FEATURE
Business development & acceptance
Beyond Table Stakes: Innovative Strategies for Driving Client Engagement at Mintz It was fall 2019, and the marketing and business development team at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C. was preparing for its lawyers to attend a private equity conference. It had produced intelligence briefs on the portfolio companies that would be in attendance and analysed each by sector. It used reverse triangulation in the firm’s CRM system to determine which of its lawyers had relationships with any of the conference attendees. The result was a list of matches that the attorneys then used to set up meetings. By tracking the resulting new business, Mintz was able to calculate its return on investment for the conference, which had cost $75,000 to attend. In less than three months, the firm billed $250,000 to new clients, and new matter work — quite a significant outcome in a short amount of time. The firm applies the same model for other conferences it attends. This type of big win is what law firms hope to achieve through business development efforts. It was only possible because of the robustness of Mintz’s CRM system and the strength of the firm’s marketing and business development team, which is headed by Chief Marketing Officer Amy Fowler. Reaching this level of performance is indicative of the firm’s unrelenting commitment to ongoing innovation and improvement, as Fowler explained.
Nourishing the firm’s go-to-market strategy “I’ve worked in legal marketing for nearly 20 years now, and I had always wanted a CRM tool that would do everything, but was always sorely disappointed,” Fowler says. “Several years ago, we started working on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform with a Thomson Reuters Business Development Premier (BDP) overlay. Through a collaboration with Thomson Reuters, we have what I consider a truly high-functioning, valuable, and useful tool. It has become the lifeblood of our go-tomarket strategy.” Fowler explains that the CRM system houses all of the firm’s contacts; but more importantly, it contains relationship data, including “who knows who” and the
30 | Wilson Allen CRM Supplement
strength of those relationships. Through it, the business development team also track sales activity, such as pitches and leads, win/loss ratios, lawyer diversity, and other essential metrics the firm analyses. Its experience database captures information for use in future pitches, RFPs, and proposals to win work. “The fact that we’re capturing every lead vs. pitch vs. RFP every step of the way means we can then analyse what works best to engage clients. We can look at how long it takes to turn a lead into a pitch. We can see if that’s dependent on the attorney, the practice area, or geography. We can look at what factors may move that process along,” Fowler adds. These factors include steps such as preparing intelligence briefs that summarize all of the background information it can on a company. Not only do the intelligence briefs help lawyers prepare for a first meeting, but they serve as a reference for the future. The briefs are also stored in the CRM and inform outreach efforts, such as invitations to events, which are all documented in the CRM. Fowler sees the positive impact her team has on the sales cycle, but she can also measure it as well. “We can track all of the new business that comes in and see how many experiences we have with a person to move from lead to pitch, and whether that’s at an individual level or an event,” she explains. “When that interaction turns into a new matter; we can tie that to our financial system to look at the value of the new matter and determine the ROI on it.”
