In my September column, I started a series of articles to help you turn your contacts into lifelong profitable relationships. Becoming a “contact curator” is a career mandatory.
The process of turning contacts into two-way, giving relationships follows a sequence of events: developing your list, sorting for success, planning and taking action, following up, and tracking progress. Last month’s article was about creating your list. This month’s article covers the next step: sorting your list effectively and efficiently.
Grouping your contacts
Funny thing in the legal industry, I have not heard of people “segmenting” or “grouping” their contacts. Very unusual. In most other industries, you take your list of contacts and group them into “like-minded groups” so you can be efficient and effective in your communications.
In law, people seem to think that everyone needs a uniquely crafted, bespoke message. Actually, everyone needs the perception of a unique message, but people are similar enough and have similar enough needs you can put them into similar groups. You can put people into “homogeneous groups” and use similar messages and actions for each group.
Think of communications on a continuum. At one end, there is “mass communication,” i.e. you develop the same message to all of your contacts. At the other end, you develop a unique message for each of your contacts. Frankly, developing unique messages for each contact is a very inefficient way to communicate with a long list of contacts. The better way is to sort your list into groups of similar contacts and message them by group. This is called “mass customization.”
It is not wrong to either find one message for everyone, or to find a hundred messages and deliver one to each contact. It is about being efficient and effective. If you had the time to develop and track hundreds of unique communications to your contacts; you would probably have a high percentage of responses. But, we don’t have this time.
On the other hand, creating one message for everyone is also not a great option because the message you develop is going to have to be pretty generic to appeal to a broad audience, and therefore weak. The best solution is to group contacts together and develop group messaging and actions.
Maybe you have heard of today’s legal buzzword, “big data”? Big data is just an old concept for finding patterns in a lot of information and translating those patterns into something intelligent and useful. Quite simply, you can think of it as finding order in chaos.
Ordering your contact chaos
So, how would you sort your chaotic contacts and group them in “like-minded groups?” The answer any really good marketer will give you is, “it depends.”
In organizations that have thousands or even millions of clients, mathematical formulae are used to determine homogeneous groups. Since you have far fewer contacts and little access to in-house mathematicians or statisticians, you are going to have to use a less empirical method. (I used to have an ex-Russian missile scientist working for me!) You have to look your contacts over and take an educated guess at how to group them. For example, you can group your contacts by:
• industry,
• legal need/practice area,
• geography,
• referral source,
• tenure with you or your firm,
• number of legal services/practice areas used with you or your firm,
• demographic profile, or,
• anything you can think of that pulls contacts together in similar profiles that you can appeal to.
There is both an art and a science to ordering your contacts efficiently and effectively.
Sometimes it is easier to figure out how to group your contacts by putting them into a table. Let’s say that you are a solicitor and your practice includes contacts that have the following similarities:
| Industry | Tenure as a client | Legal service needed |
| Construction | not a client yet less than 5 years more than 10 years |
labour builders’ lien litigation |
| Banking | not a client yet less than 5 years more than 10 years |
employment insolvency and bankruptcy merger and acquisition |
| Education | not a client yet less than 5 years more than 10 years |
labour and employment litigation construction |
From your above analysis of your contacts, you have found that your contacts:
• fall into 3 industries;
• are neither not clients yet, are clients with short tenure, or are clients with long tenure; and,
• have similar legal needs.
Being able to sort your clients by groups in some fashion gives you a huge advantage when you go to the next step in the process: planning activities and taking action.
Check out my November column to find out how you plan and implement activities efficiently and effectively for your groups and get closer to becoming a contact curator.
