The foundation of a winning strategy is having a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and how important it is to achieve it.
Sometimes it’s pretty straightforward. More often, however, you’re surrounded my multiple competing brand, reputational, access and corporate objectives and have finite resources with which to achieve them:
“Over the next two years our company will be launching 3 new brands, and a further 6 new lines for heritage products. We have new competitors entering our existing markets and we need to retain brand leadership, but we are also entering highly competitive markets in which we are not known at all. A major competitor has opened an office in the near vicinity and is competing heavily for talent, including our own; we need to engage our own employees, whilst showing prospective employees that we’re the most attractive option for a career in life sciences. And I need to give a headcount back next year…”
If that sounds familiar, you might be interested in our approach to prioritisation for high performing communications and policy groups.
We take a scorecard based approach to our prioritisation process, POLESTAR, measuring both product and corporate objectives alongside each other. We then produce a clear map of where you can best target resources for the highest corporate and commercial return. This provides you with a solid foundation – fully aligned with the needs of the business – upon which to build your communications and policy plan.
POLESTAR, the proprietary approach we take to prioritisation, is:
- Tailored, to the needs of your function and to your company
- Scorecard-based, to accurately reflect the preferences of your organisation, team and stakeholders
- Inclusive, built from the bottom-up as a whole team exercise, including other internal and external stakeholders where helpful (we recommend at the least representation from the commercial part of the business)
- Data-driven, so you can drill down into the detail with budget-holders and align your resources proportionally
- Proactive, enabling you to articulate what you are going to focus on, rather than apologising for having to say no to lower priorities
- A foundation, for all your strategic planning, forecasting, budgetary discussions, resource allocation, team structuring and core competency development
We will work with you and your team to deliver a clear, coherent and scalable map of priorities. This will provide you with:
- Value, a language for demonstrating the value of your function to budget holders and leadership
- Efficiency, a reduction in your investment of time and resource on lower value returns
- Competitive edge, a focus on your strengths and where your expertise can have the greatest impact
- Focus, a framework to move away from ‘butterflying’ and being stretched thin by competing priorities
- Alignment, with the most important commercial and corporate needs of the business
If you’re interested in exploring how we can help you to focus on the things that matter, free you up from those activities with marginal returns and articulate the value of your expert function then let us know a little bit more about your needs below: