December, 2019 | Article
Making it into the Circle of Trust and How Marketing and Business Development Systems can Help
Do you want to gain new clients and keep the ones you have? Then you can’t overestimate the importance of respect. It’s a commodity which can get you “over the line” in a myriad of personal and business situations.
Of course it’s easy to talk about respect, but harder to build it. It can’t be forced, but there are several building blocks. One of the foundation stones is making people feel valued and important. In a professional context, one way this can be done is by making clients feel you’re listening to them, so if they’ve told you something which matters to them, you should remember it. You can also make clients feel important by showing you know them; where they work and what they work on are good places to start.
It’s also key to acknowledge feedback and realise when things haven’t gone as well as they could have. If for whatever reason you have delivered less than excellent service, it goes a long way if you make a conspicuous effort to make it up to clients.
When you demonstrate respect for the client it shows them that they’re a contact who matters to the law firm. Respect can be demonstrated in a number of ways and by different areas of the firm. For example, marketing can show respect by understanding the contact, what they're interested in, not sending irrelevant mailers or event invitations, and ensuring preferences and special requirements are remembered.
Meanwhile lawyers can show clients respect by setting time aside to meet with them when possible and by understanding their wider context when having conversations. While formally arranged meetings are key, the informal “I saw you were attending our seminar and thought I’d pop down” can be even more powerful.
There’s no question that showing a contact that they matter to the firm, when done well, engenders a positive attitude in a client or potential client. However, in reality, in the midst of busy lives, it’s easier said than done. This is why it’s wise to let client relationship technology do some of the work. The goal is simply to use technology in such a way that each contact feels respected by, and important to, the firm.
First principles
Information gathering should begin as soon as contact is made with the firm and of course there needs to be somewhere to store it. In most cases, of course, will be a client relationship management (CRM) system. Now I know I risk about 75 per cent of readers rolling their eyes and clicking away at this point, but whatever your experience to date – and for the most part it isn’t positive – to do any of this without a CRM is hard. The trick is to use automation to take the pain out of CRM and actually make it work.
The first barrier to making client relationship technology work is largely cultural. Despite years of effort, there’s still a lingering feeling that it’s important to keep what you know about a contact to yourself. Everyone needs to be convinced that it’s not “their” data - it’s the firm’s data. Once the “it’s my data” cultural hurdle is cleared, the even bigger hurdle of “it’s too much effort” looms.
What you really need is a CRM systems which shortcut the drudgery and luckily there are tools that can help with this. For instance automatic analysis of normal activity in Outlook can provide a pool of potential new contacts. Having an email address is one thing, expecting a user to add all the required information into a CRM system is quite another. That’s why your system needs to have automated processes which augment the information without requiring the user to do anything except confirm that the contact should be in the CRM.
Some contacts may not originate from a relationship. For example, if the contact fills in a form on the website to get some gated content, their record starts with marketing. Again, it’s important that the record gets into the database, so the form should flow directly into the CRM. Assuming you’re not using something like Hubspot with a built in CRM, tight integration between a website form and the CRM system is required.
Starting the journey
Once a contact has made its way into the CRM system, additional data can be gathered and this can prove incredibly useful when meeting with a contact to provide context and relevance. The types of information it’s possible to gather and record include web pages visited, content downloaded, emails received or opened, links clicked on, invites sent and events that were accepted, attended or not attended.
Typically firms struggle to make use of information at the point where it’s going to matter to the client. Yet if this type of information can be made available to individuals within the firm who are going to speak with the contact, the conversation can become much more productive. “Hello, what brings you here today?” becomes: “Hello, how did you enjoy our seminar on Single Tariff Pricing last week?”
This type of interaction, fostered by marketing level insight, helps with the overall perception of the individual talking to the contact. It allows them to show relevance, immediacy and gives the impression of an efficient firm. The delivery of the information also matters, however. Letting a contact know that they’ve been “stalked” through their digital interactions with the firm doesn’t give a good impression, using the data to inform a conversation does.
Deepening the relationship
Relationships then develop based on personal interaction. The first challenge is to make sure meetings take place. These may be formal or informal, but either way it’s important to be well briefed ahead of time. If a contact is showing increased interest in the firm, and they’ve attended firm events, adding this information into the CRM system is a good first step; particularly if this can be automatically presented to an individual prior to a meeting.
The firm should also proactively notify employees if one of their contacts is coming to an event. The employee can then go to the event with the specific intention of meeting that contact. This requires that the CRM system records relationship information and that there’s a way of identifying related contacts from an event acceptance list. From a contact’s perspective, someone who has taken the opportunity to find out that they are attending an event and made the effort to meet them shows respect.
For a more formal meeting, taking the time to research the relationship between the firm and a contact is essential. It’s particularly important to find out who else has had contact with them recently and what they learned, as this implies that the contact is important enough to come up in conversation between two people at the firm.
Again, the requirement here is that the system “knows” that a meeting is coming up and gathers all of the relevant data from all systems and presents them in an easy to consume digest. The digest would include information from CRM, marketing, PMS etc. as well as public news sources, automatically sending this to anyone from the firm who’s attending the meeting.
The importance of following up
Finally, once a piece of work is done, the temptation is to move on to the next client without as much as a backwards glance. This misses the opportunity to further strengthen a relationship. Gaining feedback is an important part of demonstrating that you care about the experience a client had, especially if something has not gone well. All clients should get the chance to give feedback no matter their position. If a client takes time to complete feedback, engage with them and deal with any issues. If remedial action is needed, promise little and deliver more to convert a detractor into a promoter.
The feedback mechanism needs to be triggered automatically by a key event in the system (e.g. matter closure, final bill etc.). The system needs to alert the relevant person that feedback’s been given and must provide the capability to let them record that it’s been dealt with and how. In cases where feedback has not been dealt with, an appropriate automatic escalation path needs to be followed.
In conclusion, a deep relationship between the firm and its contacts is essential to win and retain clients. Key to this is the client’s perception that the firm is one that respects them and cares about them as an individual. Properly applied and used, client relationship technology can prove very valuable in helping individuals in the firm to build and support that perception.
For more information on the subject join Tikit for a webinar on December 12th, 2019, click here.