We just completed a new training video to help you when starting out in Growth Panel.

The total run-time is 18 minutes, so we broke the video into two segments. Review it before you login to your Preview account. If you’re an account administrator on a Professional version, forward this link to new members after sending out their login information.

For best results, click play and then select the HD icon in the YouTube player controls (it appears once the video is playing) to view the high-definition version, and click the full-screen icon to its right to get a better look. Keep your volume up, and click your Esc key to exit full screen mode.

Growth Panel Training Tutorial - Part 1

Growth Panel Training Tutorial - Part 2

If you’re a consultant focused in marketing, sales or business strategy, you can use Growth Panel as the infrastructure for your practice.  Use the content and tools under your own brand for deliverables and use the online platform to create client proposals and manage project execution. 

As most seasoned consultants know, the key to growing a successful marketing practice is great execution. 

With Growth Panel, you can hit the ground running with your projects. The web-based marketing platform allows you to 

• Add a career’s worth of intelligence to use under your own brand
• Create, organize and manage workflow for client projects
• Create client proposals and project plans
• Access tools and documents for delivery
• Collaborate with your team on deliverables
• Store all of your intellectual property
• Train your team 

Managing a Client Marketing Project 

There are a few different ways to approach a new client project. Let’s take a look at an example of how to use Growth Panel before you’ve landed a new client. 

1.  Engage a new client lead. In your initial meeting, determine their pains and discuss high-level solutions. 

2.  Afterward, begin preparing a proposal. Login to Growth Panel and start with the Plan Creator. Choose the business challenge that best addresses your prospect’s pain and drill down in step 2. Customize the recommendations in step 3 based on your prospect’s pains and the solutions you plan to deliver. Save your plan and export it to a plan template in Word and deliver to your prospect.

3.  Win the business! Enter Projects and create your new project. After creation, click on it to enter the Project Details screen and import your plan proposal from the Project Plans icon on the right. Once you’ve imported your plan, add detail to each milestone and task: establish delivery dates and assign plan tasks to team members (or to yourself).

4.  Download documents attached to your plan to execute each step.  

5.  Store finished deliverables in your project area.

6.  Manage your execution schedule from your calendar.

7.  Collaborate with your team on each task, milestone and goal directly from the Projects section.

8.  Complete tasks, cross off milestones, and match your results to your goals.

9.  Archive your completed project for future reference. 

Currently only your team has access to the Projects section, so you’ll need to determine how to share deliverables with your client. Much of that depends upon the type of services that you deliver and your clients’ requirements. Or, you can have your client set up their own Growth Panel account and add you as a user so you can work on the project together. We share revenue with distributors, and it’s a great way to leave behind a tangible asset that your client will value. 

We will be adding guest access and project reporting to the Projects section soon, so you’ll have the ability to share single project deliverables, tasks and project status with your clients without having to add them as full users to your account.

There are a number of ways to get started using Growth Panel. Last week we tackled two scenarios: how to get started when you’re looking for a solution to an immediate marketing challenge, and getting started managing an existing marketing project. 

Another approach is to dive into the marketing content to expand your expertise in a specific subject. Most marketers and consultants have deep expertise in 3 to 5 of our subjects, along with hands-on experience in six to eight. 

Visit the Library and choose a subject to access the content you’d like to explore. After you select a subject, the exercise panel will display the core exercises you can download to execute and manage each task. Download them here and review each exercise.  You don’t have to do them all right away; just look at the tasks each exercise presents to get an overview.  This might take 30 minutes to a few hours, depending on the subject and the depth of your review. 

Marketing Content for New Expertise

I learn best when I write or type something that I’ve read, so I like to create my own summary of each exercise in my own document. Let’s take a look at Pricing.  After downloading and reviewing the exercises, my outline looks like this:

• Pricing Strategy: What are we currently using?
• Steps to determine pricing strategy
       - Match value proposition to market maturity level and market share goals
       - Understand cost structure
       - Calculate cost-of-goods sold
       - Determine desired gross profit margin
• Review main competitors’ prices and try to identify their pricing strategy
• Match competitors’ value propositions to their pricing strategies and check for alignment. Which ones directly compete with ours?
• Determine acceptable range of prices that meet profit goals
• Review process for evaluating price changes
• Determine how to assess price elasticity and how to evaluate its impact on revenue and profit

More Content in Extended Library

Next, use the side navigation pane to move to the Extended Library and Links panels to review other articles that might be useful. Each panel delivers internal and external content that expounds on the core exercises. They’re tagged as tools, reference material, books and articles. 

As an example, here’s what the Pricing section currently contains: 

• Case study on how a billion-dollar parts manufacturer approached revamping their pricing strategy
• Articles about how to use value-based pricing (for consulting firms)
• Articles and case studies on how companies set prices and approach pricing changes
• Recommended books detailing the math ties between pricing, demand, COGs and margin
• Online calculators to run instant what-if scenarios
• Price elasticity diagrams 

You can also check out the Description panel, which contains our eBook content for each subject. We’re adding an editing function soon, so you’ll have the ability to tailor the content to your company. 

Applying the Content and Tools

After completing my outline, I like to dive into an exercise and start applying it to my business.  I use the Extended Library and Links content to expand on my tasks as I’m working through them. I’ll generally set aside a solid 60 minute window for each learning session, and focus on mastering one or two key tasks at a time. 

We’ll send you alerts each month when we add new content to your Extended Library and Links panels, so you can increase your expertise as needed.

In our next post, we’ll address how to move all of your marketing management to our platform. 

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• Effective Price Management (slideshare.net)