The Key to Business Development Success: Accountability, Consistency, and Collaboration
Times are changing, and the success of a firm is now dependent upon the collective. It takes a village, right?
Gone are the days when you could rely on your highest-hitting partner with all the connections to bring home the proverbial bacon. 🥓
Clients today want to know more about the firm with whom they work, including your young associates, and you want to provide mentorship opportunities for your greener attorneys to learn the ropes of soft skills that bring in new business. They are the future of your firm.
Helping your firm meet business development initiatives builds a bigger book of business for your firm and promotes a culture of growth and opportunity that is an absolute must if you want to acquire and retain top legal talent.
So, how do you cultivate business development prowess in your firm? It's all about accountability, consistency, and collaboration. Let's get to it!
Accountability in Business Development
Holding employees accountable can help you accomplish your business objectives... that's a no-brainer, right?
When people understand their obligations, they can work better and more efficiently. Certain employees need heightened supervision, making it important to monitor how you and your team complete BD duties. But HOW you monitor your employees' progress on business development initiatives is important.
Remember how we mentioned that ever important firm culture? The processes you have in place to gauge and track success not only directly affects your bottom dollar and the business brought into the firm. Implementing accountability in a positive way (instead of a "Big Brother" breathing down your neck kind of way) is key!
A proper system will assist internal marketing and business development professional service teams and their attorneys in more ways than one. The ability to track efforts and time and spot inefficiencies is how you win big on building business and growing the accountability aspect of your firm's culture - without making anyone feel overwhelmed or micromanaged.
By tracking project progress, your team members can stay focused and build the behaviors that make business development second nature.
Employees are able to learn responsibility as well as the ability to apply them to virtually any job. Having a system of accountability in place is the first step to a positive company culture of rainmakers.
Consistency in Business Development
"The best laid plans of mice and men..."
You can have all the best intentions and most brilliant BD ideas in the world, but they are dependent upon consistently working to reach the end goal.
A lack of consistency in business development breaks down great initiatives and can become burdensome to an entire firm, even if it's just one single employee who is failing to stay consistent in their efforts to drive business for the firm.
One shortfall turns into a big one that compounds and breeds malaise around the tasks that grow business. On the other side of that coin, however, is that repeated consistency breeds patterns and habits of success. There's another point made by Captain Obvious!
So, how do you build consistency in business development? We've talked about this before and could go on endlessly discussing the best means to drive consistent behaviors in BD, and there are tons. Our personal favorite? GAMIFICATION!
We love using gamification to build consistency in tasks, especially those that fall under the least favorite heading. Turning your business development tasks and initiatives into a challenge will excite your team and make BD lessons fun.
Hello, is there another profession more competitive than attorneys? We can confidently say no. Turn your BD plans into a game plan, and watch your team knock their goals out of the figurative park.
Collaboration in Business Development
We've talked about the firm culture and instilling consistency in your team enough that the importance of collaboration should be pretty clear. You can't expect your team to get on board and charge full steam ahead on a plan for which they had no input.
True firm success involves everyone at the firm, even your administrative teams. Cultivating plans for success and properly tracking progress in a shareable way allows everyone to take part in the firm's success, making them work harder for your team in the future.
When planning for your firm's future BD initiatives and marketing efforts, be sure to involve the entire team, giving them an actionable plan with metrics for success, and be sure to do it in a fun (and competitive) way. You'll be surprised by the level of involvement and enthusiasm you can garner for any goal you set!
We know we make it all sound so easy (hey, it's what we do), so please reach out to one of our Society 54 pleasant pheasants for more information on how to implement accountability, consistency, and collaboration in your marketing and BD efforts. We have a solution you'll love.