Larry Bodine blogs about a conference for sales and biz dev staff from law firms. One of the presentations made by Doug Hoover talked about creative uses of competitive intelligence to gain new clients:
Hoover said law firms should start by creating the basic spreadsheet of clients, ranked by revenue or profits, and list out columns with all the practice groups of the firm. In each cell, you plug in the revenue collected from that client. But revenues can be misleading — they can show a client as being; but this may be because the client’s revenues were down, and meanwhile the law firm has increased the share of client wallet and solidified the relationship. It should be scored as a winner. External data should be added to each cell: which other law firms represent the client and what legal work they are doing. It may turn out that a client has no work for one of your practices. You may find there is a lot of work and it’s being distributed to many firms; Hoover said, the perhaps your firm can take away from your competitors.
Hoover recounted how an East coast firm was planning to open an office in Los Angeles. It did a lot of insurance defense work and had established relationships with insurance companies. Their strategy was look up the top 10 insurance carriers clients, and find out which lawyers in Los Angeles had represented them. The firm shortened the list by cross-referencing the lawyers with any other firm clients they had worked with.” The list of lawyers is the hunting list of lawyers they were trying to poach, he said. Competitive intelligence increases your ability to penetrate a new market.
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