On May 11, the Chicago LMA Steering Committee hosted “He Said, She Said: Moving from Marketing to Sales” featuring Beth Cuzzone, Global Practice Group leader, Marketing & BD Solutions at Intapp and Christopher Newman, Director of Practice & Industry BD at McDermott Will & Emery. Chris and Beth leveraged their combined 50 years of in-house experience in the legal industry to provide the LMA Midwest members with proven sales strategies to commercialize their legal marketing efforts.

The hour-long webinar was full of actionable tips that marketing and business development professionals can use to transform their roles from support arms to drivers of new engagements and revenue.

Missed this webinar? Read the key take-aways below or access the recording here.

Key Take-Aways

• Keep in mind that goal of any marketing activity should be to create one on one conversations. Converting those conversations to revenue leads to commercial success.
• Be disciplined about thinking about marketing activities in a way where there is a clear objective, and you can assign a conversion number to it.
• ROI numbers give marketing and business development professionals a voice in the conversation. Utilize ROI numbers to prioritize where you and your lawyers are spending time.
• Think about the multiple on your ROI and then reverse engineer how many meetings you need to obtain from a marketing opportunity to achieve your revenue goal.
• Webinars are here to stay. Use post-event outreach as an opportunity to capture meetings.
• Ensure marketing activities are tracked in a CRM system to help drive the next steps.
• Be mindful of different stakeholders who have a role in the buying decision. They all have different buying patterns and objectives and define value differently.
• A good way to help lawyers distinguish between various practices within a marketing department is to ask them to think of marketing as “one to many” (website, bios, advertising, social media, speeches, webinars, articles, blogs), sales [business development] as “one to one” (understanding a client’s needs and offering a solution), and client relations as “one to few” (building out a firm’s client relationship and keeping it growing).
• As Marketing and BD professionals look to find ways to get more proactively involved in the sales and conversion process, they should think about their roles and how they can influence people to become part of the conversation equation.
• A common sales mistake is to start a new engagement by influencing; when we do that, we miss an opportunity to build trust. Influencing begins with active listening. Allow curiosity to lead to smart questions and active listening. You can then start to understand and empathize with individuals in a way that establishes a relationship that feels natural, open, and trustworthy.

Thank you to Sara Anstoetter, Marketing & Communications Manager at BartlitBeck LLP for providing this recap – we appreciate you!