How marketing and BD can drive growth together

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Many law firms have spent time and effort on the marketing side of growth. They have built brands, hired sophisticated teams, and invested in the systems that generate leads. Business development has not always kept pace, and when the two operate separately, growth is often reactive and episodic. Closing that gap, and giving lawyers the confidence and the tools to develop business, is where the real opportunity sits.

To explore how firms can do it, we brought together three growth leaders: Deborah Farone, Consultant & Legal Industry Strategist at Farone Advisors LLCand former Chief Marketing Officer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP; Gillian Ward, Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer at Reed Smith; and Amanda Loesch, Chief Marketing Officer at Day Pitney LLP. Lynn Tellefsen Stehle, Head of Client Collaboration at Nexl, hosted the conversation.

Marketing and business development as two ends of one funnel

Gillian frames marketing and BD as a single sales funnel, which helps partners see where each activity fits and why the team is built the way it is. There's the top of the funnel, where marketing is building awareness, the middle, where BD teams are qualifiyng leads and identifying opportunities, and the bottom of the funnel, where a lawyer is talking to a client about a speicific opportunity.

The point of the framework is to get every part of the machine pulling in the same direction. "We need all of those pieces to be nicely aligned and the cogs working together to help us drop that magic revenue out of the bottom of the sales funnel," says Gillian. The catch is that those parts have to connect, and Deborah says that only works when the two functions support each other. "In order for things to work well, they really do have to work in tandem."

When firms are running their marketing and BD as two separate tracks, the easiest fix is to let the marketing data feed what happens next. Amanda says, "use that data, those analytics to drive and inform your BD pipeline so that you can have a really highly qualified BD pipeline by the time it gets to the individual lawyers."

The engagement gap starts with leadership

Lawyers will happily do marketing. They will speak, write, and show up. Business development is harder, and Deborah suggests the reluctance in how lawyers are wired, pointing to Dr. Larry Richard's research on resilience. Lawyers are low resilience professionals, so asking them to go out and win new work runs against the grain. The push has to come from the top. "Unless you have leadership really behind this, whether it's the firm's leader and the management of the firm, it's very hard as a CMO regardless of how talented you are to do the job," says Deborah

She saw what this kind of consistent leadership looks like in practice at a previous firm. "I had a wonderful presiding partner for a number of years at a firm who would say to me, we have a weekly partners meeting and at every partner's meeting, I want to bring up business development. So at every meeting, I would either bring him a statistic, a story, an example of a new technology we were using, but at every single meeting, he made sure it was on his agenda."

Give lawyers a reason

Once the culture is there, the job is to make business development feel effortless. For Amanda, that often means handing a lawyer a concrete reason to reach out. "Like, hey, this client has opened this type of email 4 times in the last 4 months. Why don't you set an informal Zoom call or host a small roundtable? It doesn't have to be overly engineered or overly complicated."

What lawyers need most is the why behind the outreach. "You want to give them the why. Why this client? Why now? Why today? What problem are we trying to solve here?," says Amanda.

Deborah adds that none of it holds together without the systems underneath. "If you don't have the right tech in place, like a great CRM and system for staying in touch with people, it's very difficult."

Treating internal collaboration like client relations

Deborah's starting point for collaboration is curiosity. "'Tell me more about it' is so important in building trust. It's not just enough for a partner to go see another partner down the hall and say, I wanna get some of your business, can we share? Instead, you have to treat it like a client. You have to be able to say, I understand your business, here's how I can possibly help you."

For Gillian, this is where marketing and business development teams come into their own. "We often know more about what the partners are doing than the partners do." Her advice for acting on it is analog: "pick up the phone, don't rely on the website, and don't rely on bios."