonstrate how to entice an international audience with some useful hints and tips, plus some content ideas to get those creative juices flowing. In this session you will also get a free marketing plan template to help you form your ideas.

Week 3

• Developing value propositions

  In this session Jeremy will provide attendees with an overview of how to research opportunities, understand clients and stakeholders, assess the competitive field and to develop value propositions to inform messaging, including for exec summaries and key client presentations - for individual strategic opportunities or for streams of activity. You will also be given a free value propositions template.

Week 4

• Pitching and presenting to clients

  In this session Jeremy will run through how to prepare for, storyboard, develop content for and deliver great pitches and competitive presentations to clients abroad. You will also receive a free pitch and presentations guide.

Week 5

• Bidding and closing deals

  Attendees with gain an understanding of what is involved in successfully bidding and winning deals for work abroad – from preparation and making good bid decisions to developing your solution and story-boarding and writing your content, using review gateways to ensure quality and negotiation skills to land the deal. You will also get a free bid process template and suite of templates and tools.