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How can SME law firms better cross-sell?

As new pressures brought out by the pandemic continue, how can SME law firms improve this area of business development? Douglas McPherson, director at consultancy tenandahalf, gives his top tips.

Douglas McPherson, director|tenandahalf|

I hope I’m not crossing any lines by saying that one of the areas of marketing and business development that law firms can struggle with is cross-selling. In my experience, every firm knows they need to do it but the day-to-day pressures of meeting our clients’ deadlines and demands all too often end up getting in the way.

And, if these demands and deadlines weren’t enough, our quest to find the simple but effective model for maximising client spend now involves the additional challenges imposed by having to work remotely.

The only thing is that while things are trickier to coordinate, our clients’ requirements haven’t changed. They still need advice and support in a number of different areas whether those are linked to their working or personal lives. Our objective has to be to make sure finding the right person to provide those different types of advice is as easy for our clients as possible (which, to be honest, is all cross-selling really is).

Steps to building a BD strategy

In terms of how to best to implement your cross-selling strategy, the first steps are:

  • to choose the clients you think are most likely to need a wider range of support
  • to set your objectives.

When it comes to selecting clients, my suggestion would be to identify the clients most likely to have ‘plausible gaps’. If you see a large client (by headcount and/or turnover) that only uses one or two practice areas, it’s plausible their actual requirements overlap into a number of other areas.  Identifying a number of these will give you with a shortlist to start with.

With regards to your objectives, they fall into two camps. The first is financial – for example, increase client X’s annual spend by 12%. Or it’s work-related – by the end of 2020 client Y will use our employment and private client teams as well as our property and corporate teams.


Boost your BD skills further by watching ‘From surviving to thriving’ with tenandahalf’s Bernard Savage

One of the tactics we’ve seen work really well while working with law firms is setting up informal pods. The pods themselves are made up of representatives from each of the departments relevant to a particular type of client.

For example, if you were concentrating on family-owned manufacturing businesses you would probably want someone from the commercial, commercial property and employment departments to take care of the business aspects and someone from private client to cover the specific family-focused issues this type of business has to address.

While it may not sound overly scientific, the most important selection criterion is they all get on.  Involving people who like each other’s company will make it easier for them to work together. From a more practical point of view, it ensures regular meetings happen as planned and that a dialogue is maintained in between.

How will it work remotely?

At this point I’d expect to be reminded this is fine when we’re all in the office, but it won’t work at the moment. It really will.  All you need to do is choose your targets, set your objectives and agree who’ll be involved then task the team with starting the process via video. As we’re all facing the same restrictions, clients will understand things need to be done via phone, video and email in the short term.

However, if all this seems a bit formal, there may be a more informal way to prove the concept works before you invest more time and resource into creating a more structured approach.

At the moment, your fee earners should be talking to clients regularly on the phone. Some of these calls will be linked to live matters – but given the crucial role our existing relationships will play in our immediate futures – there should also be broader, more personal conversations going on.

If you’re taking the time to catch up and ask what’s going on in your clients’ lives, some will begin to share their plans. These are the conversations that will highlight potential issues your colleagues in other departments may be able to help with. All you need to do is suggest you set up a call so that your colleague can provide some initial thoughts or an independent perspective.

You’ve now made it as easy as possible for your clients to get the additional advice they need to take the next step and again, that’s all cross-selling really is!

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