Moving the earth
Implementing change for business-development success

With the changing balance of power between client and adviser, law firms are warming to the virtues of business development, introducing client-service initiatives and industry-sector expertise, nurturing a culture of innovation, and weaving sales and marketing activity into their partner-performance criteria. Many partnerships, however, still struggle to overcome residual scepticism to business-development strategies, despite the obvious benefits. Meirion Jones, director of business development at Lovells, examines the challenge for law-firm management teams and assesses how firms can move forwards.

“Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the earth: no matter how irresistible the force, no matter how immoveable the object, it needs only the well judged application of a lever to shift it.”

Knowing exactly where to apply the levers for change now ranks as one of the biggest challenges facing management leaders in the law. This is probably felt most acutely in the field of business development.

The legal profession in the UK is undergoing the most fundamental – and rapid – re-structuring in its history. The causes of these changes include:

The growing competitive threats from new market entrants;
Price-conscious clients applying increasingly rigorous service and value expectations;
The creeping commoditisation of once premium services;
The growing use of IT to streamline traditionally complex functions.

Since so much of this change is market driven, firms’ business-development functions are ideally placed to assist in responding to the challenges. However, no matter how well positioned business-development teams may be, persuading partners of the need to act, much less implementing new client-focused initiatives, often hinges on how effectively they tackle some deeply rooted partnership resistance.

There are many causes of this resistance but the following are particularly common.

Not more form filling

Lawyers characteristically mistrust any hint of process or bureaucracy for its own sake. Attempts to introduce business planning – useful for penetrating new markets, developing new products and clients, and prioritising activity – are frequently seen as initiative-stifling and wasteful. Many partners (often, ironically enough, those who are best at business generation) instinctively feel that the most effective business-development activities are ad hoc.

Where is the value?

The characteristic difficulty of establishing a direct causal link between marketing activity and a new piece of business undermines its credibility in partners’ eyes. (As Lord Leverhulme said of his advertising budget, half was wasted, he just couldn’t say which half.) It is understandably difficult for such empirically-minded individuals to take on trust the link between business development and sales, which is why so many arguments against business development begin and end with its apparent dependence on chance.

Is all this really necessary?

Although attitudes are changing, doubt persists in some quarters about the need to undertake business development at all. Legal advice is one business service among many but, notwithstanding the explosion in the number of in-house legal-procurement officers, some lawyers still see their hard-won legal expertise as above the vulgar hurly-burly of selling.

Are they up to it?

As egalitarian as most firms are, non fee earners have to work particularly hard to justify their place at the table. The inaccurate adage about those with ability making the most of their talents and those without becoming teachers could, equally unfairly, be applied to business-development professionals and others in ‘support’ roles. (It has to be said that support professionals don’t exactly help their own cause with initiatives such as the recent ‘Unsung Heroes’ campaign – a somewhat plaintive public-relations exercise designed by support professionals to win their partners’ respect.)

Far from being a business-development cri du coeur, these views are what make management roles within law firms so interesting. Those senior managers who are most successful at tackling these challenges are not necessarily students of advanced management theory (although this can’t hurt), but pragmatic, and often crafty, exponents of objection handling and change management. So how are the most successful firms embedding business development in their organisational fabric? And what practical steps are they taking to persuade partners to see business development as an essential weapon in their firm’s business arsenal?

Each successful organisation has a specific recipe for success. The following pointers, however, have been distilled from numerous discussions with successful business-generating partners, senior business-development professionals and consultants at leading firms, and also from market observation and personal experience. Applied collectively, they can be used as the basis of an effective change-management programme.

The water-wheel model

These measures form a virtuous circle, each step reinforcing the one that succeeds it. Although one or two steps could conceivably be removed, they ideally need to function together. Let’s look at each of these elements in detail.

1. Client/market intelligence

Clients’ opinions simply cannot be ignored or dismissed. If a client expresses dissatisfaction with aspects of the service, hints at an impending panel review or admits that a piece of work has gone to another firm, then acting upon those comments is imperative. Sad to say, partners in many firms prefer not to seek their clients’ views. Some worry about appearing uninformed or intrusive; others worry about what they might learn or simply take their client relationships for granted.

Without exception, however, everyone I spoke to cited the importance of harnessing client feedback as the single most important factor in changing internal attitudes.

As a result, many firms are now introducing formal client-service-review procedures. Some mix large-scale statistical exercises – sending many clients, or contacts at a single client, feedback forms – with in-depth face-to-face meetings to address particular concerns and trends arising from the results. Some use third-party organisations to interview clients on their experiences of working with the firm. Many seek client feedback at the completion of each transaction and conduct post-pitch client debriefs, regardless of success or failure.

Irrespective of the particular method used there are two common factors:

The information gleaned from this process is used to effect changes in the way that client relationships are managed;
Objectivity is vital. Simply requiring a relationship partner to undertake a review with his own client risks sacrificing the impartiality that a more disinterested observer can bring. In many firms, business-development professionals are leading this process, an involvement that helps bring them closer to their partners and strengthens the influence they have on the firm’s client-facing activities.

2. Objective setting

When the salespeople of capital-equipment companies – aero-engine manufacturers, for example – target a potential purchaser, they do so knowing that it will certainly take months and probably years to convert a lead into an order. They plan their sales strategy accordingly, diarising regular follow-up meetings, working on strengthening the relationship with the target – learning more about sales strategy, decision-making processes and commercial concerns – and ensuring that they provide valued and relevant reasons for the target to wish to remain in touch.

Partners, on the other hand, have a less scientific approach – their contacts can be sporadic and too widely dispersed, relationships are often not developed systematically and, if there appears to be no immediate prospect of work, attention goes elsewhere. It has to be said that the financial targets on partners often encourages this short-term view.

Some firms, though, are recognising the importance of a more flexible approach to objective setting that sees intermediate evidence of progress as valid success measures. Whereas new revenue remains the long-term aim, shorter-term progress measures are captured to demonstrate the progress being made. Such measures include:

New information gleaned from the client – on the working if its procurement process, perhaps, or is internal organisational structure;
Learning about the client’s strategic objectives;
Introducing other practice areas, offices and partners to the client;
Making presentations to the client on issues of concern – or offering bespoke training.

None of these, in themselves, are work-generative, but all help to strengthen the relationship, building one concrete step on another in a quite deliberate path towards fee generation. Such measures also maintain enthusiasm and focus on client targeting, even when immediate prospects of work are feint.

3. Progress reporting, plus
4. Internal communications

Whether formally or informally, measuring and communicating progress to the firm at large are important factors in forcing change into an organisation. A means of unobtrusively capturing this data – often through informal meetings between partners and business-development people (see point seven below) – is important for maintaining the change momentum.

5. Process/infrastructure

Thanks to their associations with unreliable, outdated information and clumsy functionality, and with anxieties about losing control of precious client contacts, few software packages get such a bad rap as the marketing database. These attitudes relegate what is potentially the most effective means of sharing client know-how, identifying new opportunities to develop relationships and safeguarding revenue from rival firms, to the preserve of the business-development departments and a handful of partner evangelists. How is it, then, that some firms are now making significant headway in rolling out their databases?

The answer lies in the growing recognition that client know-how is just too important to be left in partners’ heads. Partners and secretaries are encouraged to use the systems and to take responsibility for their own client data; in those organisations where buy-in is growing, there is a general awareness that the client expects the firm to be integrated, to know about his needs and to be sharing client know-how among those who can most effectively advise him. Databases, and the other paraphernalia of CRM infrastructure, are not means in themselves but tools to achieve the end.

6. Partner reviews

Some firms are also feeding information into their formal partner reviews, gathered from their partners’ business-development objectives and intermediate objective setting, and referring to activity reports culled from their marketing databases. Few firms in the UK have gone so far as to forge a direct link between performance and remuneration – although some firms are notably doing just that – but the greater clarity about what is expected of partners in this area gives terrific impetus to the overall push for change.

7. Man-marking

Most of the best business-development advisers place little emphasis on formal partner planning (in one meeting I attended to discuss the planning process, a flip chart of bullet points made only one point: plans in themselves are not important). In contrast, enormous efforts are made to develop informal relationships through short, impromptu face-to-face meetings – what one business-development professional called ‘man-marking’. Impromptu they may be, but these contacts are calculated affairs, targeting those whose opinions are particularly influential within the firm, as well as the strongly marketing oriented partners (the two groups are not necessarily the same). This approach is comparable with the relationship-based targeting that partners are expected to pursue with their own clients.

8. Coaching and mentoring

Firms increasingly invest in non-legal management training –so-called soft skills. As important as this is, if the training is contracted to external providers, in-house managers are deprived of a great opportunity to develop their own authority and influence within the partnership. Equally, when consultants leave, there is a great temptation among partners to revert to old habits.

One of the many benefits of the man-marking approach of point seven is that it nurtures the trust and confidence that partners have for the best business-development professionals. This, in turn, allows the business-development people to become de facto coaches offering discrete non-prescriptive guidance on how partners can best develop their practices. Coaching in this way – structuring the support to a partner’s specific needs in a discrete environment – is often more effective than participating in larger, generic set-piece sessions.

One final point is that almost everyone I spoke to for this piece described these processes as great fun. Whether it was a business-development professional or a partner making the point, one thing they each had in common was a tremendous appetite for effecting change and this underpinned their approach. Whether the stages outlined above will actually stimulate the appetite of anyone who is not already hungry remains to be seen, but it is a pretty irresistible entrée.

Meirion Jones is director of business development at Lovells. He can be contacted at meirion.jones@lovells.com