Article about tracking sales pursuits

1. The Management Side of Sales Pursuits
February 2006
By Adam Stock
In an increasingly competitive legal services market, where clients are less loyal to their law firms and law firms
are competing for business, there is a growing need for law firms to be systematic and disciplined in their
approach to business development. Marketing departments are increasingly retooling themselves with client
service, business development and sales functions. Attorneys, marketing and sales staff need to work
increasingly closely as a team taking on non-traditional roles to ensure continuity in pursuit of business from first
contact through the pitching and closing of business.
Being Systematic
When we established our sales function at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, a 600- attorney law firm with 19 offices around
the world, we implemented our own intranet-based application to help us manage our sales pursuits. Like many
firms, we had previously tracked our pursuits informally through spreadsheets, e-mails and word processing
documents and we did not have a fully functioning CRM system. This article shares some of the lessons learned
from implementing and using our system.
Goals
Our goals were to: 1) provide a systematic tracking of our pursuits; 2) provide a seamless way for attorneys and
marketing and business development staff to work collaboratively on client pursuits; 3) leverage our best business
development practices across the firm; and 4) provide reporting functions so firm practice group and office
managers could understand the sales pipelines for their areas of responsibility. As we have implemented our
system, we continue to improve it as our processes evolve.
Challenges
Some of the unique challenges of systematizing business development in law firms are: 1) law is a relationship
business that requires the lawyer to be the primary "sales" person rather than a professional salesperson; 2) that
there are rarely lawyers dedicated to business development — virtually all lawyers must both bill work as well as
develop business — which leads to many discontinuities in pursuits; and 3) there is not an established and
defined role for business professionals in the business development process. We sought to build systems that
addressed these challenges.
Our Approach
Unified view and openness. Our first goal was to establish a single place where staff and attorneys could look to
see the current status of a client pursuit (see figure 1, below). We had found that different offices and practices
had been approaching the same clients at the same time. By providing a single view to our pursuits, we have
eliminated this po-tentially embarrassing situation and have increased collaboration.
By sharing information more broadly and placing all of our pursuits on our intranet, we require a higher level of
trust in members of our firm. The benefits are that we work more collaboratively and we can more easily share
best practices. By being able to see what others are doing, attorneys are able to organize their efforts more
effectively and more quickly.
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2. Team and responsibility. Assigning marketing professionals explicitly to each pursuit has increased our
effectiveness in working collaboratively and winning pursuits. Where previously we had organized exclusively
along functional responsibilities — events, PR, seminars, RFPs, etc. — the pursuit-based approach assigns
Marketing and Sales support responsibility to the staff member throughout the pursuit which has increased our
effectiveness in service levels. By explicitly listing the attorneys, many of the issues of origination and business
development credit are addressed earlier in the pursuit process.
Continuity and snapshots. We frequently found that attorneys would get pressed into cases and transactions
that would pull them away from pursuits for weeks at a time. It was often difficult to get them up-to-speed and re-
engaged in the pursuit. Pursuits often take over a year, so establishing and maintaining continuity especially with
changes to our staff was of key importance. Our pursuit system incorporates a full history of the emails and status
updates of the pursuit, allowing attorneys and pursuit team members to review the pursuit detail to find out the
current status of a pursuit. (See figure 2 below.)
Like many firms, we used to start tracking clients through our accounting system when matters were opened.
Through our pursuit application we are able to track our prospects long before they become clients allowing us to
understand the return on investment for our business development efforts.
Relevance. One of the drawbacks of a unified view of pursuits is that our system is filled with hundreds of
pursuits that are not of interest to any given attorney. We have implemented saved searches and advanced
searching to allow attorneys to bring up the pursuit lists for clients and prospects that they, their practice group or
their office are responsible for.
Sales pipeline. Our pursuit application establishes a status for our pursuits Investigating, Pitching, Closing and
Won/Lost/Abandoned and establishes both target dates and dates that the pursuits were last updated. These
features allow us to get a full view of the state of our sales pipeline and the effectiveness of our pursuits.
Pursuit aging. Our marketing staff plays a much more active roll in moving pursuits ahead by regularly searching
our pursuits that have no updates reported in the last 30 days. They will send reminders to attorneys to re-contact
their clients and prospects often accelerating a pursuit that would have been neglected.
Lessons Learned
No system is without its drawbacks. We had hoped our pursuit application could be a forecasting tool. Because
the majority of our business is garnered from existing clients, new matters are opened at times, without our
involvement or knowledge and these matters never formally become pursuits. As a result, our application is not
best used as a forecasting tool. We continue to work on changing this element especially with our top 200 clients.
Since all pursuits that our marketing and business development departments assist on are in the system and we
can see our track record of success, the application has been an invaluable asset in helping us transform the
perception of our marketing department from one of "overhead" and a "cost center," to a key part of building our
firm's business. We have a full system of accountability.
The greatest benefits, however, are the collaborative team approach to pursuing new business and clients that
have yielded demonstrable results. Our pursuit tracking system has been a key asset on transforming our
marketing professionals into relevant business development professionals which has enabled us to better meet
the demands of the ever more competitive legal market. Tracking pursuits provides the firm a collaborative way to
begin to see new possibilities. It's energizing!
Adam Stock is the chief sales and marketing officer for Dorsey & Whitney. He is a board member of the Legal
Sales and Service Organization and a frequent speaker at various legal marketing programs.
© Copyright 2006, Law Journal Newsletters
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