Best in class marketing and business development organizations – Professional Service Firms

We felt it would be useful to establish a baseline of what distinguishes excellent teams, based on our work and real world, hands-on experience with both law firms and other professional firms.

The first factor that separates high-performance teams from the pack is that leadership (CMO/CBDO and managing partner) and the team have a clear understanding of their raison d'être - the reason they exist.

The best teams wake up each day with a single-minded purpose: Grow revenue.

While it seems obvious, it is surprising how many teams fail to have this burned into their psyches. Run-of-the-mill teams often are filled with smart, experienced, hard-working professionals, but they confuse activity with results. They talk about branding, positioning, differentiation, market awareness, social media, etc. They fail, however, to connect those marketing tools and tactics with the ultimate business development goal of growing revenue.

The second factor distinguishing high-performing teams is they know what leads to revenue growth - they know that the purpose of marketing within law firms is to create issues-based conversations with clients and prospective clients. To get there, they have a clear process:

• Identify and prioritize clients/prospects and focus on the highest value opportunities.
  
• Create issues-based conversations with clients/prospects.
  
• Empower, equip and motivate the "sales force" (the professionals) to maximize the outcome of these conversations, including coaching and training to develop the needed skills.
  
• Track activity and results.
  
• Keep the professionals motivated and maintain business development momentum.
  
• Repeat the process.
  

Third, the members of absolute top-tier teams are player-coaches who get out into the market and create connections and opportunities for their firms. They lead by example and join professionals on calls to help coach them in real time. They provide insight and action that both the professionals and clients agree add value to the client relationship.

Fourth, successful teams realize that there is a symbiotic relationship between marketing and business development. They do not view marketing and business development as independent activities. Instead, they purposely build an integrated process in which marketing and business development have well defined roles that are different but complementary. They also know that on the continuum of revenue generation (from both new clients as well as existing) there are no distinct hand-offs between function, but instead a sliding scale of involvement. With marketing playing a heavier role in the initial stages, and business development moving the process forward in the later stages.

Finally, high-performing teams have assessed the gap between the expectations of the professionals and the ability of the team to deliver. Often the expectations are unrealistic or unproductive. Under-performing teams find themselves bogged down in reactive, non-effective or non-strategic initiatives. Conversely, the top-performing teams have good leadership that keeps the focus on revenue growth and training professionals to be wise consumers of marketing and business development support. This leads to time spent on proactive initiatives that yield results.