Nailing Events with CRM

There is often no better way to develop business than getting face-to-face with Clients and prospects– your CRM contacts. This may explain why so many law firms spend so much time and dedicate so many resources for events. 

While the types of events are diverse – lunches and dinners, cocktail parties, seminars, roundtables, golf outings, sports events, political mixers, charity projects, open houses – the challenges are the same: distributing the event details, sending invitations, gathering RSVP’s, assembling attendee lists, printing name tags, scheduling follow up and, in a perfect world, tracking business development progress with prospects who attended.

As a result, successfully managing events can be extremely complex and challenging. It requires a significant amount of effective communication and coordination. Hmmm, sound familiar? Yes, you guessed it: exactly the things that CRM does really, really well.

As with other types of communications, CRM allows the attorneys to quickly and easily contribute contacts to the firm’s central CRM contacts database, where they can be deduplicated to prevent sending multiple invitations. They can also be categorized and added to event lists, or lists can be generated by searches of contacts who meet certain criteria like: people with HR Director titles to be invited to an employment seminar or people in the Hospitality industry to be sent an invitation for a roundtable on hotel financing options.

Before the event, invitations can be emailed to relevant lists of contacts directly from the CRM system or the lists can be imported into the firm’s email software for distribution. With advanced analytics, the firm can track who received the invitation, who opened it, who RSVP’d and who actually attended. At the event, attendee lists and nametags can be printed for check-in. Activities will then be added to each contact record automatically so that end users can see the status of each invitee. 

After the event, reminders can be set in the system and assigned to individuals who will be tasked with following up with prospects or leads. With additional CRM modules or modifications, these leads can be turned into opportunities that can be assigned to individual attorneys and tracked through the business development cycle or pipeline. All with CRM. See why there is often no better tool than the CRM ‘hammer ‘when you need to nail down events …