[co-author: Julie O'Connor]

During challenging times like these, leveraging technology can help you to coordinate communication and business development efforts and more effectively engage with clients and prospects.

With employees working remotely, collaboration requires more thought and effort than it would under normal circumstances. It will be especially important to track and coordinate who is in charge of marketing and other outreach activities including emails, calls, blog posts and webinars for all of the firm’s important contacts. This will help to ensure that no relevant client or contact gets missed because of an assumption that someone else may be handling the relationship. It also helps to prevent oversaturating the same contacts with too many messages from multiple individuals in your firm.

CRM Systems

Client Relationship Management (CRM) systems can help to record and track outreach information in real-time through the creation of activities. Activity data can be used to shed light on who has been speaking with whom, when communications took place, what messages have been shared, responses that have been received and any next steps that are required. The Marketing or Business Development teams should manage and support this process, initiating appropriate internal debriefings so that any follow-up tasks can be delegated and executed.

But, even though the process of creating an activity can literally take less than a minute, in the past most firms have been unsuccessful in implementing an activity tracking process beyond the Marketing or business development teams or an occasional or sporadic practice-based effort.

With everyone working remotely, this is a rare opportunity and the perfect time to begin focusing on this essential business process. While some in the firm may be overwhelmed dealing with helping clients respond to COVID-19 -related crises, there are likely some professionals and a number of key staff who may have time on their hands. These people could be dedicated to supporting the other busy professionals in the activity-tracking process. Additionally, adding this support role could help to reduce potential staff reductions or furloughs. To implement coordinated activity tracking, remote online training will be needed to ensure that everyone understands the process and technology. More important to encouraging the use of activities, it should be communicated that the reason the process is so important is to ensure coordination and communication during this challenging time. In addition to the training, videos, quick reference guides and other materials should be created and made easily accessible online to reinforce the basic concepts.

While CRM systems are essential, there are also a number of other supporting technologies you can invest in and leverage to support your organization in its outreach and business development efforts during this challenging time …