Making datameaningfulSimon Elven

There’s no question that nowadays it’s easy to get hold of data in law firms. But, says Simon Elven, Commercial Marketing Director at Tikit, do you really know why data matters, what data you should capture and what to do with it? This article shares some pointers.One of the defining characteristics of our age is the ubiquity of data. It’s everywhere and inescapable. Data has loomed large in the international fightback against COVID-19. Big data analytics have seeped into every area of modern life from forecasting macroeconomic trends to deciding what you’ll put in your fridge next week. And of course, professional services marketers are no less impacted. Now data sources and dashboards proliferate. Data can come flooding into firms. But actually are we making sense of it and are we looking at the right things? In this article I’m looking at what data it’s important to collect, and then what you can do with it.

First, let’s establish the point of data. For me, data is essential because it’s the key to building relationships between the firm and its prospects and clients. Indeed, data both enables you to build relationships – it gives insights and understanding that tells you what to do – and it evidences the strength of relationships over time, as we’ll see later.

To be clear, the heart of a professional services firm’s business is the personal relationships developed by professionals with their client network. Even in a globalised world, where services are increasingly being commoditised, the thing that differentiates your firm is the client’s service experience, and this is hugely influenced by the relationship that clients perceive they have with individuals at the firm.

This is intensified by the fact that we’re all operating in an environment of rising customer expectations. Across all types of activity, people increasingly expect, and indeed require, that the organisations and businesses they deal with are accessible, accountable, responsive, and act with integrity. They also want transactions to be slick. Why would they expect any less of someone giving them professional advice? For firms to deliver on these expectations they need to build relationships based on a detailed knowledge and understanding of each client.

I’ll add that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall service experience has become even more critical. In the short-term, at least, it’s going to be harder to cultivate personal relationships between fee-earners and clients in face-to-face settings. Clients will calibrate their love for your firm based more than ever on the quality of the service experience. Of course this includes the cost and quality of the work. But if these things are largely even, then factors like the smoothness of your

Building relationships

“ ”...data is essential because it’s the key to building relationships between the firm and

its prospects and clients...on-boarding process and your billing hygiene will loom larger. So how can we know, as marketers, how prospects and clients feel about us? How strong is the relationship and where is it going? The answers are in the data.

Task number one is determining which data you need to collect. You then want to organise data collection and analysis in such a way that the dots can be joined and

Joining the dots

an actionable picture emerges. Given that relationships are driving the firm’s business with prospects and clients, it follows that each touchpoint in the relationship provides an opportunity to acquire data that will contribute to completing this picture.

For instance your website analytics should tell you which organisations are visiting your site. This is enough to create an initial CRM company record. If a prospect from that organisation then downloads gated content from your site, you can create a personal record. Happily each individual has a unique email address, and each organisation a unique domain name. It enables the straightforward creation of unique records in the CRM system.

Once you have contact details and know the areas of law that an individual prospect is interested in, you can then drive deeper engagement with the offer of more content or an event invitation. Prospects who attend or participate in say a webinar, can then be passed on to an appropriate fee-earner who can set up a meeting. All this activity needs to be captured in the CRM system.

However it’s important to be clear about the limitations inherent in most CRM systems. They’re a repository of important data, but are a chore to keep current. As a result the information they contain is often partial, patchy or out of date. As such CRMs are not suited to support dynamic relationship development.

It’s also likely that other systems are in play, such as an e-marketing and events systems, and a pitch tracking system. These should be feeding into the CRM system, but the challenge remains making sense of lots of data. To tackle this, a lot of law firm marketers create spreadsheets that bring disparate data sets together in one place. But the danger remains that people are overwhelmed by too much data, and no clear picture emerges.

What’s needed is the capacity to “surface” the intelligence that’s locked in all this data. It needs to be crunched into simplified nuggets of insight that will help you make the decisions and drive the actions that build relationships. Fortunately firms can now deploy some relationship management software, such as Introhive, to help.

Introhive is an add-on to existing CRM software. It makes two big contributions: the first is that it takes a lot of the pain out of maintaining current and accurate data in the CRM. The second is its capacity to generate some key relationship indicators.

Introhive works from the point at which fee-earners are interacting with prospects and clients. It scans emails, contacts and calendars in Outlook. It will also research social media and the internet for information on contacts not in the CRM system. Fee-earners (and marketers) are then presented with a digest of current information on the contact

Nuggets of insight

that with one click will go into the CRM system. It means that CRM data is always up-to-date, complete and accurate, so that’s incredibly useful.

But what’s even more important in the context of data is that Introhive deploys a range of algorithms to take the temperature of the firm’s relationship with each prospect or client. It does this by aggregating lots of pieces of micro-data – e.g. how often emails are exchanged, how quickly they’re answered, how many people are involved in the conversation, etc – to arrive at one key indicator that “scores” the relationship with the individual contact; and another key indicator that “scores” the relationship with the contact’s organisation.

Dynamic scoringHaving collected all the data, marketers are now in a position to make sense of it. What they need to do is condense all the accumulated information into an engagement or connectedness rating. This doesn’t have to be complicated, and they should perhaps make friends with the IT department for some help.

Essentially you combine the Introhive scores with other important indices. One should be the marketing index. This is derived by calculating an index based on how often, in a given period, the client visited your site; downloaded content; received, opened and acted on marketing emails; received, opened and accepted an invite; and attend a marketing event.

Do the same with relationship development (emails, phone calls, appointments); with legal work (proposals sent, projects won, projects completed); with pitches (made and won), with feedback (NPS); and with referrals if there were any. Combine the numbers to produce overall scores for that period. You can then rate each client’s “connectedness”. Do the same for the next period and you’ll have dynamic tracking of each relationship and can see at a glance how healthy it is and where it’s headed.

When firms have this information it informs how they can segment prospects and clients for targeted marketing and sales activity. It enables opportunities to be benchmarked: firms have visibility, for instance, of how close they likely are to closing deals, which informs planning and strategy. A big benefit is that it alerts the firm to clients that are cooling off so you can act in a timely way to stop the client from leaving. Relatedly, this information is also important to succession planning. If a key contact leaves the client organisation, who is it that’s going to ensure the continuity of the relationship going forward? It also lets marketers understand how mature a client is. Is there more business development potential left? Can contacts refer your firm both internally and externally? Can they be approached for testimonials and case studies?

Also once you have these simple, tracked, ratings – they’re easily presented on dashboards to the whole firm, so that everyone can instantly understand the strength of any given relationship with an individual or a client organisation and nurture the relationship accordingly. That’s how you make data meaningful.

Simon Elven is the Commercial and Marketing Director of Tikit, one of the world’s leading providers of IT products and services to the legal and accounting sectors. Simon was a founder member of Tikit and has influenced the company’s development for the past two decades. His specialisms are document management systems, CRM systems and business development.

Registered in England 2885516. Registered office 81 Newgate Street, London, EC1A 7AJ

Copyright © Tikit 2020

July 2020 / 1

To find out more, talk to a member of the Tikit team today.

+44 (0)20 7400 3737 (Europe) +1 888 878 4548 (North America)

hello@tikit.com | www.tikit.com | @TikitGroup