To thrive, law firms continually need to add new clients that can grow over time to become strategic accounts. In addition, new or revised firm strategies require a law firm to re-thinking what the client base should be...more
When it comes to sales at law firms, simpler is better, largely because the owners of these unique businesses place the highest priority on their legal work and have limited time to learn and do sales work....more
Sales is now an established function at law firms, continuing to gain ground as more and more client-facing professionals come on board to help firms grow faster and smarter, acquire new clients, and build deeper...more
When Business Development (BD) professionals and the lawyers they work with use the word “closing,” they primarily mean acquiring a new client or a new piece of business. But there’s another type of closing worth attention:...more
Understand the business. That, as BTI Consulting CEO Michael Rynowecer has reported for years, is an attribute that General Counsel and other buyers of legal service demand from their favored outside laws firms....more
It’s budget season – one of the toughest times for law firm client development leaders because they are asked to allocate a finite amount of dollars across a seemingly limitless range of possibilities. The job is made even...more
“Commitment to help.” This is, according to BTI Consulting CEO Michael Rynowecer, one of the top attributes that buyers demand from their law firms. That’s old news; here’s the new news: More and more, law firms have awakened...more
To protect existing revenue streams, successful law firms invest heavily in client service, satisfaction, and relationships. But what about future revenue streams (aka prospective clients)? Often, and for a variety of...more
During the pandemic, buyers of legal services not only increased the number of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) issued, but also deployed new technologies to automate the buying process and heightened their focus on a firm’s...more
“We can go about selling in a systematic way because there are repeatable processes in both buying and selling.” This is an observation (with my emphasis) by Robert Miller, co-creator of the Miller-Heiman selling system, in...more
During the disruption of 2020 and early 2021, no law firm put its sales efforts on hold; most discovered and implemented new techniques, including, of course the pervasive Zoom sales meeting. Now, as business normalizes a...more
Studies in the legal market consistently show that most client team “programs” are not doing well and that many firms do not even have a focus on key clients. Here are some quick bullet points to…
Originally published...more
In a soon-to-be-published book about strategic account management (sometimes called “key client planning”) for law firms, we have assembled a good deal of detailed technical advice for building and operating a Strategic...more
By now, your firm and its lawyers have decided whether or not it is appropriate to reach out to clients and prospective clients for business development purposes. For those who have decided that outreach is in order,...more
Since video conferences are now our most-important portals to the “outside world” and we’ve become reasonably proficient, it’s time to catch our breath and focus on how best to utilize this suddenly ubiquitous platform not...more
Second of two blog posts by LawVision’s Steve Bell, Silvia Coulter and Yvonne Nath In our previous blog post, we noted the emergence in the public accounting sector (and hopefully in the legal profession) of a new era of law...more
Lingering and debilitating flat revenue growth at the vast majority of law firms is convincing law firm leaders to accelerate efforts to professionalize sales and business development, according to speakers at several...more