Feature

posted 7 Sep 2005 in Volume 8 Issue 4

Mobilising a merger

When Pinsents and Masons merged in late 2004, it was imperative to quickly integrate and maximise the firm’s enhanced capabilities. For the business-development function, the challenge had been set.

By Andrew Hedley, business development director, Pinsent Masons

Pinsent Masons is a sector-focused business formed on 6 December 2004 by the largest UK-based law-firm merger of the past four years. The merger rationale was founded on a ‘complementary fit’ business model, which made it imperative that business-development knowledge across both legacy firms was quickly aggregated, enhanced and made available within the new enterprise. This would prime the business to take advantage of the opportunities to broaden and deepen relationships across the client base.

A complementary merger is not a common approach within our industry. Many professional-service-firm mergers follow a model that is fundamentally consolidating in nature; take two firms that look broadly similar in terms of their services and client bases, put them together, squeeze the middle line and ‘hey presto!’ a bigger, but similar, firm emerges with better economics and a market proposition that is fundamentally the same as its antecedent firms. The construct for the merger of Pinsents and Masons was different.

The firms were quite different in their client bases and service mix. Each had a strong client franchise but opportunities existed to develop relationships further, which, while they could be pursued as a combined entity, were beyond the reach of either firm pre-merger. The logic works on a number of levels: Pinsent Masons is able to offer a full range of services to the construction and infrastructure corporates that were the historic core client base of Masons. Similarly, the outsourcing expertise of the new firm is better matched to the emerging needs of the manufacturing client base of Pinsents. Geographically, the European network of Pinsents complements the Asian offices of Masons. Asia in itself is a high-growth opportunity for many of the clients of both antecedent firms. Of course, for a merger of this nature to succeed there must be both a strong client opportunity and a clear plan to ensure that it is realised.

Due diligence confirmed the opportunity. The key objective for the first stage of the merger was to ensure that resources were mobilised quickly to focus on the opportunity. At this stage it was imperative that knowledge of the firm and its enhanced capabilities was quickly consolidated, structured and disseminated to catalyse the client-development opportunity.

This case study explores how the design and implementation of the business-development knowledge infrastructure has supported the firm in its quest.

Target client profile

The firm’s chosen-markets strategy focuses the business on a number of discrete market sectors. Pinsent Masons is differentiated through its strong understanding of the commercial and competitive context of client industries, in addition to its appreciation of the dynamics of the client’s own business. The evidence is strong that clients gain significant added value through working with advisers that are able to provide solutions within both a commercial and industry context.

Pinsent Masons’s target clients are high value, serial purchasers of a wide range of legal services. They are sophisticated buyers who are able to discriminate between providers on discrete competencies and often subtle performance criteria. They will frequently operate a panel approach of one form or another. To be successful within this environment, the firm recognised the need to be distinctive and differentiated on dimensions that were meaningful to its current and target clients.

In other words, Pinsent Masons has to be better than its competitors at the things that matter most to its clients. The implications of this statement are clear. First, the business needs to build on its existing knowledge and be recognised as having a market-leading understanding of its clients, their markets and the way in which these are changing. Second, to create sustainable competitive advantage, the firm must be prepared to invest selectively and prioritise its resources in a way that builds a compelling and enduring service mix.

Realising the benefits of the merger

The full merger benefits will only be realised by increasing the service mix and share of wallet within a client base that research shows is receptive to a different, broader and more integrated approach to the delivery of legal solutions. In other words, by being more effective at cross-selling.

As every managing partner appreciates, cross-selling is in many respects the Holy Grail of professional-services marketing. Success requires a number of ingredients to be in place, both cultural and organisational.

Earlier research into barriers to cross-selling had identified that one of the key hurdles that has to be overcome in a large, multi-site, multi-service firm is quite simply the need to ensure that professionals have a broad understanding of the multifarious competencies and capabilities of the business. In order to engage most professionals in actively promoting a diverse range of services and solutions this has to be more than an implicit understanding that ‘we are a big firm and can do most things’. For a professional to engage a client with confidence, they need to have a deeper level of knowledge about what expertise exists, what the experience is, who the key people are and how this service could enhance a client’s business. It was clear that a programme to increase knowledge, awareness and understanding within the firm would be a fundamental precursor to success in the market.

Structure and operation of the business-development department

Pinsent Masons’s business-development department operates on an account-management model with a team of dedicated account managers and executives working with chosen markets, practice groups and offices in developing and implementing their marketing and sales plans. The account-management team and the wider firm draw on the products and services of a number of central-service functions. These are set out in figure one and ensure consistent levels of quality and responsiveness across the business.

To put in place the necessary infrastructure framework and marketing knowledge a rapid-deployment programme was implemented within the central-service functions. Resources were constrained and time was short.

It was clear that any credible approach would emanate from exercising the mind, not the cheque book. A creative solution was required to leverage existing resources and promote joined-up thinking. While being led and managed by the business-development team, the project was wide ranging and involved a structured approach to engaging all key constituencies within the business in an integrated approach.

This has resulted in the development of a consolidated client and market-knowledge base across a range of core solutions. Getting each ingredient right has, of course, been crucial but real competitive advantage lies in their interface – the recipe if you will – together with the use of technology and management practices to deliver real-time solutions both within and outside the business.

The ingredients

iContact CRM database
iContact is the internal branding used to describe the firms CRM solution, which is driven from the technology platform provided by the Saleslogix CRM solution. It is the product of a five-year programme of investment and development. iContact won the CRM Industry Award in 2004 for the best CRM project, the first professional-service firm to win a category in the UK’s CRM industry’s ‘Oscars’. This hub technology is now integrated with full firm-wide information and a real-time interface to the firm’s websites.

The system also provides the platform for direct marketing and event management, the datastore for bid and referrals information and the sales pipeline-support tool for account development and contact management. Quickly delivering a fully consolidated CRM solution was a key stage-one objective as it provides the basis for data mining and the identification of opportunities for client development.

Practice-management reporting capabilities
To implement a sector-based approach, much greater granularity is needed than that which is normally found in a practice-management financial database. The client base has been fully grouped, classified and categorised with enhanced business and market information. Bespoke reporting gives the ability to slice and dice the data cube to track key growth and performance metrics.

Advanced client, market and competitor-research capabilities
Knowledge is power. Strong research capabilities and scalable methodologies ensure that knowledge creation and sharing is part of the driving philosophy. The business-research function provides the foundation on which a number of other platforms rely. The team has responsibility for the structuring and codification of client and market data on the firm’s central-information systems, the generation of a suite of on-demand research reports and the capability to undertake bespoke exercises to evaluate specific opportunities.

Credentials and expertise sharing
The credentials database centralises the sharing of expertise and experience across the enterprise. Open to all to interrogate, input is filtered by the sales-development team to ensure consistency and integrity. A structured search taxonomy, overlaid with a free-text facility, allows users to quickly locate and assemble relevant knowledge. Drilling down on headline credentials provides further granularity. The output is fully exportable directly to MS Word, which allows for quick and simple document assembly in a familiar end-user environment.

www.pinsentmasons.com and MyPinsentMasons
MyPinsentMasons integrates the firm’s website and iContact CRM database. It allows users to create and update their own profile in real time, writing directly to the CRM database. A personalised web view can be created, direct marketing is more targeted and data integrity is improved by engaging with users directly in the maintenance of their own record. The same technology is now being used to manage the user interface on www.out-law.com, again linking directly to iContact.

Delivering the solution
Putting the building blocks in place was the culmination of the first stage of the project. Delivering the solution across the business and ensuring widespread take-up was the next challenge.

A multi-channel approach was adopted that was user-centric in the sense that easy-to-access-and-use business-development knowledge was the objective rather than a focus by the team on the most efficient maintenance of back-office systems.

It was a victory, to a degree, of effectiveness over efficiency. By taking a user-oriented approach, the rate of adoption of new systems has been significantly enhanced.

The business-development portal
The business-development portal is the home for all business-development knowledge on the firm’s intranet. The portal is the knowledge integrator, giving access to all of the firm’s business-development products in a self-service environment. Users can act quickly, using centrally managed and up-to-date content, while freeing up business-development professionals to focus on higher added-value work.

Business-development menu in Word
While HTML-based content is necessary for any web environment, it falls some way short of the mark when there is a need to use the content to produce documentation in various product formats and of a range of lengths without time-consuming additional stylistic changes and manipulation.

To remove this barrier to adoption, a drop-down menu has been created within the firm-wide macros and templates. All sales and external communications content is preformatted to firm-wide style-guides, in a MS Word environment that allows for speedy document assembly in a familiar software solution. Control is maintained over the look and feel, and there is centralised management of accuracy and updating.

Mobile access through Blackberry units
People on the move can access the key sales-development tools – iContact and the credentials database – via Blackberry. A customised utility provides the glue between the technologies. This innovation has placed real-time information in the hands of professionals operating remotely, allowing them to access core client and sales-development information at any time.

Internal communication
The firm’s wider internal communications function had, of course, an important role to play in the implementation of the sales strategy and in raising awareness both of opportunities and new tools as they became available.

Under its auspices, the task of improving knowledge flow around and across the business was marshalled and co-ordinated. It provided another important channel to the internal market for the business-development team.

Measuring results

The business-development dashboard
A series of key performance indicators (KPIs) measure utilisation and performance across the department. These are consolidated into a ‘business development dashboard’, which provides real-time management information, transparency in terms of relative performance and allows objective decision making and prioritisation by the management team.

Is it working?
Indications are strong that the logic underpinning the merger was good and the rapid implementation programme that has been followed is bearing fruit. Pinsent Masons has just completed the first quarter of its first full financial year with a strong performance in terms of client successes, an increasing range of services sold and solid revenue growth.

The anecdotal and statistical evidence from across the firm is compelling; clients are now accessing a wider range of services and share of wallet is increasing. Client and market knowledge is flowing across the business and permeating every layer. The business-development systems that have been created and implemented are playing an important role in facilitating this and are also a key component of the firm’s wider change-management programme.

Leveraging change
The strategic management of business-development knowledge is fundamental to accelerating our focus on client opportunities, identifying market trends, adding transparency to our actions, ensuring that knowledge is shared effectively across the firm and as a lever to elicit changes in behaviour.

The project to integrate client and market knowledge within Pinsent Masons has enabled the firm to act on its ambition to be the supplier of choice to its chosen markets. A superior level of market, client and competitor knowledge helps us to make better quality decisions, prioritise resources and ensure that activity is targeted and highly relevant to the current and emerging needs of existing and prospective clients.

In a little over eight months, the project has ensured that we now have a highly effective approach to leveraging client and market knowledge together with a transparent dashboard of key performance indicators to measure and drive change.

Andrew Hedley is business development director at Pinsent Masons. He can be contacted at andrew.hedley@pinsentmasons.com