New Business in 99 Days - Law Marketing
Beth O. Seabright, Director of Marketing at Tucker Arensberg, PC in Pittsburgh, PA, has been swamped with calls and emails about her article, Associates Develop New Business in '99 Days' Program, first published on the LawMarketing Portal.
The blog Quiver & Quill followed up with Beth in an interview by Zachary Braiker of Boston, MA:
1. Did you provide your team with additional resources to point them in the right direction? For example, did you create a list of possible speaking engagements for them to attend, or were they expected to research this on their own?
I did provide additional resources for them. I suggested publications for articles, speaking engagements, networking events and occasionally set up lunches with my contacts that I wanted my attorneys to get to know. I coached them through phone calls when they were reaching out to contacts for the first time and walked them through various business development scenarios. I helped the Associates to get to their goal in any way that I could.
2. Did you post people’s point score continuously and publicly?
I sent out the results every two weeks to our Associates and occasionally included our Managing Shareholder.
3. Did that create a competitive or a collaborative environment?
I would say more motivating than competitive. A few Associates that were not making the time for the program initially saw that other Associates were making progress toward the goal and were inspired to meet with me to put together a plan to catch up with their colleagues.
4. What was the logic behind assigning which point values to which activities?
The more difficult the task, the higher the point value. I made a list of all of the activities included in the program and ranked them from simple to challenging. For instance, meetings with me: easy - Associates received 2 points/meeting. New clients were worth 10 points.
5. And lastly, have you been able to correlate a dollar amount to the biz dev challenge–ROI?
To be honest, I did not go back and correlate dollar values to the challenge, simply because a lot of the value in the program was planting the business developing seeds with the Associates. While our more senior associates brought in new matters and clients, which I could easily correlate with a dollar value, our younger associates were setting up meetings and writing articles for the first time, activities that were not going to create instant new business.
