Patricia Romain ran her first business in 1984 when she took over the word-processing bureau franchise owned by her husband. She then went on to develop her own training business, specialising in people development. She ran this business as a sole trader until February 2005 when she decided to become a limited company. At the same time she expanded the range of services offered to include B2B marketing. Now she employs six people and offers training and marketing services to all business sectors. She is a qualified psychologist and uses that skill to help in the training courses she runs as well as in the telemarketing and sales development work the company does for other businesses.
Answers & Solutions
Answers & Solutions is a marketing and training company, based in Kent, about 35 miles from London and they have been operating since 1982 and over the years have worked for nearly 200 clients from a wide variety of sectors. Their main services are marketing and training which they sometimes provide separately and sometimes together, depending on the needs of the clients. But to make it easier to understand to new clients they have split their product offering
Why do people buy?
Richard Romain, Marketing Director of ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS says "The common thread running through both product areas is the use of psychology. This means we have a good understanding of why people buy products and services (or, more importantly, why they don’t buy your products or services) and why people behave in certain ways in stressful situations."
Marketing
But does he feel he can answer the question what is marketing? Here he is clear "It covers many areas, from strategic (as in “where should we be in five years time?” and “what business are we in?”) to tactical (advertising, public relations, direct mail, sales literature, website, databases, telemarketing, marketing research, telephone surveys, web surveys, etc.)”.
The formal definition of marketing is “the satisfaction of customer demand, profitably”. A neat definition and nothing wrong with that. But for smaller companies it probably means “we want more customers”! So in our case, marketing mainly means “Getting more business for your business”. And to do this, we provide marketing services principally aimed at sales lead generation; these services are telemarketing and direct marketing (using both printed and electronic media).
ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS Client Ken Wheeler of Stalbridge Linen Services has just completed the first stage of sales development using ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS “They did a great job carrying out the marketing survey into the market for chef’s whites and quickly too. They then ascertained that our assumptions were incorrect and have now pointed out the way for us to proceed.”
Total Sales Development
ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS's total sales development service combines all the tactical elements and focuses the effort on sales lead generation for the client. They do this by testing new methods of selling the client’s products or services into new markets and increasing sales from existing markets. It’s very tactical and measurable and involves combining and testing all appropriate methods of promotion, to test which works best. So, they use telemarketing, direct marketing and electronic marketing in limited trial scenario which measures carefully the responses to various combinations. Then they implement the best combination for each sector. It is all aimed at giving the client more sales and a significant sales increase.
Marketing Department
Their Marketing Department service provides a comprehensive marketing service to small and medium sized businesses – ones who do not have their own in-house marketing resource and still want more sales.
Rob Steele, Managing Director of Air Management Systems LLP says “ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS has worked on various marketing projects for us over the last 10 years. They are keen and quick to respond – they have generated appointments for our sales team as well as helping us to launch new products into the asbestos removal market. This in turn has led to a sales increase.”
Training (or People Development)
So what is training? In this case, it means People Development using a variety of techniques such as workshops, coaching and mentoring. The learning is based on Cognitive Behavioural Psychology.
ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS principally offers sales training and marketing training, helping people development. They have developed a range of learning tools to help people understand how to use various marketing tactics. In simple terms, this is “Marketing for non-marketing people” and is part of the marketing training resource.
The training is also aimed at people working in customer-facing roles, including sales, support and service staff. We offer workshops in Customer Care, Stress Management, Time Management, Dealing with Difficult People. This backed up by design, implementation and assessment of NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications) programmes.
Training for the Healthcare Sector
ANSWERS & SOLUTIONS has one area of specialisation which, on the face of it, has little to do with sales and marketing. For historical reasons they have significant expertise in the healthcare sector and provide workshops on non-clinical people skills development such as Time and Stress Management, Dealing with Aggressive Behaviour and Assertiveness. They work for NHS and Private Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Care Homes and GP Practices.
Says Irene Akpofure of Humane, “I have worked with Trish for the last 10 years and she is a fantastic person. I originally attended one of her workshops and this encouraged me to start my own business. She now works closely with me, training my staff and people development skills”.
