The Brain Trust Weekly – CRM in Professional Services

I’m a strong advocate of the concept of maximizing existing relationships first when undertaking business development efforts – 80/20 rule and all. It’s obvious that those people you know and your company has already served are more likely to bring in new and additional business than those who have no connection.

So how to evaluate the relationships (friends, family, etc) that your employees have in a way that maximizes your ability to turn them into customers or increase their business? There’s social media of course, but that’s for another blog post. First, you must evaluate what the relationships are – then you can strategically determine the influencers who can turn the relationships into new or additional business.

That’s where a CRM comes in. A CRM (customer relationship management system) is a system long-utilized by large companies to manage customer and sales information and communication functions. In Why and How Using a CRM is Important, Contemporary Analysis says:

For Salespeople: If used properly a CRM should allow agents to provide an excellent and often customized experience to every customer while being able to scale the sales process and reduce stress. On the agent level, the key to using a CRM is to record every prospect, deal, task and customer service statistics, so that the agent can focus on the sales process and not on trying to remember every fact and figure.

For Sales Management: A CRM should allow Sales Management to focus on developing forecasts, training materials and coaching salespeople, instead of directly monitoring everything their sales teams are doing.

Lead prioritization and brand management are secondary benefits of using a CRM.  Without a CRM, it is difficult to collect the structured data necessary to prioritize leads based on profitability, loyalty and purchasing activity.  It is also makes it difficult to manage communication in the most effective way.

For Marketing: By watching the conversations that your clients are having with your salespeople and customer service representatives, you can collect testimonials, determine pricing, schedule promotions, identify key words, determine ROI of marketing campaigns and improve lead generation activities.

For Customer Service: Customer Service should use the data contained in your CRM to provide customers with well researched guidance and a seamless experience between sales and customer service.  By taking a moment to pull up a client file when they email or call, your Customer Service staff can provide a customized experience that relies on the information collected during the sales process and previous customer service calls.

For Operations: If used properly a CRM should allow Operations to improve the quality of their output by allowing employees to know exactly what is expected of them.

According to CAS Software, companies traditionally receive the following benefits from using a CRM:

1. Story data centrally creates a company-wide user network
2. Customer dossiers provide all the information
3. Customer knowledge reveals potential for development
4. Customer value can be determined and communication measures specialized
5. The strength of the data and knowledge it provides motivates employees
6. Provides ability for staff efficiently manage projects
7. Increases customer retention, thus reducing long-term costs
8. Brings together all existing data applications for one source

Coming from the professional services sector, however, there’s an additional functionality that can be extremely beneficial to law firms, accounting firms, and the like – moving beyond just a database of sorts to manage customer data. While that and the other benefits listed above are important, a firm can also leverage its CRM to identify potential clients through the firm’s employee and practitioner base. By syncing with a firm’s Outlook Contacts system, business development professionals can identify the companies and contacts that their employees and attorneys/CPAs have (and that may be personal in nature) and facilitate an introduction to its services via a trusted source.

Although there are admittedly some complex issues to overcome in successfully implementing a system in this kind of environment (chief among them cost, buy-in by partners, and transparency/sharing of trusted client and contact info), the benefits outweigh the challenges and when done right, can improve the bottom line.

The Brain Trust sources below provide additional information on the opportunities:

Law Firms Utilizing CRM Systems to Leverage Relationships and Improve Business Strategies (Delaware Valley Marketing Group)
Like their business clients, law firms–large and small alike–see the value in using sophisticated technology programs to implement client or contact relationship management (CRM) systems.

Top 12 Evaluation Criteria for CRM Professional Services Selection (Forrester)
In a survey of 119 companies: nearly 28% used PSPs to help develop their strategic vision for CRM, 42% used PSPs for defining business objectives for CRM, 44% for aligning business processes with the CRM strategy, and 56% to define the conceptual design for CRM technology solutions. PSPs were used by 60% of enterprises to establish detailed design requirements and by 64% to implement CRM solutions.

Leveraging your CRM (Society of Marketing Professional Services)
In its essence, CRM is the ability to leverage intelligent connections among people, companies, relationships, experience, and expertise through technology to deploy your business objectives.

The Secret of CRM Success in a Law Firm (Law Firm 4.0 Blog)
Experience database implementations are among the most challenging of all marketing technology initiatives – not because the technology is hard, but because gathering such data in a law firm culture is.  But the challenges and obstacles are far from insurmountable.

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