Everyone has a personal brand and it often plays a critical role in professional success, advancement and business development. Similar to a business’ brand, your brand is a promise of what others will receive from you, what you will be known for and how people react to your personality and approach. Whether or not you actively…
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[Note: This post is co-authored by RainMaking Oasis and Jonathan Hollenberg of HawkPartners, a marketing strategy and research firm for Fortune 500 companies.] In our prior two posts Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different than Customer Service and Customer Experience (CX) Part 2 – Mapping the Client Journey, we discussed the difference…
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[Note: This post is co-authored by RainMaking Oasis and Jonathan Hollenberg of HawkPartners, a marketing strategy and research firm for Fortune 500 companies.] As discussed in our first post Customer Experience (CX) Part 1 – Is It Different than Customer Service, customer satisfaction often focuses on narrow and discrete touch points that clients are exposed…
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Providing exceptional and consistent client service is critical to your firm’s success, but to be a real winner, you will have to deliver an exceptional client experience (CX). With clients now in the driver’s seat and law firms aggressively competing to hold on to clients or take work away from others, we know that excellent…
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Despite all the talk about clients not being loyal anymore and only being interested in pushing matters to the least expensive “bidder,” many things about relationships still matter to most clients. In our last blog post Sales and Service: The Loyal Client Lifecycle, we touched upon some of the ways to nurture and advance client relationships….
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Law firms continue to compete aggressively for new clients and new work from existing clients. We know from recent surveys by Citi and Altman Weil that client demand for outside lawyers remained flat in 2016 and is expected to do so again in 2017. With the same or less work to go around, this means…
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Law firms are facing stiff competition when it comes to holding onto their clients, much less gaining market share. Given the flat growth in available legal work, law firms have been having to “steal” work from other firms to gain share. BTI Consulting’s Market Outlook and Client Service Review 2017 reports that while legal spending…
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In 2017, lawyers will be under more pressure than ever to succeed at business development, and yet many of them remain skeptical about whether or not CMOs, CBDOs and their teams really add value. Even at firms with the most enlightened partners in leadership roles, the role and effectiveness of business development and marketing is…
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What’s the difference between a client and a customer? Lawyers, like other professional service providers, consider the term client to be more prestigious and most eschew any reference to clients as customers. But it may just be time to reconsider. First, clients are beginning to act more like custmers and second, law firms could benefit…
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As we enter into a new year, firms would do well to renew their commitment to really focusing on and taking care of their key clients. Too often, clients are taken for granted or viewed merely as a source of revenue. Firms focus on getting new matters, cross-selling and pitching, often without much attention to…
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The Heiman Research Institute conducts an annual survey of worldwide organizations to determine what differentiates those that are the best in sales from all the others. While all types of companies were included in the survey, the report breaks out professional service firms from the rest. Relative to other types of businesses, professional service firms, a category…
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As if law firms don’t have enough to worry about in this era of more discerning and demanding clients, pressures on rates and profitability and more stringent competition, it is estimated that over the next ten years sixty-five percent of baby boomer equity partners will retire. While some firms are using early retirement and de-equitization…
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Two things are clear right now. First, dramatic changes have already occurred and will continue to occur in the legal profession (actually, most are affecting all sectors of the economy.) Second, these and other new changes will be permanent, i.e., this is not a pendulum swing that will swing back. The marketplace is driving these…
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As we proposed in our previous post Value Post 3: Like Law Firms, GCs Must Deliver More Value to Their Clients, general counsel face many of the same pressures that their outside lawyers do when it comes to demonstrating their value to their clients – the business side of their companies. Much of the legal press…
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Law firms have been so wrapped up in their own challenges that they often neglect to think about the fact that legal departments are also under substantial pressure to deliver value to the business. General Counsel may consider their outside lawyers a “necessary evil,” but many company executives and boards consider their in-house lawyers a…
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