Firm Leadership's Role in Retaining and Growing Clients

-----By: Mike Stankus, Managing Partner, Akina

The past few years have certainly been interesting and challenging. Most Law Firms have focused on careful growth management and enhancing overall profitability.

Clients continue to be more demanding and sophisticated. Initiatives geared towards lowering overall legal costs (rate "push back" and consolidation of number of firms working with) are putting extra pressure on incumbent Law firms. This pressure is expected to continue for the foreseeable future and will be particularly prevalent on more commoditized services.

Firm Leadership has no choice but to aggressively deal with this reality. One of the best strategies to deploy is a firm wide client planning initiative.

What would the impact be if your Firm's top client cut their billings to you by 40%? What if they got acquired by a company that has a relationship with your top competitor? What if they issued an RFP designed to consolidate the number of firms they work with?

To the pro-active Firms, some of these scenarios represent opportunity. Ability to take advantage of these situations is dependent upon anticipation – and planning.

Most Firms will state that they do key client planning. Our research has found that most efforts are taken at best with the primary benefit being an increased awareness of keeping key clients happy. Organizing meetings to facilitate initial plan set-up is the first step in the process. Ongoing execution of the plan, something attorneys historically struggle with, is what makes client planning work.

What should your client planning program look like?

Through researching client planning best practices utilized by leading law firms, Akina has developed list of "critical success factors" – components that must be part of any client planning program:

• Treat the client planning program as a major initiative. Assign ownership to a senior partner and develop a financial and operating plan. Client planning initiatives utilize resources and money. Make sure the program has high visibility throughout your firm. Measure the results on a monthly basis.
• Include a financial analyst (or CFO), CMO and Information Resource Director (Library) as part of the planning team. There is no more room in law firms for these various team members to act as silos. The impact each will have on helping you as leaders retain the firm's most valuable revenue sources will be critical and obvious as soon as they begin to work with you.
• Instead of creating a mission to "maximize" revenue from the client, focus on developing a "trusted advisor" relationship with the client. Reaching "trusted advisor" status typically means:
• More single sourced opportunities – less competition (lower cost of sales)
• Less emphasis on price (higher margins)
• Long term commitments (visibility into future revenue streams)
• Create an client planning program playbook that includes:
• Client plan template
• Team structures with defined roles, ownership, and expectations
• Communication plans that define when and how internal and external (client) communications will happen
• Program governance (rules of engagement)
• Realize that unique skill sets are required to develop high impact client relationships. Sometimes the attorney with the origination credit lacks the skills to grow the relationship. Create a profile of a successful client manager. Benchmark current client managers against the "optimal" and develop a program to increase skill levels.

So, to summarize, your client planning program should contain:

• Firm wide visibility and senior partner ownership
• A focus on building trusted advisor relationships NOT on maximizing revenue
• Tools, template that provide firm wide consistency
• A profile of what a client manager looks like and a training program to designed to develop skills

Read More: What are the keys to getting value out of client planning?

Other Whitepapers:

• Technology Sales People – The New Success Profile
• Diagnosing Your Revenue Generation Issues
• Building a Client Service - Minded Staff
• High Impact Returns from Strategic Account Management
• How to Steer Your Firm to Greater Revenues when you're not in the Driver's Seat
• Sales Tip – Building credibility through "Discovery" Letters
• Selling to Multiple Decision Stakeholders
• Firm Leadership's Role in Retaining and Growing Clients
• The Pursuit Drill ™: Improve Your Sales Team's Ability to Close Deals

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