Skip to main content

Maximize Your Marketing Budget – II.

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Attorney Marketing, Business Development, Law Firm Marketing, Marketing for Law Firms, Marketing Partners.

In our last column, we began reviewing 12 steps to help maximize your marketing budget. Here are the next 3:

3. Maximize the impact of proposals,pitches, prospect meetings, etc.
4. Conduct success/rejection analysis. Do you know why or why not a particular pitch was successful?
5. Lead “go/no-go” decision discussions before investing in an rfp response or initiating a new contact.

Undertaking regularly scheduled review of these efforts will help to refine what works, discard underperforming tactics, and win more business. See our “services” pages for details.

Maximize Your Marketing Budget

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Business Development, Law Firm Leadership, Managing Partners, Marketing for Law Firms, Marketing Partners.

Maximize your firm’s current marketing and business development budget by demonstrating to firm management the opportunities they have to grow. Lead the way to a sustainable management approach which places greater value on the role of marketing and business development. Provide the marketing partners, marketing committees, partners-in-charge and practice leaders with these important decision-making tools.

The first of 12 decision making tools are:

1. Design straight-forward business development pursuit schemes;
2. Establish and manage timelines for each step until final closing.

In the next several blogs, we will cover the other 10 decision making tools for growing new business.

PROBLEM – "Our Firm Continues Adding Lawyers – We Need a Complete Marketing Overhaul

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Business Development, Law Firm Leadership, Law Firm Marketing, Managing Partners, Marketing Partners, Practice Group Leaders.

RESPONSE – the bigger you become, the more you need to focus. Begin with a few promising practice groups and use their successes as a model.

RESULT – One practice group may begin envying another practice group’s success. It’s a dynamic that requires some political sensitivity on the part of management, but it is a another great problem to have. Competition stimulates growth.

PROBLEM – "What Do We Do With Our Junior Lawyers?"

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Attorney Marketing, Law Firm Leadership, Managing Partners, Marketing for Law Firms, Marketing Partners.

RESPONSE – A true pipeline for business development includes junior partners and associates. Take them to sales meetings. encourage them to get their names out there via articles and speeches. With newer lawyers, the key is to encourage business development without undue pressure. Whatever they bring in is gravy – and you are making a great investment in the future.

RESULT – We help clients create a true “sales” culture ( I know this is a dirty word, but !!!) from top to bottom. You can too.

PROBLEM – "Our Practice Group Has No Business Development Budget"

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Law Firm Marketing, Marketing for Law Firms, Marketing Partners, Practice Group Leaders.

RESPONSE – Of course it does. Your members are already spending money on marketing and business development at one or more ends of the spectrum. You simply need to collect that data and find out what you’re already spending. That is your budget.

RESULT – Getting a hold on your current, actual spending will allow you to focus resources where they will clearly do the most good. This is a critical step to measure current results and refine and improve the tactics.

PROBLEM – " Our Office has Great Attorneys But Our Revenue is Flat"

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Attorney Marketing, Business Development, Law Firm Marketing, Marketing Partners.

RESPONSE – Organize and attack. Your lawyers need to learn a basic business development truism: that clients and prospects don’t care about how great the attorneys are. They assume that to be the case or they would not be talking with you. Instead, they care about what those great attorneys can do for them.

RESULT – The effect of such an enhanced client service mentality will not only unearth new prospects, but develop new business from existing clients.

PROBLEM – "I JUST LOST MY LARGEST CLIENT"

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Asking for Business, Attorney Marketing, Law Firm Marketing, Marketing Partners.

PROBLEM – “I just lost my largest client.”

RESPONSE – Setbacks should catalyze action, not cause paralysis. The firm should monitor and evaluate all such occasions where clients fall by the wayside to ensure that the lawyers responsible jump back into the business development “fray” with a new three-month action plan.

RESULT – A crisis should spell opportunity. Losses should pump the collective adrenaline. If that kind of response becomes ingrained in the firm’s culture, odds are the bottom line will actually improve at a reasonable point in time after every loss. Go to www.closersgroup.com/services.

PROBLEM – "Our firm has no pipeline."

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Allan Colman, Business Development, Law Firm Leadership, Law Firm Marketing, Marketing Partners.

In the next several blogs, I’ll describe problems law firms have brought to us and solutions that worked.

PROBLEM: “Our firm has no pipeline.”

RESPONSE: Manage your speakers, greeters, authors, communicators, trainers, marketers, etc.

RESULT: Properly assigned, with concretely defined roles, the firm’s staff will become a kind of conveyor belt. All of their designated tasks will funnel toward the actual sales moment. The pipeline thereby remains engineered to support the one final moment – the closing – that justifies its existence in the first place

INDIVIDUAL MARKETING PLANS – A WASTE OF TIME

Written by Allan Colman on . Posted in Law Firm Marketing, Marketing for Law Firms, Marketing Partners.

Rather than individual marketing plans, why not consider asking the professionals at your firm to make a BUSINESS GENERATION COMMITMENT. When done quarterly, the five-line commitments discussed in our previous 2 columns (or 10 if you include an additional five lines for a review of what was accomplished during the previous quarter) would:

* Shift the focus from marketing the firm to growing new business.
* Provide management with a simple tool to review, support and advise each professional with
regard to his or her actions or non-actions.

Business development goals should be smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-
-based. A BUSINESS GENERATION COMMITMENT system is very smart. Need help getting started?