Integrating Marketing and BD into Everyones Job

Integrating Marketing & Business

Development Into Everyone‘s Job

White Paper

Date: October 2011

Integrating Marketing & BD

2

INTEGRATING MARKETING & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT INTO EVERYONE‘S JOB OCTOBER 2011

Acknowledgements

Prepared for the USA Law Firm Webinar, this document was developed with support from

seminar hosts and in direct collaboration with the following:

Key Collaborators

Derek Giles

Phil Reid

The xRM4Legal.com Team recognizes their efforts in helping to ensure content relevance in

support of the broader legal profession.

xRM4Legal.com Contributors

Rocky Sharma, Senior CRM/xRM Consultant

Feedback

To send comments or suggestions about this document, please click the following link:

http://xRM4Legal.com/content/contacts

Powered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, xRM4Legal is more than just marketing and Client Relationship

Management (CRM). As a new and innovative marketing and business development solution for law firms

and other professional services organizations, xRM4Legal offers the most complete set of solutions for

marketing, business development and client care. Our comprehensive platform includes Web, E-mail

communications, relationship and contact management, social CRM, analytics and SharePoint solutions.

xRM4Legal is backed by a national and international team of legal industry specialists providing design,

consulting, technology, implementation, hosting, training and ongoing support services.

www.xRM4Legal.com

Legal Notice

This document is provided ―as-is‖. Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and

other Internet Web site references, may change without notice.

Some examples depicted herein are provided for illustration only.

This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any product. You

may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.

© 2011 Asia Pacific Dynamics Corporation. All rights reserved.

http://xrm4legal.com/content/contacts

http://www.xrm4legal.com/

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OCTOBER 2011 INTEGRATING MARKETING & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT INTO EVERYONE‘S JOB

Table of Contents

Preface ........................................................................................................ 4

About the Author ....................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................. 6

Law Firm Assets ......................................................................................... 6 Industry Trends ......................................................................................... 6

Industry Pressures ..................................................................................... 6 Cultural Challenges .................................................................................... 6

Structural Challenges ................................................................................. 7 Poor Processes Hurt the Bottom Line ............................................................ 7

The Need: A Common Business Platform ......................................................... 9 Tools to Match Law Firm Challenges ............................................................. 9

xRM4Legal Value Proposition ........................................................................ 10 Fits with your Systems ............................................................................. 10

Fuels your Firm Productivity ...................................................................... 10 Enables Confident Decision Making ............................................................. 10

Microsoft Dynamics CRM .............................................................................. 11 Microsoft Office Familiarity Empowers Users ................................................ 11

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Overview .................................................... 11 Microsoft Dynamics xRM4Legal ..................................................................... 13

Easy to Use/Fully Integrated with Outlook ................................................... 13 Consolidated Accessible Information ........................................................... 14

The Client Behind the Matter ..................................................................... 15 Better Plan, Evaluate & Budget Events ........................................................ 16

Systematize Cross- and Up-selling ............................................................. 17

Client Connectivity ................................................................................... 17 New Client / New Matter Inception ............................................................. 18

SharePoint Document Collaboration............................................................ 19 Digital Marketing: Overview ......................................................................... 20

Messaging, Content & Thought Leadership .................................................. 21 What Other Firms Are Doing ...................................................................... 22

Conclusion ................................................................................................. 23 How We Can Help ....................................................................................... 24

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Preface

About the Author

David Blumentals has 20 years‘ experience in IT and Professional Services.

With a background in economics, finance and insurance David moved into

marketing and business development in 1989.

Since 1997, David has focused on the successful delivery of Client

Relationship Management (CRM) systems, often integrating with Practice,

Financial and Document Management Systems.

After working with Epicor‘s Clientele CRM in the late 1990‘s and developing finance and CRM

software systems in the early 2000‘s David started working with Microsoft CRM 1.2 in 2004

and Microsoft Dynamics AX in 2007. David continues to work today with Microsoft Dynamics

CRM 2011 in both on-premise and hosted, cloud computing deployments.

David has held several Director level positions with leading Australian IT groups. A major

project was development of the BankNET financial management system and 2003 partnership

with the Australian Taxation Office on their Electronic Commerce Initiative to test the process

of electronic lodgement of the Business Activity Statement from a ‗Web environment‘.

In May 2008 founded Client Profiles Asia Pacific, an offshoot of Client Profiles Inc, based in

Atlanta Georgia and recently acquired by Aderant. As a Microsoft ISV Partner of the Year and

Professional Services Partner of the Year in 2009 and 2010, Client Profiles established an

impressive client base across Australia-New Zealand including six of the top thirty law firms.

More recently, David has established Asia Pacific Dynamics Corporation as a support vehicle

for both clients and Client Profiles implementation partners globally. He is also a director of

VARCentral, a leading supplier of hosted, eCommerce software solutions to IT Resellers across

Australia and New Zealand, www.VARCentral.com.au

David can be contacted at [email protected] or +61 409 245 354.

Sydney – Sydney Wharf 9, 56 Pirrama Road, Pyrmont NSW 2009 Australia

London – 40 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, London E14 5NR UK

New York – 1330 Avenue of the Americas, New York City NY10019 USA

For North America please call: +1 (212) 653 0379

For Asia Pacific please call: +61 2 9571 4853

mailto:[email protected]

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―No new clients, no job. Lots of new

clients, lots of prosperity for the firm and

good times for everyone...‖ Anonymous

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Introduction There are of course many books and seminars that have addressed this topic over the years.

In this white paper we will consider some of the trends, pressures and challenges and how a common business platform can help.

We will also take a look at xRM4Legal, powered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and how it

might be used to overcome some of these pressures and challenges.

Law Firm Assets

A law firm‘s primary assets are its knowledge, experience and people. Key to success is maximizing the use of these primary assets – value being measured by the

firm‘s processes and its knowledge, experience and talent.

Industry Trends

When talking with firm‘s around the world they identify a number of trends:

Greater firm and client collaboration Proactive Client Relationship Management (CRM)

Client interaction through electronic document and transaction exchange eg. dealrooms Dynamic communications management eg. ‖digital‖ email marketing, social CRM Adoption of information technology tools that deliver both flexibility and control

Industry Pressures All of the above serves to add pressure to our work lives.

Most of us understand that we now live in the information age where knowledge is a

competitive advantage and keeping current is a fundamental requirement. Clients expect a greater range of services, budgets continue to be cut while timelines

accelerate.

All this leaves little room for enhancing quality and innovation but the expectation for both is continuing.

Cultural Challenges In her book The Integration Imperative, Suzanne Lowe describes how for many law firm‘s integrating marketing and business development functions can be an uphill battle if they

haven‘t yet identified the structural and cultural impediments to integration.

Some of the common cultural challenges are listed here:

Revenue-generating practitioners are allowed to avoid marketing and business development

Revenue-generating practitioners exclude marketers and business developers from important decisions, meetings or initiatives

Marketing and selling functions are poorly defined There is little preparation for economic down cycles Marketing budgets are frequently tightened in a knee-jerk fashion

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There is a need to erase marketing vs other silos

Structural Challenges In terms of the structural challenges the two biggest we see are around how marketing and

client teams are created and operate and the ―hand-off‖ from marketing/business development to the practice areas.

Law firms often market through a ―matrixed‖ business organization (for example, geography, industry or service line). Frequently this is at odds with the structure of the firm around client

teams or practice areas.

Marketing and business development "hand-offs" - for example, turning inquiries into opportunities and pitches are not as seamless as they could be. Likewise, the new client, new

matter inception process can often miss out on key pieces of information already captured during client, qualification, conflict checking and proposal generation/negotiation.

Poor Processes Hurt the Bottom Line So here we see some examples of how poor processes hurt the bottom line:

Often law firms tell us about the dozens of information systems in the firm, each devoted to a particular subject. Systems for financial information, personnel data, library collection, and so

on.

Oddly, many still do not have a client system. No place to share what they know about clients' business goals, their people, their legal challenges, their preferred way of working with the firm, and their relationship history with the client.

One firm told us recently of numerous examples of how their current system and manual

processes inhibit their ability to execute on simple email marketing tasks. In fact, in one example, they estimate that the generation of one mailing list may have cost the firm over

US$6,000.

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In another example, to promote a new office and partners in Southeast Asia, one firm staged restructuring and securities seminars. The production of mailing lists for those seminars was a

disaster. They were unable to sort contacts by region or sector interest, and a large percentage of the contacts were stale. This created intense frustration among the partners in

the Asia office, many of whom had to spend considerable time reviewing contacts and lists. Because these firms have not integrated their systems, such as Outlook, practice and

document management, data is out of date soon after it is added.

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The Need: A Common Business Platform So what is the solution?

First we need to appreciate that the needs of various stakeholders can vary greatly and often conflict with each other.

Clients want innovative high quality work done on time and on budget.

Attorneys want to manage their teams better and deliver matters on time.

Team Members want to spend time working on billable time, not doing paperwork.

Partners want to manage the firm to achieve maximum client delight, growth and profitability.

Law firms need a way to tie the various stakeholders together and satisfy their individual

needs.

Tools to Match Law Firm Challenges

Law firms are, of course, unique and need tools that reflect this.

They also need support from people, technology partners, who understand these peculiarities and have relevant experience in addressing them.

A system that helps us understand who are our clients, what we do for them and how we can do more will enable us to measure profitability of our marketing and business development

efforts together with return on investment.

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xRM4Legal Value Proposition

The xRM4Legal value proposition is very simple – familiar to your people; fits with your systems; fuels your firm productivity; enables confident decision making.

Besides the Standard Outlook Client various other front ends are available to users, including

Internet Explorer Web client, SharePoint , Mobile Express and WorkSite. This enables users to access data and features from various Office products such as Word, Excel and Outlook. Data

access and security roles are specific to different types of user and can be easily added and modified.

Fits with your Systems xRM4Legal supports integration with a number of law firm practice and document management systems – Thomson Elite, Aderant Expert, iManage WorkSite and MailSite to

name a few. This is important for sharing case and financial information with marketing and business developers – information like what has been billed, what has been paid and what is

still outstanding. It also helps knowing what type of work has been done for particular clients and whether this is referenceable.

Fuels your Firm Productivity xRM4Legal supports a large array of collaboration features including alerts management, integration with Outlook , SharePoint and Unified Communications. The embedding of

Windows Workflow Foundation makes it possible to model business processes as work flows that can be configured and administrated by teams or individual users.

Enables Confident Decision Making Besides the native reporting tool, various standard Microsoft tools can be used for analyzing

and presenting data in the most comprehensive visual way.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM

During the last 12 months the number of Microsoft Dynamics CRM installations has grown to

exceed 30,000 world-wide, representing over 2 million individual users, supported by over 2,000 certified I.T. partners.

Recent focus areas of xRM4Legal development have been to increase the number of

application features, including addition of modules for Intellectual Property Management, document assembly and automation features for proposal generation and matter management – also Resource Management for managing personnel, skills, cases, matters and projects.

Microsoft Office Familiarity Empowers Users By adding this additional functionality xRM4Legal becomes more than just a marketing system

– and another great way to justify the investment to law firm partners!

A good example of this is project management. Conversations with law firms confirm that there is pressure to move away from the billable hours model. This is encouraging a much stronger focus on project management among firms, as it becomes important for them to get

work done more quickly and efficiently. More and more legal services are being purchased not by the legal department but via some sort of procurement function. The process is therefore

much more focused on cost, deliverables and metrics rather than a good relationship between the general counsel and the partner of the firm. Law firms need to be proactive in reviewing

the resource and project disciplines within their practice groups and xRM4Legal provides a suitable platform for managing all marketing, business development, client care as well as

matter and project management.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: Overview So, in a little more detail, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is a broad-based solution. What we

mean by that is that Microsoft Dynamics CRM has standard out-of-the-box functionality that covers Marketing, Business Development and Client Care. It is a very horizontal solution that

we have turned into a very vertical solution centered on the needs of law firms. Also, we have

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everything in ONE solution: one database, one toolbox, one business logic, and one source

code.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is known and positioned as a solution with cutting-edge technology—technology that enables our customers to grow with the solution. You can start with just a few

users, hosted for $99 a month. Later you can move ‖on premise‖ where you have your own servers and software licences and can scale to thousands of users if necessary. Three-tier

technology enables you to run the client on just about anything – Outlook, Web or Mobile device, and finally, a very defining characteristic: It is highly configurable. You can do anything. You can mold the solution according to your processes and needs – with new forms,

new fields, new views, new reports, new dashboards, without it costing a fortune.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and xRM4Legal is for the law firm that wants to run a connected business, getting the benefit of running a solution in one database across multiple locations,

having clients, referrers, and staff interacting and doing business independent of time and place.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is also a global solution, sold in more than 80 countries, and more than 40 languages. We already support xRM4Legal in USA, Canada, UK and Asia Pacific.

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Microsoft Dynamics xRM4Legal Designed for law firms, xRM4Legal (at its core) automates the capture, management, analysis,

and reporting of client and related marketing and business development activities. Users can gain complete visibility into client, contact and matter profitability.

As mentioned previously, we extend it into Enterprise Matter Management, into document assembly and into resource and project management.

Easy to Use/Fully Integrated with Outlook

With xRM4Legal you can carry out marketing, business development, and client care service activities in the intuitive Outlook environment. A combined xRM4Legal and Outlook user

experience helps to improve user adoption by providing a familiar and flexible user interface, helping to minimize resource and training investments.

You can plan and execute from one database across your whole firm, with instant overview and access to all data from both practice and document management systems.

Importantly you can also gain a quick overview of activities performed by others in the firm,

and drill down to the details for further analysis.

Knowledge sharing is enhanced as users share work deliverables and experience between matters.

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Consolidated Accessible Information

Real-time dashboards deliver advanced business intelligence functionality that is simple to use and easy to change. Users can quickly configure multiple dashboards to monitor business

development and marketing performance. The dashboards can be set up for individual or shared use, and can include inline charts with drill-down intelligence to visually navigate data,

identify trends and uncover new insights.

With xRM4Legal you can grow easily into global markets—with support to set up documents, fields, and interfaces in the language of your choice.

You can also pursue opportunities across borders with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities.

As mentioned earlier, we can integrate quickly and easily with legacy, third-party, and

essential practice management applications.

Importing data is made simpler with built-in Data Migration and Data Import Wizards.

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The Client Behind the Matter

xRM4Legal also enables social marketing and business development by bringing intelligence gained from social media and traditional editorial sources to the firm to increase awareness

and client interaction.

Information seen here continuously aggregates and analyzes relevant executive and corporate data from thousands of content sources to uncover new business development opportunities.

This intelligence is delivered natively within CRM and mobile devices.

With xRM4Legal digital marketing you can segment your client base into meaningful profiles to drive effective marketing campaigns.

From there you can use questionnaire surveys for an insight into client satisfaction and to identify new market opportunities.

Analyzing campaign results helps refine marketing messages to execute more successful

campaigns.

The information captured during marketing campaigns – event invitations and publication responses – can be quickly leveraged into the business development process.

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Better Plan, Evaluate & Budget Events

Understanding the source of marketing responses, event attendance and return on investment helps better planning, evaluation and budgeting.

Closed loop marketing analytics enable email and web campaigns to be associated with

opportunities and pitches (and ultimately new client and matter creation) to provide the ultimate in measuring business development ROI.

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Systematize Cross- and Up-selling

xRM4Legal provides a convenient tool to find the pitches, proposals and other types of

opportunities that are either currently underway or have been pursued in the past – especially valuable across multiple offices and practice groups, contributing to the sense of ―one firm‖.

Business developers use xRM4Legal Opportunity records to track interactions with a prospect or existing client that may lead to a new matter or a request for further information or legal

service. In addition, business developers can use xRM4Legal Pitches to target documentation of the firm‘s ability to add value or service to a specific prospect or existing client (for example,

tender documentation, expression of interest, capability statement) thereby managing opportunities and next steps regarding these opportunities.

Client Connectivity xRM4Legal is really about placing the client at the center of your firm by making every staff member a client specialist with access to all relevant and appropriate data—across all systems

used by the firm.

This empowers staff to provide a unique client experience—helping to drive client satisfaction and retention.

Integration with phone systems can automatically retrieve client information quickly when

handling client calls. Quick views of client status, contacts, financials, new opportunities and matters can be

presented across all practice areas.

You can also maintain an overview and control of external referrers, including all elements of the relationship, to help ensure that they meet their commitments.

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New Client / New Matter Inception

At the beginning of this white paper we mentioned the occasional disconnects between

marketing/business development and new clients and matters.

Above we show a typical Client/Matter Inception form, built into xRM4Legal. This is a custom entity that records Authorisation, Client Information, Client Address, Referrals

& Competitors, Keywords & Classifications and Matter Information including Rates, Billing Addresses and so on. This is useful in generating necessary Letters of Engagement supporting

compliance and risk management within the firm – while also delivering ―two way‖ synchronization with the practice management system when required.

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SharePoint Document Collaboration

xRM4Legal also supports effective collaboration with clients through sharing of documents and other information.

A big benefit is capturing client interactions in an ―all-in-one‖ system to help ensure clear and

consistent client experiences.

An ―always-on‖ client experience can be provided with SharePoint portal access over the Internet.

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Digital Marketing: Overview An integral part of the xRM4Legal solution is digital marketing – appreciating that in a law firm

there are four distinct groups of users, all with different roles and requirements:

Partners and associates

Secretaries and practice group administrators (the ―support staff‖) Marketing and business development (BD) and,

Information technology (IT)

All of these very importantly contribute to acquiring and servicing clients, prospects and valuable referrers. One of the big things these days is using digital marketing to help connect

the efforts of partners and associates with marketing and business developers. With these online tools, partners and associates have visibility into what marketing and business development are doing to support their efforts. Marketing has visibility into what the client

teams do to follow up on the leads and opportunities they produce. Overall firm marketing effectiveness and ROI improves because there is now a way to measure what works and what

does not.

Where this often starts is with online event and publication subscriptions like the one shown below that allows clients to register for firm events via email and subscribe to newsletters and

other firm publications via the firm website.

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Messaging, Content & Thought Leadership

At xRM4Legal we work with a number of digital marketing platforms including integrating with Concep Campaigner. Here, the goal of each newsletter subscription, alert and marketing event is to provide what is known as ―closed loop marketing‖. By ensuring that the targets,

activities, and the results of the activities are related and captured in CRM in a consistent format, the entire firm can measure data such as:

- The number of opportunities produced.

- The number of pitches created. - New assignments produced and revenue generated from closed pitches.

- Cost per marketing activity. - Cost per opportunity or pitch, and - Cost per client.

The ability to know what was spent on a newsletter, alert or marketing event and relate it to

the actual revenue that resulted is the essence of closed loop marketing. A firm with this information can plan, forecast, and target more effectively. This information helps the

marketing team assess the quality of opportunity and pitch sources and design newsletters, alerts and marketing events that produce better results for partners and associates with each

effort.

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What Other Firms Are Doing

In order to be effective and productive, law firms can no longer rely on just traditional marketing approaches such as mailing lists, events and partner contacts to reach new clients.

They need to make sure that they know how to reach their prospects, when to reach them, and how to be relevant to their specific business needs and challenges.

We mentioned earlier about how social media networking can tap new markets. What this is about is increasing marketing and business development productivity by delivering relevant

business and social insights when and where you need it. It is all about reaching the right person at the right time with the right message and some firms have been doing it for a few

years now.

So many business developers just go to a website to find information about a company. To differentiate yourself, you need to bring more insight about their industry or their competitors

and how you can help them be more successful. It‘s said that even in B2B, business to business, sales – people ―shop with their head and they buy with their heart‖. Saving them money or winning their legal case are minimum requirements – winning the deal is about how

you relate to them better than your competitors, and that comes down to messaging, content and communication!

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Conclusion In conclusion, selling is not just the responsibility of people with ‖business development‖ or

―marketing‖ on their business card, it is the responsibility of everyone in the firm. A lot of people see their job as a silo and may not think sales or service is part of their responsibility, however most firms are changing. The stark reality for many is no new clients, no job. Lots of

new clients, means lots of prosperity for the firm and good times for everyone.

It‘s no surprise then that a lot of firms are encouraging staff to look for opportunities. In some of the firms we have worked with, employees are open to this yet in others they

resist the role they play. The culture of the latter invariably leads to poor long term performance of the entire firm as many prime opportunities pass by without anybody even

knowing about them. So how do you deal with this? Here are a few suggestions:

Ensure that all staff have a love and passion for your firms services. If they don‘t

believe in it, they can‘t promote it. Educate your staff on the importance of marketing and business development to the

firm. Start dispelling the myth that ―sales‖ is a dirty word, and educate staff that sales is

more about looking for an opportunity and then proposing possible solutions. Incentivize all staff with marketing and business development incentives, not just your

marketing team.

Encourage all staff to spend more ―face time‖ with clients. The closer the relationship with the client, the more comfortable they will feel in proposing new solutions to clients.

When they are successful in generating a new client or a quality opportunity, publicly thank them for it, to show other staff it is ok to think outside of their ―silo‖.

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How We Can Help We have an extensive portfolio of working with law firms across the globe, helping them to

solve their communications and CRM problems.

Maybe your firm faces short-term pressures, or you want a better return from the marketing

budget or improve cross-selling across practice groups.

Maybe you believe your last marketing event deserved a better attendance from your clients,

or you need to find cost savings.

Perhaps your firm has the appetite for adopting a client-centric approach to communication

and CRM strategy.

If you would like to learn more about how we have helped law firms across the globe deal with

integrating marketing and business development into everyone‘s job, please contact us.

We are pleased to announce our new ―Discovery Day‖ for exploring your firm's potential uplift

in business development, increase in client retention or reduction in cost - using process and

behavioral change and xRM4Legal.

We are a highly regarded legal technology partner and have a strong team of legal specialists,

based in the USA and Canada, as well as UK and Asia Pacific.

What sets us apart from other partners and technology companies is the importance we place

on your requirements and getting the best from your client relationships.

We have designed a one day workshop that has proved to be a very effective way of

identifying your firm's change opportunities and engaging stakeholders in the CRM adoption

process. We have found that it has really helped firms to assess the true value of CRM in the

context of their working practices delivering a robust return on investment.

To learn more – please email me [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Documents

Integrating Marketing and BD into Everyones Job