Winning in a post-ABS world

OK, so not the most exciting title ever, but this was the banner for the 6^th Annual Conscious Client Conference held at Coombe Abbey on 16 and 17 May. It was great to meet up again with David Gilroy, Sales and marketing Director of Conscious Solutions, and to meet some other members of his team as well as renewing some old acquaintances. As last year, I went along for the first day with Debby Hackney, one of my co-directors. She was slightly delayed by traffic and so (fortunately) missed the moment when another young lady delegate recognised me and came over to say hello, reminding me that we had “got drunk together at a conference” a couple of years’ ago. Not, I hasten to add, a Conscious Client Conference!

The first speaker was Nancy Slessenger of Vinehouse Essential. Her presentation was about how to set meaningful business objectives and why SMART just does not do it. Her example was Julius Caesar, who apparently always gave very clear directives although he may not have been a nice dinner guest. Objectives can be SMART but they do need to be aligned to the top goal of the organisation. They should not clash but should be joined up and cascaded down. They should not be simply agreed and then filed away for the year, but need to be objectively managed with regular updating. She made the point that objectives are not there in order to be achieved but to tell us what we need to achieve. She clearly knows her stuff. One example she gave, which I had not heard before, was of an objective to encourage teamwork – the objective is for person A to identify what they need to do themselves in order to help person B achieve their objective and then to do so.

Next up was Alistair Marshall of Alistair Marshall Consulting. He was asking what business development looked like in 2013 in a talk entitled “10 Ideas you must implement to hit your year end financial goals”. The talk was much better than the title and he was a very engaging speaker. There are challenges ahead. The old mantra was no longer true. Doing what we have always done will no longer produce the same rewards. Our financial health will be determined not only by how good we are but by how good we are at telling people how good we are. We need to get a lot better at doing this. If we do so, then this will have a massive impact on our revenue. Employee engagement is key – they cannot be dragged where they do not want to go and have had five years of nothing but bad news. We all need to be obsessed with strategy and marketing – it is selling and it is all about relationship building. Our service is never quite as good as we think it is. Our value is all about our brand and our people and both suffer in a recession – we cut back on marketing and cut back on staff development and training. We spend money on the wrong stuff. The truth is that the things that work best don’t cost a lot of money – advertising is the price we pay for being unremarkable. There are only three questions for clients – why buy at all, why buy now and why buy from you? There are a lot of very similar law firms in the real world. It is grey, woolly and nebulous. Our best people should be in contact with our clients. Would we rather have a loyal client or a satisfied client? It is well-known that the most satisfied clients are those who have experienced a service failure and who have seen it corrected – they are the most loyal by far. Think of the life-time value of a client. Identify the target clients you want to win. Have internal targets that are consistent. Have some activity targets rather than merely financial targets – as activity drives financial goals. Have client review meetings. Ask for testimonials and case studies and use them. In a recession people look for experts rather than generalists. Be an expert. Experts are seen. Experts write. Don’t be afraid to put your prices up. Avoid the commodity mindset. Oh, the 10 ideas? Well:

1. Client profile and targets
2. Client review meetings
3. Client surveys
4. Become an expert
5. Strategic ventures
6. Sales skills
7. Social media
8. Cross-selling system
9. Writing – good words get good results
10. Risk reversal – client guarantees

The last speaker before lunch was Bill Kirby of Professional Choice Consultancy. He was reviewing the merits of moving to the cloud – whether to engage with hosted IT or not. It was really a no-brainer. The security and DR aspects were now an integral part of many Government contracts. There would be reductions in terms of costs (not merely staff but also space and electricity costs), management time and scalability. Definitely a cost-effective solution. Timing would depend on where you stood in the server renewal cycle. The fact was that many firms were overspending on ICT by simply renewing existing arrangements and contracts and not looking at alternatives. There were some things to watch out for – make sure you buy plenty of data storage as you will need a lot more going forward, seek a backup of the data to be delivered to you once per month. Seek tight SLA on response times. Ask for the host to offer first call help desk. Avoid DropBox as this does not comply with Data Protection legislation as it is hosted in the States.

After lunch, Richard Sharpe of ContentETC gave a very entertaining talk about defamation and how not to get sued. He is a former journalist of some repute and has been sued in the past. He introduced the main provisions of the new Defamation Act 2013 and the welcome new defences. However, he was less happy at the diminished role for the jury. His talk included consideration of who owns the copyright in material produced in LinkedIn or FaceBook or a blog. He suggested items for inclusion in a social media policy (memo to self – check our policy next week). Remember that you can be sued anywhere – as a tweet or blog is published wherever it is read. Remember also that it you retweet or forward a message, then you become the publisher of it as well as the original sender.

Then we had Dan Fallon from Search Star who told us where Google was going commercially and how this was likely to impact on law firms in “Google & Money”. Chilling stuff. At present 94% of users click on the organic results and only 6% on the PPC ads. However, for “high commercial intent” searches, some 64.6% already click on the PPC ads. Google appear to be intent on driving out search engine optimisation and organic search results, at least for commercial searches, and to increase their revenue from advertising. Users might think that they will be getting an honest result, but in fact only those firms who are prepared to pay will achieve a ranking and those who pay the most will get the highest and Google will become a shopping destination. There was the usual discussion about PPC and about using larger and more relevant ad formats (e.g. site links, location extensions, call extensions, product extenstions). There was also some talk about re-marketing – where the adverts follow the user around the site, as Google knows where the user has been and what he is interested in. This already happens of course. I might have tweeted about Google’s apparent plan for world domination but, thinking back to Richard’s talk, felt that this would be unwise.

The final session of the day was an open forum hosted by David Gilroy. Tips on building digital relationships and the need to get the data right. Advice on client and staff surveys and benchmarking from Law-League.com. Discussion about options for taking payments online. Self-service using secureforms. Google authorship. Videos. The benefits of mobile sites and whether they should be responsive or not.

As ever, a really useful day.

By Steve Kirwan