8 minute read
Beyond Table Stakes: Innovative Strategies for Driving Client Engagement at Mintz
Business development & acceptance
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.
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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 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.”
The CRM system is used primarily by the Mintz’ business development team, which shares information with lawyers when they need it. A handful of lawyers have direct access to the system including robust dashboards that allow them to track clients, prospects, experience entries, and sales activity. Mintz has deliberately rolled out access slowly. “Rather than force the system on our lawyers, we provide access to those that seek it,” Fowler says. “This approach seems to be working well and encourages our lawyer users to become almost like an internal sales force for our CRM system to other lawyers.”
Sharing knowledge and meeting client expectations In addition to supporting business development activities, Mintz uses its CRM as a tool to meet client expectations.
“Clients expect firms to understand their industry so that they’re able to provide business and legal advice in the context of what’s going on in their industry, which takes time,” Fowler says. “Our client invests their time informing legal counsel. If we bring a new associate into the matter or a new partner in from a new practice area, they need to come into the relationship with a high level of understanding, so the client doesn’t have to repeat themselves or pay to bring someone else up to speed.”
Fowler believes that’s a real value proposition for CRM – using it to bring others up to speed. “Clients care about efficiency. If they know that we’re capturing everything about them and making it easy for people in the firm to access their preferences, that’s a benefit,” she says.
Raising the bar on client experience management Having a client-centric mindset has been part of Mintz’s culture since the firm’s founding in Boston more than eighty-five years ago. Today the Am Law one-hundred firm with five-hundred attorneys and a global reach has applied lessons learned from clients to create innovative programs to enhance client service.
The firm had been conducting client interviews for the past ten years. Results have been consistently positive, with overall scores showing a best-in-class level of service. To continue in this tradition, the firm analysed the survey data to look for opportunities for improvement. “We’ve always been concerned about client satisfaction and have had client teams for a long time,” Fowler says. “But we realised that to stay at the top of the pack, with everyone getting more and more focused on client service, we needed to make sure that we are consistent across the firm around the delivery of client service. And the way to get to consistency is through training and education, so everyone is operating at a higher level.”
To support this objective, Mintz launched its Client Service University in 2019. Each quarter, the firm brings in subjectmatter experts to lead focused sessions. Training started with the firm’s management committee and its policy committee. “A pricing expert talked about how to use pricing to deepen relationships and engage clients further. A communications expert offered guidance on improving pre-kickoff meetings, post-matter reviews, and role-played how to handle difficult conversations about matters that don’t go well or if the client doesn’t like a particular associate,” Fowler explains.
The sessions included topics such as delighting clients by identifying simple steps and actions to build relationships. “We did value-add exercises and idea generation activities to train the lawyers to be more client-centric,” Fowler says. “While these actions don’t tie direct directly to our CRM system, it does tie into the concept of understanding our clients. It helps our attorneys focus on what our clients want and need and teaches them to become more skilled at building relationships.”
About two-thirds of Mintz’ partners have completed training so far. Once all of the partners have been trained, Mintz will focus on associates. Looking back and looking ahead In the past, marketing typically only had ownership of the firm’s website. Everything else was in IT’s world. But the tide has changed, and marketing and IT are more integrated than ever. At Mintz, Fowler manages a dedicated marketing technology team that works closely with IT every day. While her team still owns the website, it also has vital members, including a data analyst who maintains the integrity of data and a statistics analyst who looks at the data to make sense of it and to determine how to act on it. A marketing technologist identifies ways to use technology and data to continually advance the firm’s sales cycle and the client relationship management cycle.
“We just created a new mobile app that allows us to access all of our centralised client intelligence. Any lawyer can pull up the name of a client and see anybody in the firm who knows that person, the strength of that relationship, our most recent pitches, and the most recent pieces of experience that have been entered into the system,” Fowler says. “We’re better prepared, more engaged, and better informed. Because we understand our clients better, know what they want, and know who they know, it’s easier for us to serve them.”
Looking ahead, Mintz plans to transition to a new CRM system because of the sunsetting of BDP, but it has decided to expand that conversation beyond CRM.
“We’re going to be taking a very holistic approach to our transition,” Fowler explains. “Finance has its system, we have ours, and yes, they talk to each other. But we’re going to use this as an opportunity to do a full audit of our data sources to optimize how we’re capturing, storing, maintaining, and then exposing data. Our goal is to use our CRM transformation to benefit the entire firm.”
Amy Fowler Chief Marketing Officer, Mintz
