Empower your legal business with the business development funnel for Legal

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welcome to the cli alpha innovation and legal tech week i'm sylvia coulter and i will be co-presenting with mark medici one of my partners at law vision and in the session today we will talk about business development in the next decade so just so a little bit of background on on who we are you can all certainly read our slide here but we both have been involved in the legal industry for many years me probably a little i'm a little older than you mark so probably a little bit longer oh no you're younger we don't know for certain right that's right that's right um but at any rate we are both principals at law vision which is a global consulting firm specializing in all things strategic planning and and you know the practice of uh practice management of law firms and so we're very happy to be with you here today and thanks for joining us so we wanted to start out you know law firm business development in the next decade that's a very big topic isn't it and uh and given that we just got slammed with covid19 um you know it's it was a big business interruption but but nevertheless uh business continued business continues and so does competition and the changes in somewhat mature of a mature industry and so where we are now and where we're headed is this chart is really a just depiction of that and so historically we've been conducting market research more informally i would say mark you know client surveys certainly some internal studies on on partner needs and and firm needs and less so law firms conducting market studies and we're starting to see that really pick up significantly in terms of the research and the data to support the overall business development slash sales plans and then that information ideally feeds into a plan and with mission and goals product and service development and mark is going to talk a lot more about data analytics and pricing and things like that but also building strategic alliances while there's a lot of competition in the marketplace there's a lot of opportunity to build strategic alliances and then that coupled with in-house training so that's our planning side informed by data and research and again we're we'll talk about what's changed in that research and and data and then that gets communicated back out to the market so ideally this is a marketing and business development cycle that pretty much has never changed over time it was all adapted from the military believe it or not strategic planning and and so this will be a similar cycle for as long as the firm is in business frankly it's just within these boxes what changes and how much more sophisticated these activities will be one of which is client development personal selling cross-selling and what we call strategic account management commonly called key client planning and so mark you know this this these things are going to change within this cycle and they'll just mature in the way firms start to collect data and analyze data and so forth when they put their plans together yeah and i and i you know i think this is a fantastic way to begin today's discussion sylvia and if you really think about it um you know 2020 as we all know we're almost tired of talking about the the effects of 2020 um but there's a lot of a lot of things that are coming out of 20 that i think will will potentially impact the trajectory of many of these ideas and many of these plans you know if you look at some of the statistics one of the first things that major law firms did in 2020 when they anticipated some significant headwinds that in some cases actually came to fruition but in other cases many law firms were quite surprised about how successful they were but one of the first things they did was cut their business development expenses you know so depending on what survey you're looking at many law firms cut their their business development and marketing expenses by upwards of fifty percent or more um not sure that was the right decision i'm not sure it was the the best decision but i think coming out of of that that environment um what law firms have also done is they've learned what they can do and how important technology and data will become and so as we start to think about this framework sylvia i just wonder if if number one notwithstanding some of the challenges some folks might face with regard to budgets um there's a greater opportunity for us to think more expansively about about what you can do and the importance of business development and the formality that goes along with that absolutely and so you know we say that in order to really build a strong go-to-market strategy using history to plan the future can be very informative we don't want to rely on history in the sense that this is the way we've always done it and it worked so far so let's continue to do the same but rather let's use some historical knowledge and data and build on that to plan the future and so one of the things we recommend we're getting a little tactical here in terms of where things are heading and how you can plan for the next decade is to review up to we say five could be seven um we've we just worked with a firm and it was probably seven years of financials and basically assess where did 80 of the firm's revenue come from both on the client side and the practice side and so for this particular firm we just helped 84 percent of their revenue came and they had i think i want to say something like 15 000 clients which is a pretty big number obviously 84 of the revenue came from 240 clients which is a pretty amazing statistic and was very shocking to the firm and that allowed the firm and we really helped them do this pretty manually so you can be pretty manual about how you review this literally went to every single clients of those 240 clients to their website and and said where is the client what is the client saying their business is all about and what industry they say they're in and so you know you created a pie chart and saw that x percent was in um financial institutions x percent was in traditional health care another percent in life sciences with a strong segment in medical device and and then another percent in manufacturing so if we were being strategic about where we're focusing our business development activities in the future and mark and some of this is is where you might want to how you might want to acquire new firms or merge with other firms or open new markets this is the business you're in right and for the last seven years these big market segments represented 84 of the firm's revenue and similar stories when you do this analysis firm over firm regardless of size this was a firm with 750 lawyers um and so really starting to to refine the go-to-market strategy using data to inform that strategy is going to be key and it doesn't mean leave out all the other practice areas it just means let's really focus on servicing these markets yeah yeah very interesting um can i comment on this slide so yeah of course absolutely yeah i think and i could not have said it better of course but just to add a few ideas to this um when we have uh helped help firms think about this and it sounds like it wasn't just the 80 20 rule in your case it sounds like it was the 99 one percent rule with regard to the 240 clients out of the 15 000. uh there's a couple of questions that we always like to ask in the context of using historicals to project the future number one is had you looked at your plan you know prior to those past five years did you live the outcome that you actually set out to achieve in other words did you sort of operate with a random walk or or did you actually achieve the goals that you want because that will additionally inform the kinds of targets and goals that you set out now and and and inquire about the processes you have in place in order to achieve them going going forward and and many firms have been very successful with with a very informal type type of strategy so it is an interesting question and again every firm has the option to sort of sort of pursue rigor in that kind of formal approach than others but it is an interesting question the second thing i'd invite folks to think about is is you know to the point about uh you know the 80 20 rule and 80 of your profits or revenues or so forth coming from 20 um also explore the idea of client rotation meaning in any given year over the past five years um were they different in year one versus year four versus year five and why is that and again does that have anything to do with intent and purpose and approach to how you how you went to work excellent points and then you can use the firm's existing revenue growth opportunities to continue to plan the future by looking at maybe the the second 100 or even the top 500 clients or even if you wanted to go to a thousand clients i don't know you'd want to do 15 000 clients and see you know how that said how about those follow that those um market segments that were identified here's another way i'm going to go here here's another way to look at this because the first question people have always mark is but where does that leave my practice if we're targeting x you know you know this target target market where's that leave my practices and so this is just how a depiction of what that sort of targeting produces so everyone these are all these are all alias names here but and the example we're using is a growth ramp example this could be a circle and it could be a project for a big real estate or energy client or something but as you look at all of those things required to to bring an energy plant online or to to help a company get financing for a big real estate project or in this case example you know from beginning to exit strategy look at all the practices i mean this is right across the firm everybody's involved in this strategy so we're not leaving anybody behind but rather we're saying here's what this neat you know if we're really penetrating this market and there's a lot of research out there now that shows if you're in a client organization at four or more in four or more areas the likelihood of that client continuing to offer more opportunities to that firm is very high and and continuing to retain that client as a good client is very high and so we would recommend you know here's your strategy for growth as well if you're going into new markets you want to support those practices and those targets that the firm is already very strong in if we want to hire laterals where are we weak in terms of what our clients need and so this you know here's your growth strategy over the next decade in terms of turning the firm a little bit more outwardly focused than inwardly focused mark and i think you're starting to see that more with the analytics that clients are how you're helping clients with in terms of the data they're looking for indeed now i i love this chart i think and as you say you could probably visualize this chart in a number of different ways but um there's actually a book i'm not going to remember the authors it came out of force to research about five years ago that dovetails quite nicely with what you're saying sylvia called outside in i don't know if you're familiar with it but the whole premise of the book is is about orienting and this is not just for law firms this is about how any organization whether it's professional service or manufacturing or what have you goes to market the more you begin to orient your production processes your service processes towards the way the client is thinking about the world the more you will be oriented to understanding how to package what you do and the value add that you provide uh to the client so so when we think about for example simplistic and they don't have to be simplistic but sometimes they can come across as simplistic ideas like cross-selling the idea isn't just a cross-sell so your firm can be successful but the more natural way that that falls out is if we are properly anticipating the needs of the client which this this little ramp up does a fantastic job in doing so it's not just that you know s collins over in commercial finance uh is interested in getting to work or having their team get to work but it's also a natural byproduct of the fact that we know that the client is probabilistically likely to need need those those services at that point in time so i did you know ideally in the most theoretical context uh folks will often say what it'd be nice to be in the office and let the client know about an issue they have before the client knows it sort of that proactivity that horizon spotting that people people refer to absolutely i'll go back to that slide i jumped over and and just to say you know again review the balance of the firm's clients and assess and match that up and and you know these are these are competitive tough times right now uh you brought up a good point in the beginning mark that the first thing that got cut were tons of budgets marketing budgets they got slashed in firms due to you know covet in any anticipated further interruption of the firm's businesses and yet this is if in some ways it says to me that firms were not super focused on a really refined strategy and so therefore all of these expenses seem to be unnecessary and and unfocused somewhat and so now i think maybe there could be a little bit more attention in this direction so in the future we don't see that kind of cut but it's rather this is necessary to support our growth strategy and that's what we're really talking about here so it's you know prioritize the firm's resources review the time and billing records to assess activities charged to sales and then analyze the spend right and so i think when cuts came this year this slide speaks directly to that we didn't have a lot of this information i mean it's there but it was all in a very rough format right and and so it was it's sort of willy-nilly dollars we need to go to this conference we need to do this presentation we need money for that now with a refined strategy you know look at the time and billing records you can hire summer associates to do i mean summer associates or you can hire summer mba students to do these kinds of things and what's being charged to marketing and are these dollars and is this supporting our go to market strategy is the supporting our long term where we want to be three years from now five years from now and 10 years is a long way out but if we start down this path we could refine it and it also tells a story about saying no when we have to say no sometimes to to expenses that don't make sense because again they're not supporting the long-term strategic direction of the firm so this is one way to do that the information is all there analyze the spend what do we keep in support of our new go to market strategy and what do we say no to and that's not always easy to do but that's you know that's another a lot of what we're talking about is really harnessing some of that data that's already in the firm and so getting to data you know i'll turn up turn it over to you mark for a little bit more on that yeah talk about that and just uh one of the carryovers from last slide is uh um you know i encountered this idea this idea meaning what is any um what is any role or what is any function uh in in a law firm i was talking outside of business development with a practice management chief of a major firm in the united states and they were looking to hire a new pricing manager and we got into this discussion of discussing what the roi of hiring a new pricing manager would be that individual actually came up with a value of i'd let you guess but it'll be if i take too long but of seven million right well think about it if if we have business development expenditures whether they're in the form of people or whether they're in the form of of of you know investments in technology or what have you if we can start to formulate an roi and really connect those activities to results the better off we are that all transitions into this discussion very briefly about data and um for many of you this is not a new edition of the harvard business review but um a year ago this time pre-pandemic i remember speaking about some of these ideas that marketing partner for them wherever that was last year it seems like millions of years ago rather than just one year the the idea of of you know moving to a different plateau or level of utilization of data is so important now if we take a step back for just a moment and say well don't we all use data of course and in fact that's true across most facets of the law firm whether you're talking about the finance function whether you're talking about case assessment and disputes resolution whether you're talking about deals whether you're whether you're looking at business development data is being used but but the challenge that the series of articles that came out of um this this edition of hbr review uh talked about was how do we actually start to think about it from the standpoint of competitive advantage and and in order to get there they they offered a number of different frameworks for how you can go about systematizing and formalizing things and that's not to say that everything needs to be overly formalistic or everything needs a workflow or an official process but what it is saying is that we want to move beyond the casual we want to move beyond anecdote in some cases and really start to think about which work streams are important so if we if you go ahead and proceed to the to the next uh animation sylvia one of the analyses that came out of one of the articles uh talked a little bit about how you go about developing loyalty and one of the premise uh premises of this article was uh that many companies and this was cross this was not just for legal this was across all industries but one of one of the fall downs of many companies in this article was that they spent way too much time focusing on just pure financial results or pure stock returns or or something that had a very strong orientation towards p l um and and what they articulated was the limitations of being able to achieve the kind of success that you could achieve if you don't reorient yourself to uh to loyalty and customer value and it's almost back to the the peter drucker quote the peter drucker quote if many of you are familiar uh is that the purpose of a business is is not to generate a profit it's a profit should be a natural byproduct of serving a client so so peter drucker uh had said long long time ago that the purpose of business in his mind was actually to uh to create a customer so then that would naturally lead you to doing data analysis along the lines that are framed out here on this chart where you might actually be able to use data and you might be able to put some value on your existing clock clients or customers customers as it's articulated here and and moreover you could further segment those just as silvia had articulated a moment ago about uh different segments of your client base where you have a best uh the best opportunity to match up with them and serve to your strengths and so forth so we won't go into the the the depths of of these particular uh models but i i did want to at least bring them forward so that we could at least start to get our arms around how we might go about you know thinking about it but very few firms that i i interact with uh have models um that frame out uh their customers or their client opportunities in this way sylvia do you do you see anything uh along these lines no there's been a yeah there's been a few that have attempted but i think there's going to be a greater emphasis now and and one of the reasons to have loyal clients is loyal clients are less likely not definitely you know but less likely to want to put price pressure on the pricing of the legal services i mean there's always going to be some pressure around that clearly but loyal clients are less likely to change law firms they're less likely to change service providers right so building loyalty into those relationships is really critical and it's virtually impossible to to do that without metrics right without data companies that have done that very well that uh that a number of law firms have um modeled after or tried to model at least have been going to training at these organizations include the four seasons hotels globally the ritz carlton corporation you know some big big brands where they've got a loyal client base and firms and because they are service industries firms are starting to adapt some of their um customer value and loyalty strategies but nonetheless we're starting to see you know tip of the iceberg on this right right and again we don't want to over over analyze it but but just think of the benefits that accrue from doing something like this and you can actually pivot over to the next slide as well where and we touched on this um in the earlier part of today's discussion which is you know where are the you know the the the lion's share of your your fees coming from and and what this analysis uh was was meant to describe as okay but even over that five-year horizon and this is that's a there's a different analysis than what sylvia was describing with that firm this actually was just an example uh from the hbr article uh but but their their point was is a really interesting one if you actually look at the splits on this particular chart is to say well so for those clients that have been with us for five years or more you know what would be that target at least for clients that we think sort of fit in that that key client zone if you will and and the point isn't so much about whether this particular cohort analysis is the right one or not the point is really that you should have a strategy and you should actually be executing a strategy so that if you actually have certain funds by which you can invest and you think about it along the lines of having an roi um that you can be just a lot smarter about those decisions and moreover you might illuminate some opportunities that you just just wouldn't have i have identified uh before so when we get into data strategy and you go ahead to the next one there's soviet unless you have a comment on this one you know oftentimes when i have a more in-depth discussion about the use of data and and really that's where i would sort of uh describe it in the context of things there's there's a lot of discussion these days about you know artificial intelligence and machine learning and so forth those are important things but let's just throw them to the side of the road for today's discussion um most of you who are participating on this call are way more expert at the important questions that you need to answer to be successful with your clients and any data scientists will bring you there the data scientists really just bring you a little bit more ammunition in order to get to those answers in a more effective way but it is amazing what happens when you do that so we just build this out and as you would go thinking about uh developing out a data strategy uh with your client base you know how how would you answer questions about who are your top performing clients today and what does that really mean is it the clients that bring you the greatest amount of fees in a given year or are they the ones that are are contributing the greatest amount of profitability uh and by the way are they the ones that you're targeting on purpose or are they the clients that are sort of just happening uh in happenstance along the way these are important questions that data will really start to reinforce so we just continue to sort of just build all this out we've talked about um all of all of these things in our prior slides but i'll just reinforce it as you start to think about a framework for data in the area of client development don't just ask hey what is the 80 20 rule because you'll definitely find it or the 99 one rule in the case of many examples we find but what is your rotation rate and is your rotation rate and your attrition rate one that you would expect do you have any type of indicators about whether your clients are likely to leave you and leave you cannot just be hey we're not going to do business with you but they also can represent the so-called fade meaning hey we're not going to tell you you're fired but we're just going to gradually use you less and less and less and are there any early warning signals that we might use in order to be able to help us get involved before it's too late so the so-called early warning systems and so we've been working with a lot of folks uh to help them think about uh putting in place early warning systems so that folks might be able to be a little more proactive with regard to the use and moreover whenever you have a workflow like that can it can it serve as a teaching system for the firms as well so anything to add on that one you know you brought up you you mentioned data scientists mark and i think there are two trends uh associated with where we see the next decade how we see the next decade playing out one is uh more and more firms are hiring data scientists and many from industry and to perform a lot of these analytics because they're trained and i'll let you explain their role a lot you know you know a lot more about that role than i do but they're trained to look for these patterns and these and and what's going on and they understand life cycle i mean i don't think amazon or any of the big companies we're all familiar with and have been using quite a lot in in the last year would make a move without without some of that analysis and the other trend that we're seeing and i can talk a little bit more about this briefly is sales people so sales professionals who know how to steal share of wallet who know how to go out and grab client share and who know how to compete very effectively in the market and not that they you know they're out there all by themselves sometimes they are but partnering teaming up with the partners to really build an effective sales strategy and to go win the business and to to retain and grow those important relationships so so acting on the data and acting on the information and then really building out a successful sales strategy and that some of the data we we've seen in terms of the growth rate of sales professionals is about seven percent a year we've done some studies with thompson reuters on that and uh so you know while some firms will say over my dead body we're going to hire a sales person and that may conjure up you know stock brokers and other people who call cold call all the time an effective sales professional can be incredibly helpful and and valuable to the long-term growth strategy of the firm and we've seen that in the accounting world right about it took well it's probably 20 years ago that accounting firms really built out that role and now they've got sales teams pretty much in most of the bigger firms and and mid-size accounting firms but you know so data scientists and sales professionals i think are a real trend that we'll see grow pretty quickly in the next decade yeah that's really interesting and uh um i i agree um and and i would also say you don't have to if some of that is is um i don't know if intimidating is the right word but just not something that you uh you're wanting to lean forward into uh i i guess my recommendation would be number one take it in small bites but number two share the risk um there are other functions every function in the firm is going to benefit from data and data utilization and in some cases you don't have to go so far yeah we don't have to get into the semantics or the formal definitions of what a data scientist is but there's a continuum of skills and expertise required and in some cases you don't have to have a full bore data scientist but you might just benefit from a really great data analyst or you know a data data jockey that can really do a great job at gathering the data putting it in a form that will allow you to have really really good insights one of the best best applications that we use is really just visualizing the data somebody who can really tell a good story sorry with it and and so i would reinforce experimentation embracing it because i do think if we look at the horizon over the coming years three to five even that you're going to see some firms make more significant investments uh in these areas that i think are worthwhile and i wouldn't be surprised especially as we experience new competition in the industry uh for new roles like business development and sales folks more directly coming through the frame as well so very good absolutely absolutely move on i think the next example uh with this guy the last bullet really talks a little bit about those early warnings which we covered so we can we can move forward i think the last slide i had related to data was was very specifically relating to how would you build a better decision-making process on predicting client attrition and and i don't i won't you know go into all of the the gory details here but but one of the points i i wanted to bring out one of the slides i'm not presenting today that i often will present in in conjunction with this slide is is what signals do you folks currently think of usually when we survey audiences when we're giving presentations like this we'll ask company how many folks have an early warning system for client attrition and usually less than 10 percent do but it usually then leads into a discussion about what attributes or what signals do people look at that might actually predict it um and sylvia not to put you on the spot but any any thoughts and i i can share with you some i think you you know some of it because we've shared the research together but any thoughts that come to your mind about what metrics or what signals would would uh you know provide an early warning or set of signals it could be five it could be ten it could be two any thoughts about what come uh what might give you a signal for uh predicting climate attrition well i would say you know one that you mentioned earlier mark is you know are we getting less and less work right or um another is um what's changed at the client how how many contacts do we have at a client organization if we don't have three plus at least three or more and if we don't have contacts at the c level in these organizations and we're not saying this is easy to accomplish but very very important and that to me is a warning signal even if it's a good client at some point that's going to come into play that the board or the senior leadership of the organization does not know the firm directly or have good contacts and and clearly another one that that a lot of firms have been experiencing mark are the the requests for proposals to me that's a warning because what that gives you while some firms will say well you know we we don't answer those because it's it's just to show that they did some due diligence but what we're seeing now remember the growth that we're going to see pretty quickly in the next decade of sales professionals a sales professional is going to say maybe they're entrenched with law firm a but we now have an opportunity to show our face through this rfp process and we're starting to see that that is an indicator a sales indicator for data that um there's an opportunity and the firm could have a threat there a strategic threat if they're not careful so i mean those are some you know fairly straightforward ones but uh clearly those are you know the and also if a partner leaves that's but client attrition you know i think client attrition is happening all over the place because clients are they they have so many opportunities to consider competition and also competition to this to the um what we would consider a standard law firm right by the alsp's and other and other service providers yeah and and so so you know we've just given you a laundry list there's others and if you're really interested we're more than happy to provide you we've done studies on this and we have uh insights about over over 20 of those factors and some of the others are things like uh is the client changing the way they pay their bill is it slowing down are they more likely to resist those and all that kind of stuff now here's the key so often when we come up with this laundry list we're so proud of ourselves as a group right look at us we came up with 20 20 signals to which many firms go well if i was going to deploy this this would be crazy because i would have to find all this data in all these different places and here's the good news i think is that if you were inclined even to develop the most simplistic type of an early warning system for purposes of client attrition you don't have to use all 20 of those signals the real litmus test is can you find a handful of signals that you can rely on that the data quality is very good and that have a truly predictive effect such that you can engage it doesn't have to be a fancy visualized dashboard it doesn't have to be cosmetically beautiful but if it provides you with this notion of hey i'm getting a really good true signal that's allowing us to have good conversations with our partners our lawyers and that's a that's a good a good thing so i will pause on that just for for sake of time but um but that you know there there you can get one of these processes going in in a very practical way without a you know and one way to start maybe is to um you know outside of of having someone like mark help is is to ask each of the heads of your operational business units so head of marketing and business development head of you know your cfo your co um some other key people to kind of put down on paper from their perspective and where they touch clients at the firm um how what what are some things that they would give consideration to and that just creates a big list you know for consideration to refine a little bit once you have all of that and maybe that's a simple way of starting it but it's a way of starting it and then you can become a lot more sophisticated with that but people are you know teams create good results so using you know taking a collaborative approach to this can be very useful yeah and one last point before we go on i don't know i don't want to get too stuck here so yeah but but notice what we've just observed by just kind of going through this little exercise we spent way more time which is the right thing to be doing focusing on either the business problem or the opportunity meaning client attrition which all of you are foremost experts in now that doesn't mean that we might need to go back and do a regression model or do some kind of fancy model with statistics or god forbid machine learning but the point is is that those are supplemental those are much less important in order to get started then the quest to actually actually find out and pursue these problems these other more fancy things sort of can fold in over the course of time so don't i guess the message underlying that is don't let the fancy fancy fullness of the technology get in the way of making uh making a good start on all of this good point yeah and and you know all of what we've talked about so far is basically you know this is where things are heading it's all we're off the we're off the starting point you know we the the starting gun has gone off right and so firms are hiring sales professionals firms are hiring data scientists firms are analyzing client attrition they're analyzing historical data to build a much more targeted strategic plan and a go-to-market strategy and so this is happening we we see that over the next 10 years this is really going to play out in a very strong way and we'll start to see kind of who are the winners and maybe even losers in this game in terms of the competitive advantage it gives them just another data point and this is you know on the from the sales side pretty pretty focused is we see many many firms now forecasting and managing sales activities and you know historically mark firms have said okay we have this many lawyers times their billing rate and we hope that uh this is what the results are if they bill x number of hours and so you know we always say i think there was a book called hope is not a strategy and uh so firms are getting more sophisticated again around managing these business development and sales activities and so the the way to do that is to say who are our existing clients at what stage of the process are we at with them for new business when these stages are from one to five five being closed business and what's the dollar potential and depending on the stage this is called a weighted pipeline in in sales and any sales professional has to live by this monthly in their organization and so it won't be any different if your firm hires sales people um they'll they'll know how to do this forecasting quite well as will any strong financial people who came from industry uh the the commercial world relies on this this is what goes to wall street basically to give you the forecasts but anyway so you know i would i would urge to have your directors or chief marketing and business development people start to develop even again you know as mark just said you don't have to do some real heavy sophisticated analysis to get this going you just requests come in you know who's it for who's the client we're pursuing what's the opportunity it goes down on a forecast sheet it could be a simple spreadsheet initially some firms are implementing um strategic sales tools to to do this analysis for not analysis but tracking for them and you can do it by practice you could do it by office firm wide it's just a good habit to get into is to start looking at the forecast and now this is a much better predictor of revenue and so again we're starting it's it's a way of looking at analytics sales analytics to predict our future so rather than say well we did you know 1 million this year we did 50 million or where we did a half a billion in gross revenue uh let's cross our fingers and let's hope that we can up that by x percent uh this takes the hope away right this is giving you reality when you start to forecast with actual numbers and you're looking at what it what's the activity going on across the firm um you know whether it's rfps whether it's uh business development calls and and opportunities and meetings that our partners are running it it's it's a way to forecast potential and it's kind of a nice way to look at it because it lifts you know lifts the ceiling off the potential and and it's wide open yeah i love this in the sense that it's uh it reinforces the notion of of trying to actually execute a strategy or a plan on purpose rather than by happenstance and the other thing that a technique like this often brings out is is really good relevant conversations you know a lot of times people get stuck in a process or a report or or data analytics and they go oh it's just for you know those folks who want to sort of go into a dark room and read a report but the reality is if you use data right or if you use reports like this right what it really does is it brings the right conversations together at the right time it when you that's that's obviously optimal but that doesn't always happen that way but that's what you aspire towards you want to bring people together most relevantly and that's that's why you do this kind of stuff and and it's amazing what differences make when that happens absolutely absolutely and again for those of you who have good contacts at you know your counterparts at consulting firms or accounting firms go lunch with them have a zoom meeting with them talk to them about the tools they're using because they've been doing this for a while now not years and years but you know certainly 10 to 20 years so they're a bit ahead of the legal industry in terms of using some of these tools and they might provide some really great insight and then you know last this slide looks a little bit busy but you know we thought we'd just give you all of the data instead of just that all of the information instead of just the headings and that is you know it's an ongoing key client team process we call it sam legal and sam is a widely used term um in the commercial world so widely used in fact we tried to um trademark sam legal and they and they said no it's just two generic common a name across industries so sam is strategic account management and we differentiate i mean all the things that that we've been talking about today really lead up to a successful sam strategy on the business development side and um and and and the reason we're saying it's sam and strategic accounts is because we want you to think about it very strategically and and there is a purpose to these important meetings and these important strategies and frankly many commercial businesses and the accounting world and the big consulting firm world use sam as a strategy overarching practice plans department plans office plans they say these are the strategic accounts that drive x percent of the revenue of our business and that strategy needs to be distributed and implemented somehow across our offices and practices so this is the process and what it looks like and it's pretty standard i mean we've adapted it for legal but this is a very standard process in business once again and it's called strategic account management we will see a lot more of this and as that sales role evolves in law firms you will also see strategic account managers and there are a few firms already dipping their toe in the water on that and those are individuals who are solely responsible hired and solely responsible often teamed up with a data analyst and a project management individual and and their whole purpose is to take this important client of the firm and grow it and partner with the partners on on developing that so this is kind of where it all the rubber meets the road on all the things we've been talking about today mark yeah i know i i love it and i appreciate you um sort of leaving us with this this framework and um and like i i one of my themes that i've been offering throughout the course of this is that um you know see if you can be on a journey i think our recommendation would be um the better firms are are implementing these types of frameworks and even if some of this feels daunting figure out those early steps in other words you don't have to you know accomplish all of this with one full bite but maybe there are some things you do and in fact sylvia as almost uh a question for the audience from the audience to you is look if you can only do two or three of these things let's say a firm is really excited about about this framework but they recognize they're not going to be able to put in place five sales professionals and new metrics and a sam program any thoughts about how how a firm you know might pick and choose their journey for uh for commencement on this process boy that's a good question you know there are a lot of key client team programs at firms that have you know jumped off and failed miserably they're in their second and third iteration um getting all the partners on board with that uh you know and i think part of that is because the focus was on what else can we sell to the client what else can we pitch to the client and that's not what strategic account management is all about really so let's take a step back what are some of the metrics and the data look at the prepare side of this right it's what what we've been talking about and some of the metrics and data that that mark was talking about you know how strong is our relationship come up with an initial pool we say we say 20 but that's a big number i mean i i would even back that up to five and and how are we making sure that we've got buy-in for this and that it supports our overall strategy so the prepare just like if you were going to trial or just like if you were going to negotiate a big opportunity preparation is everything right so that's that's the jumping point and so we leave you with that and um thank you for joining us today and it's been a pleasure to to spend part of our day with you and if you would like to receive any additional updates from cli or alpha please follow them on linkedin facebook or twitter or all three so thank you mark for co-presenting and we will see you all again hopefully in the future very good goodbye you