New Survey Results Do PSF practitioners WANT to market and sell? See the results of our research. Our upcoming surveys: How well do Marketing and Business Development work with other operations, like Finance, IT, HR, Legal and more? PSF Marketing/Business Development Integration – Does it Benefit Clients? Results for our survey "Are Marketing and Business Development Functions Stuck in a Rut?" will be available soon. News Ken Lizotte's new book prominently features Suzanne Lowe's ideas on successful business practices for professional service firms: The Expert's Edge: Become the Go-To Authority People Turn to Every Time (McGraw Hill 2008)   Podcast: The Silver Group's interview with Suzanne Lowe on differentiation and her upcoming book. January 2008. MP3 file Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's upcoming book The Integration Imperative™. The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, Rain Today, September 2007 (Awarded Marketing Sherpa's Best B2B Opt-in Email Campaign) Speeches "The Integration Imperative," SMPS Annual Conference , Chicago, May 9, 2008 "The Integration Imperative™: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos – Once and For All – in Professional Services," SMPS Northeast Regional Conference, Providence, May 8, 2008 New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog Marketing and business development stuck in a rut? Hiring fee-earners who WANT to Market and Sell See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "What a great newsletter — about the only one I've ever found useful in the marketing space." — Marketing and Communications Director, New York investment firm Recent Issues Five Questions for Jessica Reiter on Launching a Groundbreaking Branding Initiative, February 2008 Five Questions for Eileen Harrington, VP, Marketing, Analysis Group, on the Firm's Web Initiative, January 2008 A Year of Doing Things Differently, December 2007 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

The Marketplace Master™ is a monthly email publication on professional service marketing from Expertise Marketing, LLC.

Letting the Clients' Perspective Drive a Law Firm's Marketing Reorganization

How firms portray their organization to clients is not an issue to be taken lightly. If not thought through carefully, a firm's structure for marketing can hide strengths, emphasize weaknesses and become a barrier to marketplace mastery.

The catalyst for taking a hard look at how effectively a professional services firm is functionally organized for marketing purposes often starts when a firm experiences challenges with business development. This month we talk with Wendy Horn, Marketing Director for Bracewell & Giuliani, who recounts how the law firm kept its clients’ perspective top-of-mind when radically restructuring the way the firm marketed itself to clients.

Bracewell & Giuliani serves Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions, leading private investment funds, governmental entities and individuals concentrated in the energy and financial services sectors worldwide. In 2005, former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani joined the firm as a senior partner.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

P.S. Is your firm employing unique marketing and business development strategies or tactics? Are you marketing your firm differently? Let us know if you would like to be featured in a future issue.

Five Questions for Wendy Horn on Reorganizing a Law Firm's Marketing Approach

Lowe: Describe a "Doing Things Differently" initiative that is intended to increase your firm's marketplace effectiveness.

Horn: When I joined Bracewell & Giuliani as Marketing Director in January 2006, the firm was organized by specific legal disciplines — an inward-looking structure typical in many law firms.

From an internal perspective, this can make perfect sense; discipline-specific silos are maintained because they simplify client tracking, billing, substantive training and attorney compensation. However, businesses see their problems, challenges and opportunities holistically, within the context of their industry, rather than as discrete legal issues. Problems are solved and opportunities are seized using whatever resources make the most sense, and the end result must benefit the organization as a whole.

The leadership team at Bracewell knew we needed to radically re-think our approach to business development and that this would impact our organizational structure. Working closely with firm leadership and drawing on the insights of a list of key firm clients, we identified six Strategic Practice Areas (SPAs) focused around industry sectors or business issues affecting our clients:

• Banks and Financial Institutions
• Energy
• Environmental Strategies
• Financial Restructuring
• Private Investment Funds
• White Collar Criminal Defense

Wendy Horn, Bracewell & Giuliani

Lowe: How did you realize that something different needed to be done?

Horn: There were many signs that the traditional approach to business development through legal practice areas was not the most effective way to communicate with clients. We were regularly missing service opportunities because attorneys from one practice area, who were working on a specific set of client matters, didn’t identify other business issues for which attorneys in another department could provide assistance.

For example, even though Bracewell has a world-class team of environmental attorneys, we were doing no environmental work for our top five energy-industry clients, all of which faced major climate change issues.

Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back was one week in which a single client was approached by two groups of Bracewell attorneys. Both groups were offering to provide a broad set of legal services, and neither group knew that the other was pitching the same client. Clearly, we were stepping on and stepping all over each other.

Lowe: How did you overcome the obstacles or internal challenges to turn your idea into reality?

Horn: Lawyers are generally compensated for sourcing, winning and maintaining their own clients, independent of what their colleagues may be doing down the hall. This tradition comes from decades, even centuries, of legal practice that focused on the individual client/attorney relationship. While such relationships remain important, they ignore the growth of mid-sized and large firms over the past 20 years, and the comprehensive services such firms can offer their clients.

This one-to-one correlation between client and attorney has other, broad effects throughout the firm. Hiring decisions, financial tracking (including profitability), resource allocation… all of these and more are generally organized by discipline or practice, not by client industries or business issues. All of this has made it very difficult to help attorneys understand that their worldview is not necessarily shared by their clients.

Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in helping change our attorneys’ thinking was my suggestion to use in-person client satisfaction interviews. Hearing from the clients themselves helped our lawyers recognize the importance of — and the opportunities to be gained from — assuming the clients’ perspective on their industries and issues. We asked what they wanted more of from Bracewell. The responses were amazingly consistent: give us information to solve our business problems.

Similarly, as we began to create and distribute client alerts newsletters and industry blogs (e.g. Energy Legal blog) that focused on real-world events and business issues, clients responded to their contact attorneys, positively and directly. It wasn’t the marketing team telling the attorneys what the clients needed, it was the clients themselves.

Lowe: What's the status of your “Doing Things Differently” initiative now, even if it’s not finished yet?

Horn: We have not yet begun to track results, budgets or performance of these six SPAs, except where they line up with existing practice structures. Simply put, attitudes change more quickly than longstanding accounting and operational systems.

However, we have implemented a number of organizational and procedural improvements that will help us further this change: The firm named six prominent attorneys to coordinate the SPAs and promote this approach to clients. We developed a new client-intake process that describes the work done for the client in a way that matches the client's industry perspective. We have also created an experience database that can be used to take advantage of firm rankings and press coverage and develop new service opportunities.

Lowe: What advice would you give other professional service marketers who want to Do Things Differently?

Horn: Marketing is still new for professional service firms. When partners bring professional marketers into discussions of client services, change occurs. Our role is not just to assist in this change, but to help lead it. So be bold. Use all of your talents, skills and experience. Show up every day with passion for your role and contribution. Make things happen.

But also understand that most professional-services providers — especially lawyers — are trained to challenge ideas. They will require you to defend your initiatives and defend them well, because that’s what they do for their clients. It isn’t personal; in fact, at the same time that they are challenging your ideas they will encourage you to keep coming up with new plans and goals.

One of the best ways of helping convince attorneys and other professionals that your ideas are sound is to bring the voice of the client into the process. At Bracewell, this has helped the attorneys understand that we weren’t promoting change simply for the sake of change — we were responding to the real-world concerns and needs of the firm’s own clients.

Your feedback is important to us. Please contact us with your comments and questions.

Call for interview subjects: Do you know of a professional service firm that is taking steps to integrate its marketing and business development functions and would be willing to be interviewed for Suzanne’s upcoming book, The Integration Imperative™? If so, please direct them to our page on The Integration Imperative™ for more information.

Take the confidential, web-based Marketplace Masters professional service firm differentiation assessment test for instant feedback on whether your firm is doing differentiation right.

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