In B2B sectors like corporate law, successful client pursuit requires personalization.
The very best client developers aren’t used car salesmen. They don’t blast clients with generic insights and messages. Rather, they
- get to know their clients,
- understand each client’s business and industry,
- know the issues keeping the client awake at night,
- follow the share price and the quarterly announcements,
- notice when something newsworthy happens.
Most important, they take proactive action: rather than waiting for clients to contact them, they reach out with valuable insights and resources that speak to that client’s needs of the moment.
It’s easier said than done.
Personalization is hard. Doing it well requires a lot of effort: scanning current news for relevant developments, determining which clients are affected, researching the firm’s relationships, finding the firm’s most relevant insights and experts, drafting the right language, etc.
That research requires information that typically lives in multiple systems: CRM, finance, relationship tracking systems, publication databases, partner bio databases, email history, etc. Each of these systems has its own user interface, its own ways of organizing information, sometimes even its own sources of data. Navigating them individually can be frustrating; navigating all of them at once is overwhelming.
This is a classic connect-the-dots problem.
Law firms have spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours on CRM and other technology systems that collect client data. Those systems do a really good job of collecting data that’s relevant to client pursuit. They have names, titles, locations, email addresses, maybe even reporting relationships. They know know the articles clients read, the events clients attend, the RFPs clients put out. They know which partners know which clients, who has emailed whom, who has met with whom, and so on.
The dots are there, but the dots themselves aren’t enough.
Client insight—and, more important, client outreach—requires firms to connect those dots. That’s still an intensely manual exercise. That’s why most BD teams (especially the good ones!) tell me they are under constant pressure from their colleagues to deliver more. What they do is critically important, but the way they do it doesn’t scale.
It's a problem that’s tailor-made for Generative AI.
AI can connect dots with a speed and accuracy that that human beings can’t touch. AI has infinite time to read the news. It has the patience to digest all a firm’s publications and recall them down to the most specific point. It can instantly memorize every client and prospect a firm has. It can visualize the complex web of relationships and interaction touchpoints between clients and partners. It can effortlessly toggle from one system to the next, assembling a holistic view of clients and their relationship to the firm.
...AI can spot patterns across different systems.
Most important, AI can spot patterns across these different systems. It can identify, for example, the companies who may be affected by an announced change to U.S. banking regulations. It can immediately tell which of those companies are not active clients, and who a firm knows at those companies. And it can draft personal emails to those prospects linking to the firm’s most relevant insights and experts.
These capabilities position AI to fundamentally transform the way firms approach pursuit, client engagement, and the distribution of thought leadership. Specifically, there are three things that AI will do to dramatically enhance both productivity and effectiveness:
- Shift client pursuit from reactive to proactive. AI will monitor news sources, capital markets, regulatory announcements, court rulings, etc. and identify opportunities to engage specific clients on the topics that are top-of-mind for them (or should be).
- Turn a cloud of client data into a drop of action. AI will finally allow firms to connect the dots across client touchpoints and systems to make better decisions about whom to contact and how to go about it.
- Shift the distribution model from broadcast to narrowcast. AI will allow Marketing/BD teams to move from one-size-fits-most websites and newsletters to highly targeted distribution, on which the firm sends each client its most relevant insights related to that client’s unique needs.
The holy grail of marketing—not just in law but in every industry—is one-to-one engagement.
Over the past two decades, firms have made heavy investments in CRM technology and process designed to seize that grail. They’ve mostly been disappointed. Instead of a holy grail, they find themselves today with a mountain of data that they struggle to comprehend, much less act on in any strategic way. AI will change that by bridging the gap from data to insight and--most important of all--to action.
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Formerly with leadership positions at PeopleLinx, McKinsey, and Socialtext, Michael Idinopulos is the Co-Founder of MyMai. Connect with him on LinkedIn. Follow his latest writings on JD Supra.
