Increased competition is driving the need for differentiation, and sector programs have become an increasingly popular business development strategy to generate added value, create horizontal, cross-practice and cross-office collaboration and a more client-centric approach to delivering legal services.
There are obvious benefits to such a sector-based growth strategy:
Differentiate your firm's service offering by emphasizing specialized, sector-specific expertise
Build up and institutionalize sector-specific insights and best practices
Take a client-centric approach and make your firm more recognizable to specific market segments
Identify potential conflicts of interest
Sector strategies also allow marketing teams to create much more focused and relevant go-to market messaging, offering the lawyers better entry points and content to starts business development conversations.
Nexl offers a couple of interesting features that will allow you to manage your sector-strategy.
Feature 1: Create sector-specific company lists
The obvious starting point for any sector-based strategy is identifying your strategic sectors. Firms need to take stock of their current footprint across all business sectors, and define which sectors will be prioritized above others going forward. There can be different reasons to select priority sectors, but an important consideration will of course be the future growth potential within certain verticals.
Nexl's automated enrichment process means that many of the companies in your CRM will have been placed in a certain sector. So, you can use a filter to quickly select for specific industries. Note: If the options in Nexl's list of sectors do not include your desired sector, you can always use tags to achieve the same result (in this case filter on the tag, rather than on Industries).
You can then combine this with other filters such as "Company Type", "Location" or "Known by" to get to a very specific view. In this list, you have key information on these companies, such as the number of contacts, recent engagement, and tasks, upcoming meetings or opportunities, as well as the last moment of interactions.
You can then go through this filtered list of companies to add them to a sector-specific company list.
Feature 2: Identify and manage sector-specific prospects
Nexl is a great tool to quickly identify other targets within a specific sector or industry. By using the "Prospecting" tab, you can quickly see companies within a certain Industry with whom the firm is not interacting. You can "Add" that company to your list of Prospects from where you can manage it further.
Once your prospect has been added there are a range of actions you can take to start managing the prospect more actively:
Assign a "Relationship Partner": this partner will be responsible for developing the target and coordinating business development initiatives.
Create tasks for this Prospect to members of the team and follow up to measure progress.
Add notes to provide further detail on why this is a Prospect and describe high-level objectives.
Create "Opportunities" to manage any potential opportunities for new work from this prospect.
Feature 3: Create sector-specific marketing lists
Relevance is everything when sending out Marketing campaigns. Often mailing lists are built within practice groups, but for more relevant and targeted marketing campaigns, a sector-specific mailing list can mean all the difference.
Using the same selection process as described above, it is easy to build such sector-based lists, so you can import them into your email marketing tool for your campaign.
For more information on how to create a mailing list, click here.
Conclusion
Many law firms have discovered the value of an industry- or sector-based business development strategy. But law firms also need to walk the talk and execute such strategies. Nexl can be very practical in terms of managing key prospects and clients per sector, and generating sector-specific distribution lists. If you have any further questions related to sector programs, feel free to reach out to [email protected] for more info and guidance.