The brave new world for legal marketing?
Law firms traditionally sold “expertise” and charged by the hour without reference to the commercial outcomes they delivered. That is changing, but what exactly does the emergence of “product marketing” within the sector mean for the legal marketer?
Keith Hardie, Director of Innovation Marketing & Business Development, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner
keith.hardie@bclplaw.com
Lawyers may reasonably claim that the characterisation of how they once operated uncommercially is now largely historical and that firms are now more client-focused than ever before. Despite this, I think most legal marketers, and possibly clients, would argue the history of selling expertise rather than outcomes still casts a long shadow over the industry.
However, as a result of new approaches seeping in - partly due to the “productization” of legal services - I think we’re approaching a tipping point that means legal marketers will need to learn new techniques to keep pace.
Traditional legal marketing
On a day-to-day basis, the shadow of the traditional approach often means that legal marketers resort to putting together lots of generic content about the legal team’s experience. This, combined with lawyers’ innate fear of leaving anything out, often means slaving over materials that become little more than lengthy lists of generic capabilities.
I know I have the scars from arguments with belligerent partners demanding the right to publish pages and pages of boilerplate content and tombstones without really mentioning the clients’ requirements.
At the same time, marketing teams are kept at arm’s length from the end clients, learning too little about how services are delivered and what factors are key to selection. Most legal marketers have battled against this positioning but it has felt like an up-hill fight against partners who still want to base their pitch on their expertise and have inside information about their clients that they can use like a well-stocked armoury to shoot down any counter proposal (even if much of the time we may believe their “data” is corrupted by their personal opinion!).
Despite our best efforts, the brutal truth is that most feedback suggests the result of much of our marketing leaves clients feeling uninspired, with their real needs ignored.
The new era
But we are moving into a new era in which legal services are increasingly being “productised”. I believe that, as a result, effective marketing will begin to take centre stage as it becomes increasingly critical to law firms’ commercial success. Legal marketing is on the rise!
My view is that, in the future, firms won’t be able to rely on the magic of rainmakers sprinkling pixie dust on relationships and marketing teams won’t just focus on providing bland generic leaflets or standard text to create the background music to their genius. Marketers will, as they do in other industries, become the arbiters of client needs, using data and insights to create marketing strategies that deliver tangible commercial results.
We’ve already seen a growing group of legal marketers who are drawing on techniques routinely used by other B2B marketers, as well as B2C approaches that are increasingly being applied in the B2B space.
In particular, they have focused on educating partners about the need to really put themselves in their clients’ shoes, talk about their clients’ issues and demonstrate how the legal advice being offered can resolve their clients’ challenges and deliver results. They have also challenged lawyers’ natural tendency to believe that, when it comes to content, ‘more is better’, and they have helped to sharpen law firm messaging around the things that really matter.
These talented, brave legal marketing experts have made huge progress over the 15 or so years since I switched from working in large corporates to the world of law. The bad old days of law firm websites starting by highlighting that the firm was ‘established in 1864’ or other seemingly irrelevant details about the firm’s history are thankfully (mostly) behind us.
“Marketers will, as they do in other industries, become the arbiters of client needs, using data and insights to create marketing strategies that deliver tangible commercial results.”
The next phase
However, I think the next phase of the development of legal marketing, which will involve a host of other challenges as more of the industry moves to ‘productised solutions’, is likely to involve further significant changes. Perhaps the most significant of these is the move to managing robust, disciplined sales pipelines, which connect marketing with sales and attempt to deliver a smooth flow of work that matches the resource available.
- What is the ideal client profile? Who are likely to be earlier adopters? How do I capture interested prospects?
- What is the value of the opportunities in the pipeline? Using the conversation rate, what is the likely value and volume of future work? What capacity is required to meet demand?
- What is the right price to maximise profit and utilisation of the resources available?
- What is the conversion rate? Can we speed up the sales process to move things more quickly? How do we address any bottlenecks in the pipeline and how do we address them? Can we drive conversion more quickly and effectively?
I have included a diagram of a basic sales pipeline approach, along with some of the basic concepts it encapsulates.
While it is true to say that most marketers understand the basic logic of sales pipelines, in law firms the challenge of creating a robust, data-driven sales pipeline to identify and track opportunities has almost invariably proved too great. Defining ideal client profiles with lawyers who fear excluding potential opportunities is hard, and getting updates from reluctant partners, tracking conversations and evaluating the outcomes is seen as too much of an administrative burden.
As a result, most legal practice areas don’t have some of the basic marketing disciplines that are routinely found in other industries and are left focusing on producing collateral or organising events. Meaningful ideal client profiles are either so broad as to be meaningless, or non-existent.
Opportunities are not routinely monitored, to the extent that even pitch teams, who operate at the far right of the pipeline, often have no feedback on 80% of the proposals submitted. And most events are evaluated on the basis of perceptions of audience satisfaction rather than the outcomes or leads generated.
The lackadaisical approach may work in a mature market that relies on personal relationships with existing clients and contacts, but new products need the discipline of pipelines as they test the market to confirm there is demand and then (hopefully) drive for growth and scale.
Those experienced in creating new businesses also demand a ruthless focus on cash flow and burn rates. For them, this means evaluating the value of sales opportunities, tracking conversion rates, monitoring the time taken to deliver opportunities through each stage of the pipeline and linking to anticipated cash flows become key to building a business case for investment, as well as planning for additional resource.
Opening the eyes of COOs
In my view, as their firms launch new products and divisions, partners and law firm COOs will be exposed to product marketing, and have their eyes opened to the power of these approaches and the data driven insights they deliver. As a result, they will increasingly demand similar disciplines within their traditional practice areas, removing the hiding places for woolly thinking and partner politics driving marketing efforts.
The good news is that this means marketing will play an increasingly central role but with greater influence will come greater demands.
COOs, finance directors and managing partners will demand more robust business plans and will expect marketing teams to play their part. They will see that those using product marketing techniques can more effectively answer basic questions about the value they are delivering, ROI, sales bottlenecks, anticipated future revenues and cash flows, they will press those that aren’t to catch up.
Learn or get left behind
For legal marketers, the challenge is to get familiar with the approaches and concepts of product marketing and start embedding the thinking in the way we work. In some firms, these changes will be harder than in others, and partners will be more resistant in some areas of law that probably have less to gain from implementing these approaches.
But I believe, as we see an increasing split between the most successful law firms and the rest, and as product marketing approaches bleed across to traditional legal services, we will approach a tipping point.
At the same time, smart legal marketers are realising that technology is coming to their aid by providing better CRM tools that enable them to capture and visualise client journeys, while the increasing digitisation of communication channels also enables much more effective monitoring of client behaviour. All this means that connecting marketing to sales and to the financial results is becoming easier.
If we want to be on the right side of the divide, we will all need to be able to demonstrate our ability to adapt these more robust approaches to the complexities of the law firm setting, with all the challenges of partner politics, relationship ownership and diverse client needs.