Winning the Business Development Battle Part 10: Air Cover

No matter how great an army of seasoned business development veterans you may have at your firm, they will always be more effective when they have reinforcements. In the law firm, the group that is tasked with backing up the business development troops is the Marketing Department. They provide the air cover to help ensure that the business development battles on the ground are successful.

These loyal and dedicated members of your business development army can help to provide whatever the troops need to be effective. They can start by helping to draw up business development battle plans. They can ensure that the troops’ expertise is widely distributed through publications and placements. They can assist in picking the right targets. They can do research or other leg work to help with movements in the field. They can provide ammunition to use during meetings. Then they can help with follow-up to keep things moving forward. Most importantly, they can help to lay out and execute an effective business development strategy, which is essential to success. Remember, no matter how fierce the battle, the Marketing Department should always have your back.

An Apple a Day Keeps CRM Failure Away Part 3 - The Apple of Our Eye

Sure, there are plenty of stories about CRM failures. But in reality, when rolled out successfully, CRM has tremendous potential. It can actually help a firm to improve communication, coordination and Client service. If you think long and hard about it, I bet you’ll have trouble coming up with too long a list of really important stuff we do in a law firm that don't involve at least one of those things. That’s because law firms are relationship businesses and relationships take a lot of all of the above.

Here are just a few of the things CRM can help us to do:

• We can de-duplicate our contact lists so we don’t send the same people multiple communications.
• We can generate lists that can be segmented by key categories to ensure that we can target information to the people who can benefit from it.
• We can alert potential Clients of important changes in laws or regulations that can affect them.
• We can coordinate Client team meetings and efforts.
• We can share information gathered from client surveys about Client service preferences.

All of these things can help CRM to become the apple of our firm’s collective eye. Then, there are even more important things that CRM can do…