Using a“marketing director on secondment” to boost your marketing

Taking responsibility for building a professional marketing function, launching CRM and profile raising

This Top 100 London law firm appointed us on a part-time basis to take responsibility for running their marketing department. Working directly with the senior management of the firm, and with the in-house team reporting to us, our remit was to define the ideal structure for the department and introduce more effective marketing planning and activity.

A new approach to planning

Our first step was to work with the team leaders and partners to introduce a quarterly planning and budgeting process that focused them on the priorities for their teams, and ensured that the marketing department could support them effectively.

The other immediate priority was to manage a major overhaul of the firm’s marketing database prior to an office move, and to devise and implement a range of marketing communications activities linked to the move. The firm estimates that our work in simply updating the address book facility of its database saved it £15,000 in mailing costs when it moved offices, and the new system also provides the facility for better contact management and marketing planning.

Developing key clients

The firm was also keen to review its business development strategy, and our first recommendation in this area was to maximise the potential of the existing client base. In interviewing clients, we identified that growth and client development opportunities had been missed, particularly in terms of ‘cross-selling’. Consequently, we devised and piloted a client planning programme designed to focus on major client opportunities, involving partners and fee-earners from across the firm. Results include identifying key issues to address during a review of legal services; spotting opportunities for selling additional services; and addressing client dissatisfaction before it became a major issue. Despite being a CRM project, at no stage did we need to look at software and not calling it “CRM” was a major factor in getting partner acceptance and making the programme work!

A higher profile

Our other major priority was to help the firm raise its profile to reflect its size, skills and client base. We carried out a series of positioning workshops with partners to identify the firm’s core strengths and messages and, combining this output with client feedback, devised a PR strategy designed to generate a higher profile in the business, trade and professional media. Working with the PR agency that we appointed we achieved impressive results in terms of media coverage.

More recently, and following our structural review of the firm’s marketing needs, we have helped this client recruit an in-house marketing manager to take on more of the day-to-day coordination, while we continue to work with the senior management at a strategic level.

As the managing partner said,

“The Marketing Team gave us a clear vision of where we wanted to go with our marketing and their work on developing client relationship management, in particular, was extremely valuable. They also won us over to the value of PR in raising our profile.”