Saffron Steer assists healthcare organisations across the NHS, private and voluntary sectors to think and compete differently, creating the influence and impact they need for growth and sustainability.
The focus of our work is on creating a differentiated competitive advantage. We challenge conventional thinking, helping you to think differently. We then guide, advise, and shape winning strategies with you, actively working with clinical and management teams to position, enable and grow healthcare services that are differentiated, credible, relevant and sustainable.
Our approach is very hands-on in working with teams to uncover the sources of differentiation ; no strategy by SWOT in a darkened room!
Our strength is uniquely combining clinical credibility with compelling commercial acumen. So, our clinical experience and insights around shared decision making, clinical governance and an ability to engage clinicians of all types combines with a broad breadth and depth of understanding of healthcare businesses and how to make them profitable with the right business model. This gives our clients confidence that we are not just to be engaged when thinking about starting long-term initiatives but can also add value very quickly to short-term initiatives.
It’s not about brochures! It’s firstly about identifying growth areas and new markets, prioritising key audiences and segmenting them, then managing the many ways to connect and engage with customers and balancing your organisation’s capabilities with your customers’ experiences. We want you to be better at understanding and connecting with your customers. Our approach to strategic marketing is “Collateral Light: People Heavy”.
It is uncommon for any healthcare related project to exclude clinicians. We know how to talk to clinicians of all types and at all levels. Thorough, meaningful and mature conversations with clinicians are necessary to ensure the success of your development projects. We have become known for the energy and enthusiasm that we bring in galvanising teams.
We know that you want to win business and that there are many ways to do this. We have a proven track record of winning new business for clients by bringing our strategy, clinical and commercial expertise to the development of competitively positioned bid solutions for large procurements. We have also won new business for clients by doing more simple, effective customer and team engagement work. We also help you identify and think through forming partnerships as a way of responding to future business development opportunities.
You’ll find our uncommon, yet realistic, approach to strategy development refreshing. We do ‘unusual strategy’ i.e. when proper strategy is carried out it might seem, and feel, unusual. Proper strategy is about helping clients to understand ‘what is going on here’, then facilitating the tough decisions and actions that are needed to win. Too often we see ‘non strategies’ i.e. notional ambitions to grow and ‘all things to all men’ plans. Strategy is about understanding the problem and then deciding to do this, and not that, and we encourage you to develop the right strategy by having the confidence to make the tough decisions to act and to win. We achieve this with you by injecting the thinking and actions that join employee and clinical engagement (this is super important), value for customers (easy to say but tough to articulate on your own) and differentiation to achieve better competitive positions and influence.
Our ‘Think With You’ Sessions
If you need to think and compete differently, we offer these dynamic and engaging 1/2 day, or full day sessions, to help you find sources of difference to position your business more competitively. We also help you to make important strategic choices about what to grow, how, where and with whom. These sessions allow you separate the urgent from the important, giving air-time and space for the those big, important strategic issues that often get drowned out in the usual annual planning round.
These sessions are typically run for 8-10 people and are not Executive exclusive zones. We encourage representation from your wider team including clinicians, admin teams and even patients/patient leaders.