Using relationship intelligence for strategic client development.

• Author: Alltop, Bruce

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As most law firm marketers know, getting a handle on the thousands of valuable relationships your firm has with current and prospective clients can be quite challenging. Larger firms, especially those with attorneys spread across multiple cities and time zones, have an even tougher time at managing and leveraging this information.

It's not simply a matter of finding out who your firm knows, but it's analyzing how well they know a particular contact and understanding what role that contact plays in the decision-making process at his or her organization. Perhaps, even more importantly, it's about discovering which key influencers and/ or decision makers within our clients and prospective clients' organizations that we don't know. It's at that point that we can begin developing a strategy to broaden and deepen relationships with that particular client/prospective client company.

Choosing a Solution

Prior to investing in an Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) solution, we did what most firms did to track down important relationship information: We sent "Request For Information" emails to "All Attorneys" with the requisite "Please!?" asking "Who knows whom?" This method was time-consuming and inefficient for a firm our size, so we researched ERM solutions that would automatically search and rank the most valuable relationships our firm had with existing clients and prospects.

After an exhaustive search, Holland & Knight chose Hubbard One's ContactNet for our ERM solution. We soon recognized that few products existed that could easily pull relevant relationship information together and also rank it. We needed an easy-to-use solution that everyone at our firm could employ to conduct searches and find the data they needed. Of course, it was important that the product easily integrated with our existing technology systems, like CRM, and could grow as we grow.

Privacy and Relationship Sharing

Sometimes other law firm marketers ask me about privacy when it comes to ERM systems, and whether our attorneys or partners have any aversions to sharing relationship information with their colleagues. Indeed, privacy was a big concern, but information sharing has not been an issue as it relates to ERM. We attribute that to many factors

First, our firm has a collaborative culture that is conducive to sharing knowledge and information with one another. We understand that we cannot operate in silos if we're going to be successful...