Digital White Papers

10 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Data-Driven Business Development Initiatives: Is Your Firm Utilizing the Complete Value of Existing Assets? Nearly half of the responses came from regional and boutique firms with 151-500 lawyers, while a lile over one-third came from larger global firms with over 500 lawyers. Survey respondents included firm leaders in marketing and business development roles and leaders in knowledge management and pricing. One-third of the respondents were chief marketing and business development officers. Another third were at the director or manager level in marketing and business development roles. The remaining participants were directors, managers or individual contributors within knowledge management, pricing and strategy. Structural Approach The majority of firms approach business development in a similar manner. For 72 percent of respondents, the marketing and business development function is organized as an independent department within the firm. A much smaller proportion (11 percent) have marketing and business development embedded within the entire practice –– a technique used to encourage collaboration between lawyers and business development. While this approach may encourage collaboration, it also fosters the creation of multiple data silos. Different practices within a firm organize and categorize their data dissimilarly. To drive collaboration and limit the data silo effect, some firms are implementing a hybrid approach based on the concept of one independent group dedicated to different practices, which requires a more consistent procedural approach. Business Development Challenges Marketing and business development have their fair share of responsibility for capturing business from new and existing clients. This oen involves situations in which team members must drop everything and quickly respond to lawyers' requests for pitches, RFPs and other outreach efforts. Capturing the data for executing these requests effectively was reported as the largest constraint to 2017 business development initiatives. This is an issue oen referred to as the "ad hoc problem" (AHP). It comprises data scavenger hunts to pull together information on a firm's expertise and client feedback in order to respond quickly to requests. These tasks are spur-of-the-moment, strenuous and require teams to gather information from a variety of systems. And the most critical information oen resides in a lawyer's head. Efforts to gather data usually involve mass emails with the subject line, "Has anyone worked with [fill in the blank]?" Marketing and business development team members run around the office with clipboards and templates trying to catch lawyers' aention. Next, a series of intricate spreadsheets are collected. Just geing this far can take up to 80 percent of the business development team's time. This can thwart proactive efforts to invest energy in innovation and use data to deliver higher value. Massaging the data to meet the aorney's request becomes the next significant challenge. This is not limited to RFPs and pitches. Business development oen must promptly pull together client profiles in preparation for meetings, determine areas of cross-serving opportunity from pen and paper, and develop website content. Curation of data and approval processes are also required and only The key to successful data- driven initiatives is to start small, build momentum gradually and not dwell on perfection.

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