Legal Marketing & PR

Get BD Under the Law Firm Marketing Umbrella and Let it Rain

By Larry Bodine

This is a guest post by Thalia Zetlin, Principal/CMO of Berdon LLP in New York, a CPA firm that advises law firms of all types - ranging from specialized boutiques to global practices. She can be reached at (212) 699-6708 and TZetlin@berdonllp.com.

Consider a law firm where…

• Its website touts the firm's "responsiveness" while a number of attorneys are not getting back to clients within a 24-hour window.
• One-on-one interactions between attorneys and potential clients are never captured in the database and remain hidden in the individual attorney's Outlook contacts.
• Client experiences vary from partner to partner with some demonstrating commitment while others are detached.

If any of these scenarios have a familiar ring, they're signs of a firm that's letting revenue opportunities slip by, sending mixed messages, wasting resources, and encouraging internal conflict. These debilitating symptoms rear up when all components of the firm's marketing are not fully integrated into a unified marketing strategy. Specifically, this occurs when business development is viewed as apart from the marketing umbrella — inherently making it subject to its own agenda.   

To get a clearer picture of how to cure these symptoms, it's important to first establish what we mean by marketing and business development (BD).  At its core, marketing has been, is, and continues to be the connecting of a need or want with a provider who can fulfill it. To accomplish this, professional services marketing uses an array of components that work together and BD — the one-on-one contact with clients, prospects, and referral sources — is just one of those components, albeit a very significant one, nevertheless only one… of, in fact, five.

Second, to see how BD naturally evolved to become an integral part of marketing, let's look at a little history. Back in the late 1980s, the only kind of marketing that was done was "country club marketing" referred to as practice development (that one-on-one contact mentioned in the previous paragraph). This was understandable considering all the marketing restrictions at the time. To develop the practice and generate new business, it was necessary to get everyone involved and engaged, and to move the mindset and culture away from the confines of country club marketing. A change in terminology seemed a good start and to begin that process practice development (PD) became BD, a change that initially met with a lot of resistance.

For the rest of her article visit the LawMarketing Channel.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on March 23, 2011 (boomark / email).