THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL MARKETING USING TECH TO ENGAGE … · 2019. 3. 5. · By using engagement dashboards, we can conﬁ dently share insights and make recommendations based on our

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USING ENGAGEMENT DASHBOARDS TO DRIVE THE SALES PROCESS AND GROW RELATIONSHIPSBY ADAM STOCK AND STEFANIE KNAPP


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USING ENGAGEMENT DASHBOARDS TO DRIVE THE SALES PROCESS AND GROW RELATIONSHIPSBY ADAM STOCK AND STEFANIE KNAPP


ngagement dashboards are a useful feature that marketing automation systems offer. Are you using them?

These dashboards track the nurturing of contacts on their journey through the marketing and sales process, measure how engaged a prospect or contact is with your online properties and assign scores for each activity. An engagement dashboard looks across marketing activities for individu-als and companies over time and provides insights to help marketers and business developers close sales. Those insights include which individuals

are interested in which products or services, where the individuals are in a sales funnel and which individuals are at risk of becoming unengaged.

At Allen Matkins, we are in the early phases of creating an engagement dashboard to assist marketing and business development professionals’ work with lawyers to grow client relationships, assist in our account-based client teams and improve the success of our prac-tice and industry group marketing and business development efforts. By using engagement dashboards, we can confi dently share insights and make recommendations based on our fi ndings. In this article, we share a few learnings from our work with engagement dash-boards in an effort for other legal marketers to start using them or use them more effectively.

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Reporting Information Across Marketing and Sales Implementing engagement dashboards for online e-commerce businesses is straightforward because all marketing is online, and there is a single sales channel that can be traced from the first contact to purchase. For multichannel businesses, implementation is a bit harder because dashboards need to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) informa-tion that is entered through different sales channels. Sales professionals in most in-dustries report sales in order to get paid, so these systems have accurate, timely information. Unfortunately, according to a study by Practice Pipeline titled “The State of CRM and Law Firms,” less than 5 per-cent of lawyers — who serve the primary sales and relationship management func-tion at law firms — use their firm’s CRM systems actively.

Closing the “Marketing-Sales Information Gap” The challenge with law firms is the lack of rigorous recording of how a sale is made. Each lawyer can be viewed as their own sales channel. In a perfect world, the law-yer would report the source of sales leads, where a prospect or contact is in the sales journey or which individual in a targeted company was key to closing the sale. How-ever, it is often the case that the marketing organization is unaware that a new matter has opened or a new client record was created in their time and billing system, but there is no easy path to connect this information with the marketing activities that assisted this sale. We call this lack of information between the tracked activities by marketing and business development professionals and the opening of matters the “marketing-sales information gap.”

Our goal in creating an engagement dashboard is to narrow that gap by providing a tool that marketing and business develop-ment professionals can use with lawyers to develop processes that result in more docu-

mented client and prospect activities.

LEGAL MARKETERS’MOST HELPFUL TOOLS

CRM SOFTWARE

CURRENT AWARENESS AGGREGATORS

ONLINE ADVERTISING

SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS (ORGANIC AND PAID)

In a 2018 joint survey by LMA and Bloomberg Law, legal marketers listed the following technology tools as being the most helpful:

Source: “Where Are We Now? Revealing the Latest Trends in Legal Marketing and Business Development,” Legal Marketing Association and Bloomberg Law

Surprisingly, marketing automation software was listed as the second-least helpful tool, showing that there is room for growth

with this tool in the legal industry.

MARKETING AUTOMATION SOFTWARE

LITIGATION ANALYTICS TOOLS

EMAIL MARKETING

24%

45%

67%

73%

32%

13%

56%


Audiences for Our Engagement DashboardWe have taken some first steps in developing

a client engagement dashboard by defining

our audiences and users. The dashboard is

intended to be used by our marketing and

business development professionals when

working with three different audiences: indi-

vidual lawyers, client teams and industry or

practice groups.

For individual lawyers, the questions we are trying to address are:

• Who are interesting prospects? Which

individuals, who are not clients, are

most engaged with content related

to us and our practice (our bio, our

articles and alerts, publications in our

practice areas, etc.)?

• Are they subscribed to our marketing

lists? Among the client contacts with

whom we currently interact, how many

are engaged with the firm’s marketing

and business development activities (the

firm newsletters, alerts, events, etc.)?

• How do they like to engage with us?

Among the client contacts with whom

we currently interact, what is their pre-

ferred way of engaging with our firm?

Do they tend to read our publications

or attend our events?

For client teams, the questions we are trying to address are:

• What is our relationship map? Who at

our firm is engaging with whom at the

client organization?

• Are there practice expansion opportu-

nities? Where do we see latent needs

by looking at engagement with content

related to services that the client does

not currently use?

• Which important decision-makers

should we try to engage better? Who

are the important contacts who should

be engaging with us but are not?

A View Into Individual Online Engagement Marketing automation systems that have been developed for online consumer-oriented companies are enticing. These systems include HubSpot, which Allen Mat-kins selected, Marketo and Pardot, to name just a few. These tools are sophisticated, affordable and much more integrated with online ecosystems than email, CRM and marketing automation systems that have been tailored and marketed to law firms. They dissect the user journey into much finer slices than is typical in law firms, in-

tegrate with virtually any online source you can think of and present this information in an easy-to-understand interface.

The challenges of implementing these sys-tems in the law firm context include:

• Mapping the stages of a contact life cycle in the online context into mean-ingful categories for the law firm.

• Translating the information into reports and dashboards that are meaningful to lawyers who play the critical role of clos-ing business and managing relationships

through the client life cycle.


• Account-based data: Our CRM system and fi nance system shows us company information such as industry, company structure and account-based data to understand whether companies have done business with us currently or in the past.

• Relationship data: Our enterprise relationship management (ERM) sys-tem (Gwabbit) provides the best data to discern the strength of individual relationships between contacts and our attorneys and augment title information.

For Lawyers

The challenge with any information system is converting raw data into meaningful, actionable information. For us, our ERM system has been the linchpin to engaging

Identifying Critical Sources of DataWe recognize that we have several very im-portant data sources that must be integrated to assist in answering these questions:

• Online marketing data: HubSpot provides us rich reports showing what each contact did online. We can see each contact’s activities across our web pages, social me-dia, emails, videos, landing pages and white papers.

• Offl ine marketing data: Our CRM system (we use InterAction) shows us important offl ine information, such as an individual’s company, title, what events they attended, how they have historically interacted with us and the history of the relationship.

For practice groups, the questions we are trying to address are:

• Who are interesting prospects? Which individuals and companies are most engaged with content related to our practice (the publications, practice pages and individuals associated with a practice area)?

• Are there practice expansion opportu-nities? Where do we see latent needs by looking at engagement with content related to services that the client does not currently use?

• What is our relationship map? Where we see expansion opportunities, who at our firm has a preexisting relationship that could assist us in

expanding business?


lawyers. Although having information about the contacts who have the most marketing engagement is interesting at an enterprise level, we need to communicate this infor-mation to someone who can take action. That person is usually the lawyer who has built a relationship with that contact.

Our ERM system allows us to create in-dividual dashboards for each lawyer, show-ing them how each of their top contacts is interacting with the firm. Early tests with these dashboards uncovered useful infor-mation, such as latent interests, preferred mode of communication and which con-tacts are under-engaged and might need personal outreach by the lawyer.

For Client Teams

We have developed a view intended to be used by the relationship lawyer and client teams that segments the data by client. The dashboard shows a breakdown of the engage-ment by individual, and because we have job title information, we can see which high-level contacts are engaged and which ones we should be engaging with more. Using our ERM information, we can assign specifi c lawyers with the strongest relationships the task of reaching out to the individuals at that company.

The content in this feature correlates directly with the Technology Management and Business Development domains in the LMA Body of Knowledge (BoK). To dive deeper into these subject areas, head to the Technology Management BoK domain here: http://bit.ly/LMABoKTM, and the Business Development domain here: http://bit.ly/LMABoKBD.

For Practice Groups

Our marketing automation system does a good job of segmenting the engagement of individuals with our content, emails and events, which are all tagged by practice area. We hypothesize that by analyzing changes in practice area and engagement by individuals and companies, we can detect where latent needs may exist. The data on this approach is still preliminary, but we know that for this approach to work well, we need robust content and/or events in each practice area for individuals to interact with and the practice area doing work for each client clearly denoted in the system.

Early Results Look Promising While we have not yet completely closed the law fi rm marketing-sales information gap, our experiments with an engagement dashboard have narrowed it. More importantly, this tool provides strong actionable information for individual lawyers and useful information for client teams to assist in understanding how to expand relationships. Although the value for practice groups is not defi nitive, it is clear that practices engaging in thought-leadership

marketing — alerts, newsletters, webinars,

etc. — have a better picture of how to grow

their practices and which individuals to pursue

than those groups who are not engaged in

thought-leadership marketing. ◾

Adam Stock is the chief information offi cer at Allen Matkins, a California-based law fi rm serving the real estate industry. Stock leads the fi rm’s technology operations, innovation

and digital transformation initiatives. Prior to his current role, Adam served as the fi rm’s chief marketing and client services offi cer.

Stefanie Knapp is the senior digital marketing manager for Allen Matkins. Knapp manages the fi rm’s digital communica-tions initiatives, including the fi rm’s website, videos and email

marketing and social media campaigns. She currently serves as LMA’s co-chair of the Social & Digital Media SIG.

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THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL MARKETING USING TECH TO ENGAGE … · 2019. 3. 5. · By using engagement dashboards, we can conﬁ dently share insights and make recommendations based on our