Building a list of contacts and turning them into meaningful relationships is your key to long-term prosperity. A steady flow of good work is your ultimate goal.
Unless you are lucky enough to be given work endlessly and have been promised the continuance of this good luck in perpetuity, you need people to trust you enough to give and refer business to you.
To achieve this goal, your strategies have to include retaining and growing existing clients, and acquiring new ones. The most critical action you can take is to curate a list of meaningful contacts. You need to become a life-long “contact curator.”
Curating contacts is about caring for the soul of you and your firm’s business. It’s about building a list of contacts you curate into meaningful, interactive, and giving relationships.
This column is the first part in a series to help you develop and maintain a high-performing contact list. The parts of this process include: building a list, sorting the list, planning activities, doing the activities, following-up, and tracking progress. This month’s column will address how to build a list of contacts.
Starting a list of contacts
Before the extensive and sophisticated use of client relationship management solutions (or contact databases) by law firms, most lawyers were left on their own with their Rolodexes and black books. A new associate was at the mercy of either developing their list from scratch or relying on the goodwill of a senior partner.
Today – life is beautiful if you’re at a progressive firm. You can visit your marketing people, or if you’re lucky enough to have a shared and accessible, firm-wide, user-friendly CRM system, you can dive right into a starting list in seconds.
For this column, I am assuming you know what area of law you want to practise. If you do have a CRM system, then you can ask your CRM system to search and export a starting list of contacts based on your desired criteria. Most law firms’ CRM systems will not only have existing clients in the database synchronized with their time and billing systems, but will have merged everyone’s e-mail contact lists as well.
If your system is really good, it will allow you to keep your new list in the CRM “tagged” to you so you can work with it in the system and let it track all of your actions and notes. And, it will automatically update your list with current financials and actions that other people take on your identified contacts.
This is a really important shift in how you need to think about contacts today if you are at a firm with more than a few lawyers. Yesteryear was all about hoarding business and eating what you kill. Today, survival is about collaboration and leverage. If you’re not firm-first oriented and thinking about leveraging and cross-selling, fewer and fewer people will hire you or your firm!
If you don’t have a good firm contact database, then you have to start with your own e-mail database and choose the contacts that meet your desired area of practice and other criteria you have.
Supplementing your initial list of contacts
Your initial list consists of clients and contacts you already know. You can supplement your list with external contacts over time. I am a huge advocate of starting slow and growing. It is enough to start with contacts you have selected from your own internal sources and get going to the next stage. The below suggestions to append your list shouldn’t be a reason to stop you from going to the next stage with your initial list.
To find more contacts over time you can:
• Buy lists from industries that touch your area of law (there are actually lists of lists that help you find the right list!);
• Use free ranking lists your local business journals manage and promote;
• Join some relevant LinkedIn groups that give you permission to contact their members and use their membership lists;
• Ask senior lawyers;
• Attend networking events and collect business cards;
• Join relevant associations;
• Volunteer in your community in areas that your potential clients and referral sources are also involved in;
• Join your local bar association and chapters;
• Take advantage of your firm’s events, seminars, and other meetings; and
• Any other way that allows you to find people who can give or refer you the business you desire.
Information to keep on each contact
If you do have access to a CRM system, or even if you are using a standard e-mail system, it probably has a range of fields that are populated with the basic information such as name, title, organization, and contact information.
To be useful, you need to also have fields to track more information that will help you sort your contacts into meaningful groups so you can more efficiently develop communications for groups of similar contacts.
Other types of fields of information you should consider keeping for each contact may be: information on the contact’s business and industry, who else knows them in the firm, and any relevant financial information from your time and billing database if they are a client. You can be creative and add fields for their legal needs, business needs, etc. Some people/firms track many, many things. In the banking industry, I saw one institution that had over 1,600 fields for each client.
Most importantly, you want a place where you can keep notes on the activities you have undertaken with each contact. You want to create a contact business development process with clear stages and track how you are progressing on them.
Moving from contacts to relationships
Once you have your initial list of contacts, information on each, and a place to enter and track your progress, it’s time to start sorting the list, planning activities, doing the activities, following-up, and tracking progress. Please come back next month for part 2, “Be a contact curator: sorting for success.”
