Fay Gillott believes internal marketing is as important as external marketing. Particularly so in the case of law firms and barristers chambers. In fact she goes so far as to say the success of your external marketing depends on getting the internal bit right.
I caught up with Fay during
the Hay Festival so I had a good opportunity to quiz her about her 20 years’
experience as head of operations and business development in legal
businesses. (In her time she has covered a variety, including a
silver circle law firm, a patent attorney and two sets of barristers
chambers.) She is famous for leading successful revenue enhancement
and change management programmes, so when she offers her pearls of wisdom on
the practical and tactical points that really make a difference between “nice
in theory” and “success in reality”, you listen!
“The markets for legal
services are more competitive than ever before. This means there is
a need for a professional approach to marketing and more paid-for
activity. But lawyers are “on a journey” to understand this.” [Nice
euphemism Fay]. “Those who "get it", use marketing effectively, but
with others you need to work hard to bring them along with your
thinking. Internally lawyers put the barriers up: advertising is
tacky, they say, and social media is not just tacky but dangerous
too! It takes quite some persuasion to show that if these
communication channels are used the right way, they are completely capable of
communicating messages about the business’s expertise, imparting knowledge and
offering something serious and valuable, in a way that is wholly
consistent with a top law firm / chambers brand.”
I was particularly keen to
hear Fay’s thoughts on how the rise of social media as a mainstream channel is
shaking up the professional services marketing mix, given the study on this
topic Kysen is currently working on with New Law Journal.
“Many lawyers don’t yet
accept social media as a fact of business life. Some still dismiss
it as merely something that students do, not believing that it projects a
professional image. And with some the resistance is not just to Twitter and
Facebook, but LinkedIn too. More are comfortable with LinkedIn, it
has to be said, and some get professional help with their profiles and use
their LinkedIn accounts for creating a regular blog. But Twitter is
seen by many as a scary frontier to be avoided altogether. So you
can see how much work there is to do in a firm or a set, to convince lawyers
that a properly managed social media stream is necessary for the business,
before you even get on to what they might do as individuals to support the
corporate channel, eg posting and tweeting themselves.”
This social media example is
just one illustration of how the success of internal marketing directly impacts
the effectiveness of the external effort: with everyone engaged and working
together with the central marketing team, the traction in the external
marketplace is going to be so much more. You can extrapolate from
the following and apply the same principles across all the other areas of the
marketing mix…
“Time needs to be set aside
and sessions arranged to present the planned approach for how the business is
to engage with their audiences through social media, using reasoned arguments
and lots of evidenced examples as to why it is important and why the particular
approach has been chosen. It needs to be an interactive session, so
people engage properly, as this encourages buy-in. These sessions
also need to cover what the role of individuals and teams is within the
programme, so everyone is clear not only what the business-wide plan is, but
what their own role is within this. And of course, very importantly, support
needs to be offered, to skill up and encourage those individuals and teams as
they give to the programme what is being asked of them.
“Once you’ve cracked this
internal challenge, the rest of the marketing effort becomes
easier. Not only is everyone in the business clear about what they
need to do, but also the more understanding they have of the rationale behind
the strategy of the professionals they employ, the more lawyers will listen to
them and let them get on with their job! The sum total of all of
this is that the marketing actually happens, rather than being
half-done. Lawyers are always keen to ask about Return On Investment
in marketing. To my mind, the most important factor in maximising
the ROI, is making sure that that the marketing activity prescribed in the
strategic plan actually happens in real life!”
From my own experience
working 12 years in-house in law firms, I have to say I completely
agree: at the end of the day, strategy is delivered through people,
and particularly so in a legal business. This is why investing time in making sure
everyone is clear about the strategic plan for developing the business, and
their role within it, will reap dividends.
***
***

On a
serious point, she went on to point out what it says about viral memes. This story was
broken by a small local radio station and was soon livestreamed and was
trending on Twitter (#mprraccoon) – all major news outlets covered it around
the world (which is mad). It's interesting, she says, how the news agenda
is set more than ever by what the people want, rather than what newspapers
think people should know about.
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