Testimonials

I commissioned Nicki to carry out a marketing review of the care home to help us to get more self-pay clients. After the first day spent with Nicki I was able to make changes to our services, enquiry management process and pricing which would all have a positive impact on our bottom line. Nicki then went on to create a marketing strategy and plan and is helping to oversee the implementation.

After I had been running my coaching business for a year, I approached Nicki for some help. Coaching is a competitive industry, and I was looking to get more direct clients as well as referrals from organisations. After a day with Nicki I felt confident enough to alter to how I promote myself, my pricing, proposals and my website. The changes have resulted in more enquiries and customers and have allowed me to focus my time more on delivering coaching rather than running my business.

“As an HR Director with newfound responsibility for marketing I was struggling to pull together a marketing strategy. Nicki helped us to pull together our disparate thinking into a clear strategy that was subsequently approved by the executive management team and the board. She also helped us to clarify our requirements for restructuring our marketing team and helped us to map out a toolkit to ensure our staff based all over the country are equipped to effectively market the organisation. Using her experience of working with organisations facing similar challenges to us, within a week, Nicki effectively helped us to move the organisation forward by 18 months.”

I commissioned Nicki to carry out a review of our marketing activity, some mystery shopping amongst our key competitors and some training for our administrative staff and supervisors on how to handle enquiries and assessments. The review showed me how I could spend our limited marketing budget much more effectively and how we could improve the sales process to convert more web visitors and telephone enquirers into paying customers. It also highlighted the key messages we should promote on our website, in our literature, when dealing with telephone enquiries and at assessments. All in all I feel confident that our marketing is more effective and that I have the tools in place to test new things and identify quickly whether they are working.”

Nicki recommended an overall approach which is flexible enough to work for the different parts of our organisation. She also provided a number of useful tips on how we manage our brand and the balance between national and local marketing. Nicki helped us look at how we can fill beds in our residential care homes and how we can raise awareness of our services and attract customers in other parts of the organisation. Nicki’s input into this project has been very useful to us and helped us to define our overall organisation’s strategy and requirements for a new senior post focussing on income generation.”

Nicki’s input has helped me to increase my business by over 10% (compound) over several years and at the same time my marketing budget has reduced considerably. Nicki carried out some research and analysis and worked with my sales team to get us all on board with her ideas. She convinced me to capture the details of our customers and used this data to prove that a large proportion of the money I was spending on marketing was wasted. Armed with this evidence I felt confident diverting our time and effort into building our customer base and communicating with them directly. Nicki continues to be involved helping me with the business. She is fun to work with and has a kind and personable nature, she applied herself to the task diligently.

“Thera has traditionally not actively marketed itself – relying on word of mouth and its reputation to grow and support more people. Given the move to personal budgets, we realised that we needed to do more to promote our organisation to a wider audience of potential new customers.
Nicki worked with us over a period of a year and helped us to develop our marketing strategy and did some more detailed work around helping us to implement this. She helped us to link this to a review of our operational roles and our IT strategy and think about how we can track results.
As a charity we were concerned about not being seen to “waste” money on marketing. We were pleasantly surprised that the approach that was recommended required a relatively small investment – one that was much smaller than we had envisaged. Having spent the past year working with Nicki I feel I have gone on a personal learning curve and now feel I have the confidence and knowledge to lead the marketing team and ensure that as an organisation we get the most out of what has become a vital area for us.”

We asked Nicki to give us an honest, warts and all view of our organisation and she had the courage and the experience to stick to the brief, producing a report that was very useful to us. Through her knowledge of the social care sector, expertise in marketing and understanding of the wider business processes, Nicki was able to quickly identify the key areas where we needed to focus attention. We now have a much clearer idea of our marketing strengths and weaknesses. Nicki was able to offer many practical suggestions as to how we might reorganise working methods to improve overall effectiveness; and her recommendations are informing our business plans.”

“Nicki helped us to develop our first marketing strategy and to recruit two new roles. Following an in-depth analysis of our organisation she pulled together a cohesive strategy that both the senior management team and board were very pleased with. I was impressed with Nicki’s knowledge of our sector of the social care market. Nicki brought skills and expertise that we did not possess and by focusing our efforts on the things that are most likely to work her input will ultimately save us time and money.”

“When we needed to handle enquiries direct from the public for the first time we brought in Nicki to help us manage the customer experience. Nicki helped us to split the project into manageable chunks looking at where we direct our calls and emails; what data we need to capture in our CRM system against to ensure robust reporting, data integrity and linkages with other systems; how we manage ownership of enquiries; and how we develop our processes and systems to maximise conversion. This was a complex project involving extremely busy heads of departments across a number of business functions. Nicki helped us to focus on the important issues and kept us on track through the project in a step-by-step process, highlighting several important things that we may never have considered. Her knowledge of CRM systems, call centres and the sales process in similar environments coupled with her general marketing experience was invaluable. Nicki was easy to work with and managed the project in a professional manner.”

“Nicki has a knack for getting the best out of her teams by facilitating collaborative meetings that are solution focused, by providing strong project management and by empowering employees. By leveraging her analytical skills she has the ability to pinpoint problems, quickly narrow down options and make concise and correct decisions.

I had the pleasure of working with Nicki for over a year whilst she was at MWB Business Exchange and found her straightforward communication style refreshing and very productive. In my opinion Nicki’s key strengths lie in her forward thinking nature and her holistic understanding of both online and offline and how they can create synergies. I very much hope to work with Nicki again.”

“Although she didn’t have experience of our industry, Nicki seemed to know what questions to ask and quickly grasped what our organisation was about. Previously we had focused our marketing efforts on new prospects that were unaware of our services. Nicki identified a number of opportunities internally that we could tap into including piggy backing on existing communications being carried out by other parts of the organisation and improving the cross-selling our services through our website and staff working in other parts of the organisation. Nicki forced us to think about where we wanted to take our consultancy division and provided insightful recommendations drawn from her experience in the commercial world. She made us look at things in a different way and this has enabled us to use grow our business without spending a lot of money.”

Nicki was without doubt the best marketing manager that I ever recruited to work for me during my 30 years with BUPA. Her initial role was to look after direct marketing aimed at the consumer market. She tackled this so well that after a year I reshuffled the department to enable her to take on the corporate market as well. For this she recruited a new team and scored highly in team building and motivation at her annual appraisals.

She could be both strategic and tactical, planning and implementing marketing programmes to acquire and retain corporate clients, eligible employees and personal customers for a new division (BUPA Wellness) with approximately 20 service lines. I can remember that this included developing a new website, boosting traffic and online revenue, significantly improving cost effectiveness of the direct marketing campaigns, developing new tracking systems and supporting the sales teams. Her work was invariably on time and on budget.

Relatively small budgets for this new division meant that we could not afford direct marketing or advertising agencies, and we had to be more self-sufficient. Nicki’s skills enabled us to plan our own campaigns and write most of our own copy. She was particularly good at analysing problems and finding innovative solutions to deliver results. Nicki was a pleasure to work with, committed and tenacious, and always willing to get stuck in.