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'Business Development For Busy People'

Our client is a full service legal firm, providing a wide range of legal services in the south east of England, with circa 270 staff, including 39 partners and over 100 lawyers.

With ambitious growth targets in place, the firm acknowledged that it needed to establish a comprehensive Business Development strategy. Ensuring that the partners had forward visibility of all opportunities in the firm's pipeline was paramount. However, up until that point adoption of the CRM system by fee earners had been poor, so although business development activities were being undertaken the system was not being updated to reflect this and therefore an accurate picture of the pipeline was not available.

Sharing of client records and information across the firm was also not common practice which meant that the firm was not effectively cross selling a full range of services across the client base.

New Business Development tools such as social media were not actively being used in the BD process, although some of the partners had begun to engage online in Linkedin and blogging, this had not been widely adopted across the firm.

Flair agreed to hold a 'Discovery Day' where a partner group were brought together to discuss the current business development capability in their division. After consultation with the sponsor Flair devised a comprehensive questionnaire focused on this crucial business activity, which each of the partners were required to complete and return prior to the Discovery Day. The results were then analysed and the agenda for the day based around their responses.

The Discovery Day allowed the partner group to pinpoint the areas where the firm could make the biggest gains and draw up a list of action points and assign priorities to each one.

The group now meet on a regular basis, holding each other accountable for completing tasks that have been assigned by the due date and to ensure that momentum is maintained. The CRM challenge has also been met in part by the training of some of the administrative staff to take on the maintenance of the data that is held, instead of leaving it solely to the fee earning staff. Capturing the relationship that the firm has with the client by using the CRM system has enabled them to effectively cross sell other services into clients and properly track business development activity to ensure that :-

a)  it is followed through;
b)  the time spent is proportionate to the likely return.

Some of the partners have now branched out into social media, some who were sceptics have now become converts, with Linkedin and twitter being the channels of choice. In house briefings have also been run to show individuals how to begin to use it more effectively in their business development activities.

The partners are now able to see the bigger picture through CRM and have a clear view of the opportunities that the firm is presented with to work on, but more importantly they now keep track on progress and move them forward and close the deal.

For more information on how Flair Coaching can assist you with your business development challenges please contact us on 01675 466 477 or email your enquiry to us using our contact form.