Marketing and CRM systems – sometimes there needs to be a free lunch

This is a true story that took place a couple of years ago, involving a mid-sized commercial practice in London. It began when the firm’s new marketing manager asked the IT department what options were available to her in terms of marketing software. The IT department called in a consultant, who charged them a proverbial arm and a leg in fees to advise them that what they needed was Interface Software’s InterAction CRM system. But, there was a snag. InterAction is a best-of-breed product, so the consultant recommended that they also replace their existing practice-management system (PMS) with a new best-of-breed-compatible PMS.

It was at this point that the firm’s managing partner returned from an extended holiday to discover proposals on the table for spending several hundred thousand pounds on new IT systems just so, as he put it, the firm could have a more accurate list for mailing out Christmas cards. Fortunately for the firm – and probably a few people’s jobs – commonsense prevailed. Not only did it transpire that the marketing manager did not want a full-blown CRM (client-relationship management) system – in fact, she would have been perfectly happy with a plain vanilla marketing/mailing list system – but it also turned out that the firm’s existing practice-management system already had a marketing module that more than met her needs.

So, a happy ending, but what lessons can we draw from this? The first is that most marketing people working in law firms appear to know very little about legal IT, which is perhaps only to be expected. The second, rather more worrying lesson is that most IT people still appear to know very little about marketing systems or the fact the term ‘CRM’ is not synonymous with ‘marketing’. In fact, companies like Interface have had to devote a considerable amount of their time and energy to educating the market on this distinction. However, they face an uphill battle, not least because some other software suppliers persist in blurring the distinction by rebranding their marketing modules as CRM systems.

At the risk of stating the obvious, CRM is not a posh word for marketing. Marketing in law firms is typically a discrete activity carried out by the marketing department or a market specialist – and for many firms, the ability to create mailing lists from their client-and-prospects database files is all they will ever want. By contrast, CRM is a practice-wide application that should be used by everyone whose activities impinge upon the relationship with the client. And, unlike marketing, where activities typically take the form of short-term campaigns, with CRM, the management side of the equation is an ongoing relationship that may – and ideally should – last for years.

But there is another side of the equation we have so far not considered, and that is the position of the lawyer. Talk to marketing people, talk to software suppliers, talk to in-house IT teams implementing these systems and they will all tell you that the biggest impediment to the successful deployment of marketing and CRM software is a cultural issue. Namely, the law firm ‘eat what we kill’ mentality, with its emphasis upon fee earning and clocking up billable hours, at the expense of nurturing clients while the time recording is switched off. One corporate client told me the final straw in their relationship with a City firm was being invited out for a Christmas lunch with a couple of lawyers, including the client relationship partner, and subsequently learning that the firm not only billed them for the cost of the lunch, but also charged them for the time their lawyers spent eating the food.

Of course, it would be nice to think that one day lawyers will realise that when it comes to client relations, there really is such a thing as a free lunch. Until then, the legal profession’s hit-and-miss relationship with marketing (motto: never has so much been spent, saying so little, to so few) is best summarised by the experiences of one marketing consultant, who was asked by a firm to help them establish ‘a mediocre CRM strategy’. When he quizzed them on this point, the managing partner explained that if the firm could achieve even just mediocre results, this would still give them a significant marketing advantage over their competitors.

Next month, we will be looking at using IT to make life easier for lawyers.

Charles Christian is editor of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter.