πŸŽ₯ Business Development

How to execute your BD strategies in Nexl

Gillian Hood avatar
Written by Gillian Hood
Updated over a week ago

Introduction

Welcome back! In this video, we'll talk about how Nexl can help you achieve your personal business development goals.
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In our first video, we talked about Nexl's Revenue Operations Flywheel. As you might recall, the flywheel has 3 main sections: Acquire, Retain, and Expand. These are the 3 key ways you can grow your book of business.
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In this video, we'll look at each of these 3 components of business development, and show you how Nexl can help you excel in each one.

Stay-In-Touch

Let's take a look at this Biz Dev section of our menu. First, we have the stay-in-touch reminders. In our video on contact management, we went over how easy it is to create stay-in-touch reminders for your most valuable contacts, but let's do a quick recap.
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Just head to your contacts and use the search bar to find a contact it's essential to keep in touch with. Click their name to pull up the contact record. Here in this dropdown menu, you can select the frequency you want to stay-in-touch with this contact. Nexl will then monitor your interactions, and send you a notification when you haven't been in touch within your selected timeframe.
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Now's a good time to mention our notification control center, which you can access by clicking this little bell-icon in the top right. You can click on the gear-icon to find your settings, and from there you can customize which notifications you receive by email and which ones you get just inside Nexl.
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Don't forget, all of our Outlook users can also set stay-in-touch reminders directly from your inbox with Nexl's Outlook Add-In. Keep that Add-In pinned and whenever an email from an important contact comes through, take that extra second to set a stay-in-touch reminder.
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Regardless of where you set-or-get your stay-in-touch reminders, it's important to use them to take action. Don't let this become another task on the backlog list or reminder that gets ignored. Intentional actionable business development is the key to growing your book of business in the legal industry, and staying on top of your most important relationships is the key to business development.
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Actually executing this strategy, and actually taking the time to reach out to these important contacts consistently, takes just that: time.
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We know how hard it is for lawyers to make time for these kinds of things, as ex-lawyers and ex-law-firm employees ourselves. You have to be intentional and prioritize this, as something that's essential to your growth as a lawyer.
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Even allocating one hour a week to keeping up with your stay-in-touch reminders will do wonders for your ability to nurture key relationships, and to truly make an impact on your firm.

Prospecting

Now that we've talked about the retention part of the flywheel, let's talk about acquisition.
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Many firms give their lawyers annual business development plans, but very often those plans are consulted a few times in cue-one and then put away without much progress. Again, business development needs to be actionable and intentional. Enter: prospecting.
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With Nexl's prospecting module, personal BD plans become so much easier to follow up with. Let's check it out.
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When you open the prospecting section, you'll see all the companies you or your firm have identified as prospects and assigned to you. That means the company type is set to prospect, and you've been added as one of the relationship partners.
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Sometimes prospects are discovered organically, but you can also use Nexl to proactively search for new prospects that fit your ideal client profile. Let's head to the Search Prospects button in the top right to learn more.

With Nexl's extensive data enrichment databases, there's millions of company profiles waiting for you to discover.
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In this prospect search section, you can enter a country of jurisdiction, select a relevant industry, and even narrow it down by headcount to find the size of company your firm typically engages.
For each result, you have easy links to explore the company's website and LinkedIn profile for further research.
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Once you find an ideal prospect, you can head to the Action-column on the far right.
There will be two icons or links in this column. The first icon allows you to add a company to your prospects list. By clicking this icon, Nexl will automatically create a new company-record with all the insights we reviewed in our last video.
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If the company has already been added, the icon will be replaced with a View link that allows you to open the company record.
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The second icon allows you to add this company to any other list in Nexl, like a company list or project list.

Once the company record has been created, we can open it from that view link or search for it with the company type filter. When you click on the company name, you can open the company record and see whether anyone at the firm has been in touch with them, when the last interaction was, and what existing connections or new prospective contacts we can find.
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If you want this company to appear in your personal prospects list, simply add yourself as a relationship partner.
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And as we discussed in our last video, just use the Prospects tab to identify the key stakeholders you'd like to reach out to, and use the find contact details link to find their email address and create an enriched contact profile.

Cross-Selling

The third and final section of the Revenue Operations flywheel is expansion.
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It's not uncommon to find a company that's an ideal prospect for your practice group, without even realizing that another practice area has already spoken to them or even worked with them. If you see existing contacts when you open a prospect's company record, just scroll down to the bottom of the company insights tab. You'll be able to see which colleagues have connections to this company, and which practice areas have engaged them the most, so you'll know exactly who can facilitate a warm introduction for an expansion or cross-selling opportunity.

Conclusion

That concludes our lesson on how to execute the three core sections of Nexl's Revenue Operations flywheel: acquire, retain, and expand. In our next video, we'll talk about how to track opportunities and keep track of all the new potential matters you generate from your business development efforts. See you there!

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