Professional service firms face similar issues when it comes to business development

By Tony Reiss, Founding Principal, Sherwood PSF Consulting

The marketing and business development (BD) community in law firms faces much the same issues as other professional service firms. These revolve around branding and values, service excellence, selling effectiveness and change management.

Branding & values

Many firms are taking branding more seriously these days. It is now appreciated that successful brands need an alignment of values, processes, systems and consistent communication.

Firms are going to greater lengths to align their core values with appropriate systems, processes and behaviours. For example, a core value of integrity has led a firm to appreciate this relates to social responsibility, and this in turn leads to specific behaviours on environmental issues.

Client research is also being used to obtain insights into winning brand propositions. For example, one firm detected from client research that it lacked some excitement and was told: “we want to be excited by having contact with you…..more enthusiasm….more passion”. The firm has as a result radically changed the way it works internally. It has brought in motivational speakers and uses music in creative ways to lighten the mood.

Another recent development is firms specifying more tightly the behaviours and tone of voice taken in documents, to reinforce their brand distinctiveness. It’s not easy to enforce, but it could make a big competitive difference.

Service excellence

As noted above, firms are taking client research more seriously and see this as the most powerful way of improving their services.

There are different approaches to carrying out the research and they all seem to work. In terms of frequency, some firms ask their clients for feedback annually or after major transactions. Some clients are interviewed by client or matter partners, whilst others appoint a ‘quality’ partner or external researcher. Some firms prefer face-to-face interviews whilst others are happy using the telephone or questionnaires.

Firms are also starting to appreciate that service excellence cannot be effectively dealt with by merely introducing training sessions or measuring how many times the telephone rings before it’s answered. Firms need to change the hearts and minds of their people.

Some firms are making a greater effort to ensure the language they use is appropriate. ‘Fee earners’ becomes ‘the legal team’, ‘support staff’ becomes ‘the business service team’, and ‘intermediaries’ could become ‘business partners’. The theory is that if you treat your own people better, they might reciprocate with clients!

Some firms have started to benchmark themselves against other industries on service excellence. The hospitality industry has invested significantly in understanding client ‘touch points’ and ‘moments of truth’. One law firm estimated that there were 150 client ‘touch points’, including the choice of biscuits in meeting rooms!

Selling effectiveness

One obvious development is the introduction of research analysts to support professionals in understanding market and client issues. The bigger firms are getting some advantages from a larger investment in marketing information systems. Linked with this is the greater investment in database systems to support marketing information, though there aren’t many firms that wholly believe this investment is paying back, because their lawyers aren’t committed to collecting or using the information.

The firms which need to deliver and sell large one-off projects seem to have better processes at selling. One firm has doubled its budget for account-based marketing activity and reduced its share of spending for overall profile-raising or public relations. Many firms have more planned approaches at managing their pipeline of prospective clients.

However, while every firm seems to have paid some attention to client relationship management or key account management, not many firms have got this working well. The general belief is that it’s still fee-earning that gets you brownie points and, without a balanced scorecard approach to measurement and reward, partners will not change their behaviour.

Change management

This area was not really talked about 10 years ago. The marketing and BD function was seen as a specialist area, not unlike areas of the law, and staff were seen as experts who could tell their lawyers what to do. We all now know that this doesn’t work, so the challenge has become how to develop influence and help make change happen.

To ensure their initiatives get more attention, BD managers should:

• choose fewer BD projects – although it isn’t easy to turn some things down; 

• communicate more often and over a longer period of time on priority projects;

• be careful to give the full background and not start propositions halfway through;

• express the benefits clearly;

• more openly talk about project risks and approaches to mitigate the risks; and

• obtain support from senior managers (such as practice group heads) to help projects to develop.

tony.reiss@reiss-consulting.com