Lead with Purpose.

• Author: Roach, Betsi
• Position: LMA NEWS

The world of business development and client service has changed. The buying path for potential clients is no longer linear. As a result, the approach and necessary competencies of business development and client service professionals must adapt.

Released in April 2016, the Body of Knowledge, created by the Legal Marketing Association, succinctly identifies that necessary shift in approach within the business development and client services domains. Today, an essential competency of client services professionals is to identify and react to external clients' needs, based on each client's unique personality, work style and area of practice.

What elevates your potential to advance is identifying multiple ways to build trust with clients, such as setting standards for responsiveness, understanding business priorities and points of sensitivity. Trust, as you may recall from my last column, is one of the three nonbreakable requirements for building loyalty, according to James Kane's "Science of Loyalty."

Kane says a sense of purpose is also critical to establishing loyalty. Your purpose is much more than the exchange of money for services. For a law firm, that purpose could be to become partners with clients by providing value-added solutions and insights, for example. More than anything, firms must be clear about their purpose and commit to follow through on delivering on that purpose with every relationship in every moment. It is through trust and...