Key Client Programs (also known as Strategic Account Management or SAM programs) help your firm focus the clients who generate the most revenue or have the highest growth potential. In this article, we'll expand on the concept of Key Client Programs, and show you how to run them on Nexl!

A Key Client Program helps law firms further develop their relationships with their most important clients, by ensuring they receive a proportional amount of time, attention, and resources. Having a strategy in place to maintain great relationships with key clients helps to guide consistent business development efforts and define critical steps towards keeping key clients happy with your firm and its services.

Key Client Programs are important to help law firms create stronger client relationships, and ultimately increase firm revenue by expanding the amount of business key clients provide.

A Key Client Program helps to create alignment between lawyers and their clients, which then builds stronger relationships on both an individual and institutional level. By creating both internal and external alignment, law firms increase the efficiency of their cross-practice collaboration surrounding the firm's most important accounts, and improve the overall client experience.

An aligned law firm is open and transparent firm that prides itself on taking accountability and ownership. By creating accountability and ownership around the steps required to maintain strong client relationships, firms gain a sound commercial, proactive approach to their client development.

Nexl’s platform has features specifically designed to run Key Client Programs. The goal for law firms is to gain a birds-eye-view of the overall trends in their key relationships, and to understand where there might be opportunities for cross-serving or expanding those relationships.

Here you’re able to name and describe your Key Client plan, and link the project to Microsoft Teams for seamless integration. The description field reviews the overall business development strategy and explains how the program will be run at a high level.

Nexl allows you to create firm-wide projects or to build a custom team to manage your sector initiatives. By adding individuals to the project, it creates ownership and transparency, clearly establishing who will be involved. Once the team is added, your project space is ready for collaboration and your Key Client Program is ready to begin!

An important step for any project is setting SMART objectives. A SMART objective is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These objectives break down the larger Key Client Program goals into measurable outcomes that will demonstrate success.

Tasks break the Key Client Program down even further by defining each step necessary to achieve each objective. Tasks keep your team on track and focused by ensuring each person knows what they have been assigned, providing an additional level of transparency and accountability.  

Here you can stay on top of your opportunities by adding them from within the Project module. Opportunities assigned to specific lawyers will automatically be added to their individual opportunity board, as well as to the firm-wide list of opportunities. Tracking opportunities associated with key clients adds an additional layer by identifying concrete business opportunities and projected revenue. And since Nexl is purpose-built for law firms, you can also track both inbound and outbound referrals.

Within the Project space you can create both Contact-based and Company-based client lists for multi-level tracking and transparency. With Company-based key client lists, you can monitor engagement with a key client on an organizational level, to get a complete picture of your firm's overall relationship with the client. With a Contact-based list, you can get insights into individual relationships and define concrete steps to improve.

Nexl’s company records offer a wealth of information on all Key Clients, such as any key contacts within a company and the recent engagement of each client. You can also track the overall trend of each relationship and the marketing/business development activities that have taken place.

On top of all these incredible functions, lawyers can work on Key Client Program directly from their email with Nexl's Outlook Add-In. And with such incredible insights about key client relationships right in your inbox, it's never been easier to execute on Key Client Programs and grow your revenue!