Business Development Checklist for Junior Professionals

I am often asked to run short training sessions at legal, accountancy and surveying practices with the aim of helping young professionals start their business development activities in support of the firm’s marketing and business development programmes. Here is a summary of some of the ideas provided:

Be a good Ambassador

You are a walking, talking advertisement for your firm. Everyone you speak to – whether in a work or social context – will form an impression of the firm from the way you act. Regardless of your particular specialism, people will expect you to be familiar with what your firm is doing across all its departments and specialisms. Make sure you are aware of the firm’s vision and strategy and its key messages. Chat to colleagues in other departments to learn about their key clients, services and projects. Take time to read the firm’s web site and keep up to date with new developments by reading newsletters and blog posts.

Participate in internal marketing

Part of being a good Ambassador is keeping in touch with what those in other departments do – and by promoting the services of your team to them. Building trust amongst your colleagues will encourage them to cross refer clients and work to you. Having an up to date CV makes it easier for them to include you in tenders. Attending their departmental meetings will provide you with a deeper insight into what they do and why they do it so well. And don’t be shy – if you are aware of something interesting or working on a great project or case, send an email to let them know. And if other teams arrange internal or external events, ask if you can attend.

Promote yourself

Make sure that your profile entries on the firm’s intranet and web site are up to date. Be as specific as you can about what you do and who for (bearing in mind whatever client confidentiality issues might constrain this). Tell people what you are working on. Take time to introduce yourself to your colleagues at the firm’s events.

Communicate and publicise

There is always work to do in updating sections of the firm’s web site – volunteer to help – you may assist in ensuring that your firm and team’s entries remain high in the search engine lists. Provide short articles for your firm’s newsletters, briefing sheets or blog entries if they have a blog. If you think that a client or case is newsworthy speak to the marketing or PR advisers to see if a press release or article for external media might be appropriate. If your firm uses Twitter, see if there are topics on which you can provide tweets.

Develop relationships with clients

Your first priority has to be to deliver excellent service to your clients. And you should remain alert to any problems or opportunities that you learn about and advise the relevant partner. But try to get closer to your clients – set up Google Alerts so that you remain aware of their public announcements. Read their web site, annual report and brochures so that you become more familiar with their business. Read their trade and technical press and email articles that might be of interest to them to show that you are keen to support them grow their business. Make time to socialise with your peers there – even if it is just for a chat over a cup of coffee at the end of the meeting. Request introductions to other people there so that you broaden your range of contacts there and investigate how you get invitations to appropriate events that they may organise. If you are attending conferences and exhibitions, see if they are going to and offer to accompany them – or obtain tickets for them if this is possible. For larger client organisations, find out what sports events they support and see if you can organise for your firm to play them.

Network

Identify the relevant professional, trade, business, sector and local associations and clubs and explore membership. First out about your firm’s rules on financial and time contributions towards your regular attendance at such meetings. Make sure you have a good introduction and/or elevator speech, enter the contact details of people you meet in the firm’s database or CRM system and organise yourself to make the relevant follow up calls and stay in touch with those who are likely to be of most interest in the future.

Attend conferences

When you attend conferences for training and education purposes, make the most of the refreshment breaks to talk to other delegates, speakers and exhibitors. Hone your networking and follow up skills. Consider whether there are any lower level events where you might provide a short presentation or paper. Write internal reports and blog entries on what you have learned so that others may also benefit.

Maintain relationships with referrers and intermediaries

Seek out your peers at the other professional firms who serve your clients and operate in your market. Spend time getting to know what they do and about their interests. Offer to accompany them to industry and other events and invite them along to events at your firm that might be relevant. Keep details on any central referrer and intermediary list that your firm may operate and enter their details on your firm’s database so that they are kept up to date with bulletins and newsletters. If you are asked to attend events, do a little research into their firm and try to find areas where you have mutual interests. Organise socials.

Support new business development initiatives

Ask your departmental head if you can see a copy of any marketing and business development plans and volunteer to assist with any research or analysis tasks. When tenders are received, offer your help in collating and drafting material or in helping to prepare presentations. Listen attentively when marketing and business development is discussed at team meetings and offer any suggestions and ideas that you might have. Keep an eye on what competitors are doing and share any insights.

Get organised

Discuss with your departmental head or marketing/BD department what appropriate training there might be for young professionals and find out where your firm keeps information on clients, services and events that might be helpful. Learn to use the firm’s client and contact database so that you can manage your contact information. Request help in developing your own personal marketing plan that support the aims of the firm and department’s overall business development activities.

Best marketing campaign winner – Managing Partners Forum Awards

For several years now I have been a judge on the “Best Marketing Campaign” for the Managing Partner’s Forum annual awards. Here are the judge’s citations for the 2009 winner and runners up. Well done to all those who got to the shortlist! (Further details of the other category winners at www.mpfglobal.com).

WINNER – Turner Parkinson (law)

12-partner Manchester law firm Turner Parkinson started this campaign tentatively with the creation of a website under a sub-brand to promote insolvency generated businesses and properties for sale. The initiative started to generate a significant flow of introductions and resulted in hundreds of further opportunities being added to the site each week. The later introduction of an integrated PR campaign (and coverage on BBC Radio Manchester on the TP Deals Barometer), e-marketing and weekly bulletins generated a significant number of property and corporate transactions for the firm as well as meetings for senior lawyers with 100s of contacts. A great example of a practical revenue creating campaign which has also helped reposition the firm amongst some of the larger accountancy and insolvency players in the market.

SECOND PLACE – Boyes Turner (law)

Having previously spent over £50,000 pa on advertisements that were declining in effectiveness in the extremely tough personal injury claims market, the team at this 25-partner Reading law firm faced a tough challenge. Boyes Turner created a ‘hub and spoke’ claims website with specialist sites and SEO and PPC campaigns for cerebral palsy, industrial diseases and personal injury. This was backed up with a media campaign using a fast response to topical news items such as the ‘toxic sofas’ story and investment in a referrals network. This well thought through and well executed campaign achieved strong flows of enquiries, good conversion rates and an admirable cost per case figure.

THIRD PLACE – Taylor Wessing (law)

A thorough execution of a text-book-perfect research based global thought leadership campaign with a tie-in with the leading technical journal, blogs, websites, PR roundtables, internal communications and direct and digital marketing strands. There was close collaboration between the lawyers, the marketing team and the external agencies involved and this resulted in genuine added client value in terms of an innovative new Global IP Index to guide companies on the effectiveness of patent protection and enforcement in 24 world economies.

Crazy busy – Overstretched, overbooked and about to snap (Book review)

I first read this excellent book offering strategies for handling a fast paced life by Dr Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist, in December 2007. But many of the ideas (e.g. screen sucking, gigaguilt) have remained so vibrant to me as I have witnessed, amongst my clients and colleagues, a growing and worrying tendency to some of the problems outlined.

Just over half the book describes the problems with modern life that many of us are only too familiar with. He starts by describing the many facets of the increasingly fast paced life that we all lead and the challenge of trying to take back control, identify the important things and concentrate attention on them. He looks at the medical disorder ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) – where people rush, feel impatient, lose focus mid-task, bubble with energy but keep forgetting what they’re doing, feel powerless with all the stuff around them and have great ideas but fail to complete any of the many tasks they have. He mentions the control paradox – by trying to control life as much as possible, you run yourself ragged, thus losing control in the process. He suggests that we stay busy to avoid looking into the abyss, busyness can keep a person from keeping up with the issues that matter and that acceptance, not busyness, brings us to a peaceful place.

He tackles the myth of multi-tasking (which he calls “frazzing”) and reminds us that in sports, the better the player you are, the more focused you become. And so advises us to put our Blackberries away and focus on the task, or person, at hand. “Lingering is a lost art…if we’re not careful we’ll get so busy that we’ll miss taking the time to think and feel”. He says it is the renegade spirit of people which loves to play – with ideas, numbers, algorithms and programs - and if we are too busy we lose this ability.

He refers to two great thinkers. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who showed that our state of highest functioning as well as greatest joy – a state he called “flow” – is where we rely on the special talent Malcolm Gladwell described in his book “Blink: The Ability to Think Without Thinking”.

He addresses the oxymorons of modern life – connected anonymity (the ability to connect online intimately yet remaining completely anonymous) and social disconnection. He says that virtually every person who consults him as a psychiatrist suffers from some form of disconnection. This, with social isolation, can lead to or exacerbate depression, drug and alcohol abuse, poor tolerance of frustration and a tendency toward violent behaviour. He suggests that we count the number of minutes we spend each day with live human beings.

He advises that emotion is the first key to the best of modern life. He says that the small actions such as shaking hands and maintaining eye contact set a positive emotional tone which in turn brings out the best in people. At the heart of making the most of life today is the ability to treasure and protect your connections to what you care most about and thus the main problems in modern life today are caused by neglecting what matters to you most. He mentions numerous studies of successful people in business which emphasise the importance of focusing on what you do best and sticking with it.

The second key is rhythm – his word for the complex set of neurological and physiological events that create the apparent effortlessness of a person doing complicated work well. As a person practices any activity, the planning and executing of it moves gradually from one part of the brain to another (the cerebellum acts as the automatic pilot of the brain).

He talks a little about the need to find hope when you’re down (positive thinking). He describes the phenomenon “gemmelsmerch” – a force that tugs at our attention all the time and distracts us from whatever we’re doing. He then talks about the F-state – frantic, frenzied, forgetful, flummoxed, frustrated and fragmented and warns against making sure that you do not merely make your life faster and more full of data – more difficult to follow and keep track of – in an effort to make it more fulfilling and suggests you look at the paradox of labour-saving devices that take up so much time. He talks about “screensucking” – wasting time engaging with any screen. “Leeches” being people or projects that waste your time and attention and “lilies” that make you feel fulfilled and satisfied. “Doomdarts” are obligations you have forgotten about which suddenly pop up into your consciousness like a poisoned dart. EMV – Email Voice – the unearthly tone a person’s voice takes on when is reading an email while talking to you on the telephone. “Gigaguilt” refers to the guilt a person feels over missing something even while knowing that keeping track of everything is impossible and having enough time to please everyone is equally impossible. “Taildogging” is going faster or pushing harder – on yourself, your children, your business, your spouse, simply because other people are doing so. “Pizzled” – a combination of pissed off and puzzled is how you feel when a person, without asking or explaining, brings out his or her phone to make a call while you are together. Helpfully, he notes that women have a harder time then men. He coined the term “blind baseball” – where the players have blurry vision and the field is in constant motion.

He goes on to some strategies and remedies to achieve the C state (calm, cool, collected, concentrating, creative, co-ordinated, courteous). OHIO – Only handle it once. Using your morning burst (or whatever time of day when you feel mentally at your freshest). Minimising junk time, conversation interrupts and pile-on (Just say “No”). He says you must guard against being an “Info Addict” – so alert to what is going on in the world that you fail to do anything yourself – and the “Spray Effect” – when you try to put your attention on too many things at once. He suggests that you keep alert to the warning signs that you are about to become overloaded (know your juggling limits) – and to take a break at that point. Deal with toxic worry (sometimes depression starts with a lack of mental focus).

A memorable statement he makes is “Attention is like money. If we don’t watch how we spend it, we waste it”. And talks about how our brains are becoming stuffed with stunning information that you will soon forget. Instead of a thoughtful live they savour, people are in danger of living superficial, sound bite lives they barely notice. He unpicks the common association that fast is smart – and describes the differences between people who are fast processors and those who are slow processors.

He challenges us to consider where we do our best thinking. He says that many people answer in the shower or in the car. And he suggests this is because what a person does at work is too goal directed and contaminated by gemmelsmerch to allow the free play of ideas that great thinking requires. A shower promotes good thinking because it induces a state of comfort, calm and relaxation and stimulates all five senses and your mind is free to go where it wants. Today’s world provides us with too much information and not enough thought – what separates a great innovator from the mere data gatherer is the ability to stop gathering data and think about what has been gathered.

The central solution is to have a system to make sure that you do what matters to you and to find the right balance between control and lack of control. He says that most sages urge us to make the most of the moment and to never forget that any day might be our last. He urges us to constantly ask ourselves “Am I doing what I really want to do?” and “Am I doing what most matters to me?”. He warns that once fear starts to govern your use of time, you cease to be true to the best of who you are and, paradoxically, you give up your chance to live a genuine life.

Towards the end he suggests that you do a systematic assessment of your use of time and assess the value received for the time invested. He goes beyond the usual work based categories and considers electronic time, intimate time, wasted time and creative time. He then argues that you consider the effort in order to assess the “worth it” factor. Helpfully provides grids for you to do this analysis.

He summarises his ten key principles to managing modern life:

1. Do what matters most to you
2. Create a positive emotional environment wherever you are
3. Find your rhythm
4. Invest your time wisely so as to get maximum return
5. Don’t waste your time screen sucking
6. Identify and control the sources of gemmelsmerch
7. Delegate
8. Slow down
9. Don’t multitask ineffectively
10. Play

And provides an alternative summary of “C activities”:

1. Connect
2. Control
3. Cancel
4. Create
5. Care
6. Cultivate

There is much advice on how to improve your ability to pay attention – for example: get enough sleep, watch what you eat, exercise, reduce distractions, balance structure and novelty, do what you want to do, build variety into your career, vary individual tasks, have human moments, don’t expect your attention to last indefinitely, stretch your brain every day, combine work and play, encourage deep thinking by engaging in active debate and find joy every day. There are many more suggestions and I would recommend the book to those who are interested in learning more.

Legal products – Commoditising and innovating

At the 360 Legal Conference earlier this month I presented a short paper on this topic and here are some of the key points I covered. Please let me know if you would like further details.

Specsavers is one of the UK’s superbrands. Along with its other major chain rivals it has transformed the traditional High Street optometrist and optician market. Who would have thought that this profession could be reduced to television advertising, dramatically reduced prices and “Buy one get one free” offers. Might this provide a clue to what commoditising and innovation might do to the legal and other professions? I also mention Specsavers as one of the founding fathers of marketing, Theodore Levitt, warned companies about what he called ‘marketing myopia’ – the dangers of looking too narrowly at your market and suffering major business failures. He used the US railways as an example – who focused on their business in railways and missed the revolution in transportation that almost wiped them out.

Most in the legal community fear “Tesco Law” – a major brand with significant resources moving into the consumer legal services market with devastating effects. Actually, it now looks like Co-Op law will provide the greater threat. And the essence of this threat is disintermediation – the removal of the lawyer from a central role in the client relationship to being a sideplayer and one of many possible service providers bought in by whoever “owns” the relationship.

“Innovation is the successful introduction of a new thing or method – the embodiment, combination or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes or services” (Luecke and Katz)

Few professional firms dedicate resource to innovation but “Innovation, like many business functions, is a management process that requires specific tools, rules and disciplines” (Davila) and therefore should be considered alongside other disciplines such as marketing, finance and human resources. There are numerous processes and tools that can be used for this purpose.

Commoditisation is not new. Maister talked about the differences between brain, grey hair and procedure legal services over a decade ago. Susskind’s work on the evolution of legal services shows how legal services can transform from: bespoke, standardised, systemised, packaged until commoditised and he also suggests that innovation might take place in the recognition, selection and service stages of the client chain.

There are many examples of firms stepping along the Susskind trail and in the presentation I considered examples from Veale Wasbrough, divorceonline, Nelsons, Mogers, Lawoptions, Cybersettle, Landlord-law and Pinsent Mason.

I then talked through my own model of the sources of innovation ideas. This suggests that ideas for innovation might come externally from client research (satisfied clients, dissatisfied/lost clients and new clients), competitors (within and outside the legal profession), staff, mavericks and technology advances and internally from cost cutting and efficiency reviews, service mapping and re-engineering, niche market, specialist services and collaboration. And it might be applied to marketing, legal advice (production and delivery), service, relationship and price/payment.

I then considered a couple of the tools that I had successfully deployed in law firms including: client classification, segmentation, market mapping, service mapping and service blueprinting. With a few thoughts on innovation in pricing and payment structures I ended with a process for managing new product development and some thoughts about how there might be a revolution in legal commodities in the mobile/smart telephone market. And it was with great interest that I noted just today that the first legal (conveyancing quote) iPhone app was launched by Barnetts solicitors.

360 Legal Conference report – Surviving the perfect storm

At the start of the month (it’s been busy) I attended this conference at which I presented a paper on “Commoditising and innovating legal products” (on which there is a separate post) and some key points emerged that I thought I would share:

After some rather dramatic music, Viv Williams got things off to a start at the beautifully refurbished Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch. He talked of the challenges of reform, regulation and recession and advised firms to “get work, cut costs and restructure”. He mentioned that 250 firms had now been assigned to the risk pool. There were some interesting statistics – the US has 1.1m lawyers in 460K firms and there are 412K sole practitioners whereas the UK has 140,000 solicitors and 10.4K law firms.

Steve BIllot from BDO shared some scary insights on the impact of the first “white collar recession” – indicating that the average age of the partners in the firms he dealt with was 58 and there was rarely a succession plan. He said that it was easier to deal with financial problems where firms had adopted LLP status and that a rolling 13 week cash flow forecast was critical for survival. He warned that insolvency practitioners advised that insolvencies peak some 12-18 months after the recovery from the recession and ran through some turnaround options.

Viv took to the stage again – this time with some predictions on what might happen as further changes in the legal market took place. He suggested that the top 100 firms (based mostly in London) would stay the same – as would the strong regional brands. But he was less confident of publically funded practices and looked to the emergence of community law firms and further specialist niche practices. He suggested out sourcing, off shoring and e-commerce to drive down costs and hinted at new models where firms might keep the top 20% of work and generate referral fees from the rest. He challenged the audience to think about their business and strategic plans. A move to fixed fees seems a certainty and he berated the extent of MDS (Marketing Deficiency Syndrome).

Mark Lewis, outsourcing partner at Berwin Leighton Paisner, started with his explanation of why the earlier moves by the accountants into the legal profession had failed and looked at the early appetite for legal process outsourcing generated by the NASSCOM report which estimated that the US market was worth $US3-4 billion. He demonstrated why, in his view, “LPO is a baby industry and we are all feeling our way” and suggested that most likely adopters would be inhouse counsel. It was interesting to hear about Rio Tinto’s recent move to appoint CPA Global outsourcers to the panel and insist that the other major firms on the panel work with them with the result of $1m savings achieved to date.

Being a huge fan of Chris Hughes, a motivational sales speaker, I was disappointed that the delegates did not participate as much as I had seen others do so in the past. He explored why lawyers failed to grasp opportunities to win new fees and offered a well known model with outgoing- reserved on one axis and task-people orientation on the other. He also managed to get across the message that effective selling needs a shift of focus from the lawyer and his/her needs to that of the client. I also really liked his ideas on prioritising by considering whether something was a £10, £100 or £1,000 task.

Jane Galvin, Head of Professional Services at Barclays Commercial used its Legal Services Industry Research Paper (http://www.barclays.co.uk/commercial/turningthecorner/documents/Legal_research_Q209.pdf) to provide a broad economic forecast. After lunch Clare Merrick presented some practical tips on managing professionals before my slot and a general panel discussion.