Your story, well how to…
Eila Madden and Sam Russell reveal how to build a winning corporate narrative that will make you stand out from the crowd.
T
hese are challenging times for professional services firms. Since the 2008 recession, they have witnessed dramatic changes in their sector. Merger activity is on the increase, new entrants are creating greater competition and there’s an oversupply of services. Not only that, firms are grappling with new regulatory changes and, to top it all off, clients are demanding greater value for money. This overwhelming pace of change is set to continue. How different life is from the prefinancial-crisis world when, for most professional services firms, worked flowed in from all angles. Now, as firms jostle for position in this new, more competitive era, they need to redouble their efforts to persuade existing and potential clients to pick them. Claiming to be the ‘biggest and the best’ will no longer cut it; they must develop a true point of difference. Easier said than done. Corporate narratives – firms’ stories about what they do, why they matter and what makes them different – may seem like an unnecessary distraction in the pursuit of new business, but nothing could be further from the truth. Telling your firm’s story, and telling it well, is crucial to getting your foot in the pitchroom door – and winning. The absence of strong corporate narratives in professional services has been noted. In a profile of the business development function in the legal sector, trade title Legal Week pointed out that, “Historically, law firms have been terrible at making themselves stand out, instead churning out indistinguishable messages”. The magazine quoted one business development professional as saying: “If you covered up the branding on a law firm’s website, you would struggle to see the difference between them, such are the
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similarities between what they promise to offer clients and the way they package their services.” So how do you construct a corporate narrative that is true to your firm and really says something distinctive about your services? And, once you craft that narrative, how do you ensure that it’s told consistently across everything your firm does? The task is by no means easy. The biggest challenge will be getting your partners, collectively and individually the voice of the firm, aligned. This means agreeing to the need for a corporate narrative, getting involved in constructing it and, more importantly, delivering it. For your audiences to be persuaded by your story, your partners will need to live it. Their involvement in the following journey – of discovery, definition, expression and deployment – is essential to building an enduring narrative that truly reflects who you are.
1 Discover
Most firms’ narratives are hiding deep within their organisations. The tough bit is uncovering them and learning how to bring them to life. To discover your story, speak to a wide range of fee-earners and support staff across the firm. The importance of a representative group of interviewees can’t be stressed enough. If you’re going to tell your story successfully, everyone has to believe it and buy into it. Without that cross-firm support, you will sound incoherent and inconsistent to the outside world. Undoubtedly some colleagues will be inherently cynical about phrases like ‘brand storytelling’ and ‘developing a narrative’. It’s here that working with journalists – the ultimate professional storytellers – can help to tease a coherent story from these sceptics. More and more journalists are joining in-house marketing teams and communi-