Peer to Peer Magazine

P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | S P R I N G 2 0 1 9 53 Your firm needs insight into a broader data set to inform strategic decisions. Yet for many, the focus is only on specific silos like finance. The market needs to appreciate just how important it is for firms to break down the silos among finance, risk, IT, HR, marketing, and business development and gain a wholesale view of the client matter life cycle. Firms need to start asking themselves the following questions increasingly: • In which businesses should they be investing? • On which sectors should they be focusing? • What clients should they be targeting? • How do they win those clients? Using CRM data more effectively Marketing folks have traditionally been the "coloring in" department. They've focused on stationery and brand management and have detailed analytics around e-mail campaigns and website visits. However, firms don't typically use CRM data to understand the best way to close a deal or identify how many face-to-face meetings it usually takes to convert a client. An incredible proliferation of technologies abounds in the client life cycle space around experience management, pitch management, CRM, IRM, and the connectivity between business development and business acceptance clients and the feedback stages. Firms still think about data in terms of systems from where it originated and not about processes. Firms manage opportunities in the CRM system, matters in the PMS, and the experience in an experience management system or an Excel spreadsheet. The crucial imperative that we see in firms is how to pull all of this data together, analyze what's going on, and determine how to use that information to win more business. Norm Mullock is Vice President of Strategy at Wilson Allen, and a longtime champion of innovation. Norm drives operational initiatives and evaluates strategic corporate and product acquisitions. He also collaborates with members of the leadership team to give prominence to the company's core competencies and increase market share. Previously, Norm served as vice president of market development for Intapp, co-founded and served as chief strategy officer at Redwood Analytics, and served as a product strategist and vice president of product strategy for LexisNexis. Michael Warren is VP of Wilson Allen's business development practice, has dedicated his career to helping professional services firms successfully implement CRM. In his role at Wilson Allen, Michael helps firms identify the critical success factors for their CRM and then implement simple, practical, and realistic measures to achieve them. He is the co-founder of Stanton Allen, which merged with Wilson Legal Solutions in 2018 to form Wilson Allen. Previously, Michael worked with LexisNexis focusing on InterAction projects and with Tikit in data client services. Dealing with a proliferation of data Most firms have more data than they need or could use. The real challenge is having access to the right data and getting access to the systems that hold it. Firms must also understand when the right time is to gather data throughout the client life cycle and determine from where the data will come. What we have seen is that tiny adjustments in data collection processes upstream can have a hugely beneficial impact on what's going on downstream. Being able to take referral tracking information, for instance, and gathering it at the point of client intake can help people in the CRM world manage their information better. That's why a firmwide information strate – but also technolo that breaks the silos among data repositories – is so important. Making small changes to yield significant impact It's clear that the way firms analyze the business needs to evolve, the way that people organize their data needs to evolve, the way that people are thinking about their IT projects and the people that they partner with needs to evolve. Where do you begin? Take small steps. The Japanese manufacturing industry has a concept called kaizen which is about making small improvements over time to create big change. What we're talking about in terms of your technolo decisions and data management journey is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel or relaunch your software infrastructure completely. You need to look at making minimal changes in various parts of the firm, implementing the technolo that can help you plug the gaps among silos, and identifying resources who can tap into multi-disciplinary expertise. The more you can take this approach rather than pursue a complete and total rip and replace or huge relaunch – the better off you'll be. ILTA

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