an opportunity to stand out from the crowd
It’s become increasingly difficult to differentiate in our highly competitive legal market. However, there’s one relatively untapped opportunity for legal services business development (BD) teams — offer immediate and relevant commercial value to clients and targets by making an approach aligned with their current strategic goals, at the right time.
This isn’t just recognising where there’s a need for legal services. It’s about understanding the motivations driving a client’s (or target’s) decision-making process to buy legal services through their interactions with both law firms and the markets they operate in — also known as buyer intent.
Buyer intent signals should play a crucial role in effective legal services BD by expanding outreach opportunities efficiently, empowering legal teams to take action and reducing client acquisition cost and churn.
It all depends on data — how it’s being used — and a firm’s willingness to adopt and invest in new approaches.
To be completely effective, there is a need to analyse and report on a combination of historical and current qualitative and quantitative data. Everything from physical interactions to digital engagement metrics can offer valuable clues about a client’s future legal needs. In addition, external factors need to be added into the equation. Monitoring a client’s business activities — such as mergers and acquisitions or entry into new markets — will also provide useful intent indicators.
Buyer intent signals should play a crucial role in effective legal services BD by expanding outreach opportunities efficiently, empowering legal teams to take action and reducing client acquisition cost and churn.
Marrying up this data and producing something practical for use isn’t an easy process, but the benefits of getting this approach right are significant, not least as it will offer clients a more responsive and intuitive experience at the start of their interaction with law firms.
Trailblazers could experience true differentiation, increase the efficiency of new BD and build better partnerships with existing clients that go way beyond those of a transactional nature.
Does the benefit extend beyond BD? Absolutely! Using the results of buyer intent analysis for wider purpose could deliver benefits for other business services teams.
For example, integrating client intent data with financial modelling could be a highly strategic move. By identifying patterns in client behaviour, firms could more accurately create financial models that reflect anticipated demand for services.
What role does technology play in the process? The simple answer is that technology is a critical success factor. Existing technologies that record activity, interactions and relationships are readily available. However, being able to tailor data interrogation to fit cross sector, multi-jurisdictional clients with varied target personas — then deliver a personalised approach in a ‘one-stop shop’ output — requires something more.
I’m not sure that there’s a silver bullet solution, but it’s clear what the benefits are here for both law firms and their clients. My sense is that going full steam ahead on something to capture and deliver on all intent data will be an endless task, so a trial approach that initially captures a specific target audience will be my focus.
If others have a similar interest in where this could lead, I’d be open to exploring and sharing ideas to collectively enhance the process.
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