Chris Fritsch Named Marketing & Business Development Thought Leader in JD Supra 2018 Readers Choice Awards
Chris Fritsch has been recognized as a top Marketing & Business Development thought leader in the JD Supra 2018 Readers Choice Awards. An author, speaker and regular JD Supra contributor of marketing and business development technology insights and commentary, Chris consistently achieved high visibility and engagement among JD Supra’s legal industry readers in 2017. Chris ranked fourth among the top ten of over 400 JD Supra authors writing on marketing and business development topics for the legal profession.
Chris is President and Founder of CLIENTSFirst Consulting LLC, a 10-year-old firm that provides CRM and marketing and business development technology consulting services for law and professional services firms.
Effective eMarketing – Processes & Procedures for Efficient Email Campaigns
by Rachel Fields, Client Success Consultant
Why is it so hard for Marketing to get an email communication out the door in a timely manner? In working together with hundreds of law and other professional services firms over the last 10 years, this is one of the most frequent complaints we hear from Clients.
Law firms collectively spend thousands of hours of billable time creating content, and frequently this information is time-sensitive. In some cases, the firm that gets the information to Clients or prospects first gets hired. But if the information is not sent in a timely manner,
CLIENTSFirst Consulting Welcomes Client Success Consultant Rachel Fields
CLIENTSFirst Consulting is excited to announce a new addition to our team. Rachel Fields joins CLIENTSFirst as our newest Client Success Consultant. Rachel offers Clients more than 20 years’ experience in legal marketing and business development technology with leading law firms ranging in size from fewer than 200 to more than 2,000 lawyers. She has experience developing and maintaining a wide range of systems including multiple CRM systems, email marketing and event management technology, experience and proposal tools and websites. She also has extensive experience partnering with IT, HR, Finance and Business Development departments to develop solutions for various data and knowledge management needs.
CRM Success Steps and Strategies – Part 7: Communicate Effectively
As with any type of technology implementation, ongoing communication and training will be imperative. End users need to understand the reasons for CRM and, most importantly, what’s in it for them.
Share CRM Success & Benefits
Create benefit statements for key groups. Provide relevant information and answer questions. Get firm leaders to sign off on key communications to demonstrate support. Most importantly, when good things happen, share successes.
What’s Your CRM Appeal?
Additionally, as marketers, we all know that a bit of branding can make anything (even CRM) more appealing. Come up with a theme for the rollout – and don’t be afraid to have some fun.
The Business Development Trickle Effect
Drip… drip… drip… That little drop of water trickling down the sink drain often seems pretty insignificant. But over time, those small drips add up. In fact, one drip per second is actually 86,400 drips in a day. In a year, a few little drips here and there can add up to between 500 and 2,000 gallons of wasted water. Now that seems a little more significant – especially if you’re the one paying the water bill.
Little Efforts Can Produce Big Results
It’s the same with business development. Little things can mean a lot. You don’t have to try to do lots of big things.
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.
Pounding Out Communications with the CRM Hammer
When it comes to issues with firm communications, the CRM hammer hits these challenges, well… right on the head. CRM is an excellent tool for helping a firm plan and execute marketing campaigns and distribute all types of communications.
First, CRM allows all of the professionals’ contacts to flow into the system directly from Outlook, which means there are very few changes to their business processes and they don’t have to use – or be trained on – new software. Then, CRM systems provide tools to allow contacts to be more quickly and easily standardized and deduplicated.
A Bucket of CRM Nails
Law firms often have buckets of issues that are particularly ‘pointed’ and for which there may simply never be a substitute for the trusty (or some might argue rusty) old CRM hammer. These types of issues come in many varieties, but they almost always involve communication, coordination, collaboration, Client service or, most importantly, business development.
Over and over again, I hear marketing professionals and attorneys complaining that they invested a significant amount of money in this or that CRM system and all they got was a mailing list or a ‘glorified Rolodex’. To address this complaint,
Eat Your CRM Vegetables
Since we’ve just talked about– and walked – the CRM Treadmill, let’s keep the health-y CRM metaphor rolling.
Your mother always told you to eat your vegetables… whether you liked them or not… because they were good for you… and they’d help you to grow up big and strong. Right? Well it’s the same with CRM.
Sometimes, to achieve CRM success, we have to do things that we don’t like because we know they will ultimately be good for us:
- Secretaries typically don’t like taking the time to make sure that all of their attorneys’ contacts are correct and complete,