The Brief

Prior to working with Inspire, Harrods Media had experienced ten years of continual growth. However, a changing landscape meant continued growth would require an adaptation of their model, strategy, and practice. They asked Inspire to initiate this process by providing their key teams with new insight and tools to produce proactive plans that actively built relationships and grew revenue from strategically important accounts.

The Programme

Inspire worked with Harrods to create the Harrods Academy, a practical programme that enabled key teams to learn while developing their own account plans, and encouraging new levels of collaboration between internal and external partners. At its core were three modules – Strategic Account Planning, Relationship Management and Proposal, Pitch & Presentation. An additional module for managers developed their skills as coaches, to ensure they could continue to develop the learning amongst their teams. Alongside the project work, ongoing follow-up activities enabled the learning to be applied between and beyond the Academy.

The Results

The Academy led to a more consistent and collaborative approach to internal and external clients. Through strategic account planning, the teams ensured their key accounts and customers had well-defined plans around how to support their business. The Academy also ensured the account teams knew how key client decisions are made, how they could best manage their relationships and influence key stakeholders, and how they could best collaborate to achieve mutually beneficial objectives. Finally, the management team began to collaborate much more closely, acting more as a management team rather than a group of managers, collaborating to create new templates for presenting proposals. Furthermore, the Academy became a vehicle for the division to review effective ways to continue growth in a shifting media and commercial landscape.
There has been a greater increase in productivity and we’ve had another fantastic year. I will put that down partly to the success of the training programme. It’s been a real pleasure working with Inspire.
Guy Cheston

Media Sales Director, Harrods