Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy.

News

Articles and Publications:

The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without, Rain Today, September 2007

What Would a Female Superhero Do for Gender Diversity?,” American Bar Association’s Tort, Trial and Insurance Practice Section newsletter, July 2007

Suzanne Lowe contributed to: Marketing Metrics De-Mystified: Methods for Measuring ROI and Evaluating Your Marketing Effort, by Sally Handley FSMPS, President of Sally Handley, Inc.. Sally is an adjunct faculty member at Pratt Institute in Manhattan, where she teaches Marketing /Communications for design firms.

Practice Management: Re-evaluate how you evaluate your marketer (PDF), by Suzanne Lowe and Sally Glick for Accounting Today, September 2006 (also published with permission on The Marcus Letter)

New from the Expertise Marketplace Blog

In a snit: Are we getting stuck with the dirty work?

Book-title Envy

My "One Piece of Advice" for RainToday readers

What should be expected of "marketing experts"? Part VIII

Lonely on LinkedIn

Professional services offshoring: Friend or foe?

See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog

Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?)

Recent Issues

You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

Ed Gates

Gates: In 1998-99, when I was the managing partner of the firm, we engaged in some strategic planning. With Sara as a member of the committee, we worked for a bit more than a year, on what was the first firm-wide effort to undertake strategic planning. We pretty much radically changed the firm. For example, we had never had practice groups before and we decided to have six practice groups that were principally devised to keep better track of, nurture, train and develop our associate and technology specialist base. Each practice group had to develop training programs for the people within their group (and complementary with other groups’ training). Each group had to develop their own strategic plan that had to be integrated into the strategic plan of the firm overall. Each practice group was required to deliver reviews of the associates a few times a year. This was radical at the firm. We knew that making such changes would require everybody’s effort. We had in place some very specific goals. When we encountered a shareholder who was not doing something or needed to do something, it was simply a matter of reminding people that “this was part of the strategic plan.” They would say, “oh you are right.”

Over the course of the next year, this management system became so successful that, literally, people could not remember that we did not have practice groups before.

At that time, though, changing the function of marketing and/or business development was not perceived as a particular opportunity or threat. But in our 2004-2005 strategic planning process, we noticed that larger general practice firms had begun to enter into the high-tech space. They were devoting very high levels of money to business development and marketing. It was not that we felt that we were not doing enough or didn’t have enough business, because that has never been a problem of ours. What we felt was a strategic threat: that if we fell asleep at the wheel and continued marketing and developing business the way were doing in 2005, we might wake up 5 years from then and wish we had done something else.

So a major component of the strategic plan for the next 3-5 years was to create and implement a plan relating to business development.

Sara Crocker

Crocker: It was not as though we didn’t ever do any business development until we created a separate new role for it. It had been part of the marketing department’s role, along with all of the marketing, communications, PR and other responsibilities. It was one of those things that you tried to fit into the job that was already there. And it did not always get the time and effort that was needed. For the 2005 strategic plan, we tried to decide how to divide up the responsibilities between our marketing manager and me. When an incredible opportunity came up for her, she left to take over the director role at another law firm. We switched our thinking toward finding someone at the manager level who would be focused solely on business development. For the most part, Ed and I crafted the job description and how this new role would integrate with Marketing. Luckily, we found Jay Wager.

Gates: We did not know exactly where marketing ended and business development began. Sara dug in, talked with people she knew and collected articles she had read, and created a kind of menu, if you will, of what the person could do. The role was approved by the strategic planning committee. Sara and I starting interviewing people in September 2005. Our goal was to get someone in place and hard at work before the end of the year.

Jay Wager

Wager: The role (of a staff-side business development leader), on paper, is fairly common among most substantial law firms now. But in every professional organization, the culture is what really drives the perceived value of the function and what you really do day-to-day. At Wolf Greenfield, there is definitely a strategic embrace by the shareholders of business development leadership. So, with this critical “buy-in” by people on executing this role, telling shareholders that my role is “part of the strategic plan” made it very easy to introduce new initiatives. Also, Sara was extraordinarily supportive of all this. So even though there are a lot of people who have a similar role on paper in law firms, I believe that not many of them have as much influence on people’s day-to-day activities and thinking about business development as I do here.

Crocker: It was a little bit of a challenge to communicate with people to help them realize what were Jay’s areas of responsibilities and what were mine vs. the rest of the department. Most people are confused about the division between marketing and business development. But it was a learning curve that any person has.

Wager: I came in here extraordinarily excited about the opportunity. I had great ideas to get started. But every firm has its own pace in terms of embracing change. I had to realize that I could not roll out everything at the same time, with everybody falling in line and immediately seeing all the value. I have been here almost two years now, and everything I planned to do I have started doing, if not completed some of it. There has not been any resistance to change. But it has taken longer than I anticipated.

Gates: On the practical level, the most common thing that happened in the early going is that people were not adept at business development. I think they thought that Jay was just going to do it for them. (“Oh now that Jay is here, a new client will show up salivating over me!”) The most interesting human dynamic is their understanding the difference between Jay’s role and their own role. Has it been a bump in the road? No, just human nature. It is a process. For anybody undertaking this, I cannot imagine they would not face something similar.