Legal Marketing & PR

Staff is Part of Your Marketing Effort - Whether You or They Know it or Not

By Tom Kane

It continues to amaze me how few law firms engage their non-marketing staff in the firm’s business development efforts. The funny part is that these staff members are involved in marketing your firm in one way or another, if they deal with clients, potential clients or the public at-large. These contacts, whether intended or not, can end up being for the good or bad of the law firm.

So, why not train and focus these staff encounters for the best possible results? It’s not that difficult.

My friend Stacy West Clark has a terrific article on empowering your staff to help increase client business  in The Legal Intelligencer and on Law.com’s Small Firm Business online. In fact, there is so much good stuff there that, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to cover the article in two posts.

Today, I’ll cover her initial advice, and next time how the lawyers, their assistants and even the receptionist can contribute to the firm’s marketing.

Her opening paragraph is one of the more succinct recipes for great client relationship building I have heard:

“The components of great service include understanding the client’s business, being incredibly responsive, communicative and accessible and looking for opportunities to make the client’s life and business world better.”

Stacy then points out that the lawyers do not have to do this alone. The team includes your “secretary, messenger, file clerk, receptionist, human resources manager, office manager, librarian,” et al.

And she states:

“The sooner you empower your staff to deliver outstanding client service, the sooner your revenues will grow. Staff who are involved in and educated about the marketing effort have higher morale and lower turnover and treat clients better.”

Amen!

Next time: Stacy’s ideas for starters on how to get staff members involve.
 

Full post as published by Legal Marketing Blog on November 04, 2008 (boomark / email).