Q&A: Paul Brent

SETTING THE STANDARD

An avid opponent to the view that ‘law firms cannot sell’, Paul Brent discusses Boyes Turner’s approach to direct sales and boosting business relationships. Interview by Lucy McNulty.

What brought you to Boyes Turner?
Following a degree in Economics I spent the 1990s developing a broad set of skills and experience. By the end of the decade I had been an accountant at PriceWaterhouse, got an MBA from Harvard, been a strategy consultant at business solutions consultancy CSC as well as heavily involved in merger and acquisition in the City. I was conscious that this was all great experience, however, it was clear that it was time for me to focus on a particular industry and put what I had learned into practice.
I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the options. The ‘dot com’ arena looked highly attractive. There was a huge buzz and certainly lots of money to be made if you had the right idea. But in the end, it was just a little too much like the Wild West. I had also been aware of the changes happening in professional services and specifically the legal industry for some time. It looked like a really interesting environment and the fact legal marketing was still a relatively new profession was a huge attraction.
My first role was at Eversheds integrating the firm’s UK business development and strategic planning – a really great firm which still has a huge amount of underlying potential. By 2001, I had been head hunted by Osborne Clarke to become their first head of strategic analysis. This was a new role and focused on putting in place the firm’s first sector-strategy as well as new product development, tendering and coaching partners in client relationship management (CRM) and key account management. A disagreement over a proposed knee-jerk pricing response to the ‘dot com’ bust and a rapid drop in business saw me leave for New York. I spent two happy years there working as an independent consultant with three US law firms. The focus was on developing their European and UK operations, blue chip client acquisition, securing relationships and cross-selling. It was a highly enjoyable and successful time but I eventually came to realise that I wanted a full-time role back in the UK. However, it had to be with the right law firm – one that had significant latent potential and would at the same time give me the freedom to put my ideas into practice and specifically put a proper marketing-led sales function in place.
There were three firms in the UK that fitted the bill. I approached all of them directly explaining what I wanted to do, what it would cost and the results they could expect. Two weeks after meeting with Andrew Chalkley the chief executive officer (CEO), at Boyes Turner, as well as most of the firm’s 25 partners, I was their first marketing director. That was six years ago.

What changes have you implemented since joining the firm?
At the time law firms were, and indeed many still are today, very reactive in their business development strategies. Most tend to defer to lawyers’ ideas and demands on the assumption that they know best and also have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve and the best ways to do this. Very few firms focus (enough) on return on investment (ROI) and sales. My main objective when joining Boyes Turner was, therefore, to set up a ‘direct sales’ campaign which would bring in select blue chip clients that would provide multi-service work at premium rates.
Every good salesperson knows selling is a numbers game and failure is a natural part of the process. This is a major psychological issue for lawyers who have spent most of their training and all of their careers winning. Fundamentally, they are uncomfortable with the idea of selling and it is much easier for them to focus on racking up billable hours. The upshot is that even those lawyers who actually go on and develop sales skills rarely put them into practice and when they do they haven’t invested anywhere near the required amount of time, effort and practice to turn them into effective sales people. The result is that law firms that have tried to turn their lawyers into sales people have, at best, an amateur sales force which produces, at best, amateur results.
The direct sales programme we established was designed to take the lawyer out of the sales process as much as possible. In fact it is completely owned, run and managed by marketing, with marketing professionals researching, approaching and finally meeting with potential clients – together with the most appropriate partner or lawyer who is shown off as ‘the product’. Our firm is unique in using full-time sales professionals to run the meetings which follow a very simple format and start with getting the potential client to talk about how they have used lawyers previously, and focus on developing a shared-way forward.
Out of a target list of 30 organisations, we expect that two to three potential clients will convert within a week and five or six within six months. Following conversion a cross-selling programme is put in place with the aim of securing the relationship and protecting it from competitors. The clients that have been brought in within the last 18 months or so have produced over £500,000 worth of fees with an ROI of just over 2,000 per cent.
In addition to launching the direct sales programme an internet strategy that is recognised as one of the industry’s most successful business development tools was put in place. In the space of three months in 2007, we built ten of the legal industry’s most content-rich, search engine optimised websites and put in place associated ad-word campaigns for each. This has boosted our online presence and countered the declining effectiveness of offline advertising. It has also been combined with an aggressive communications strategy that has seen us become first port of call for discussion on specific work areas that we want as well as building exclusive referral relationships with key media. It is a move that helped prepare the firm for the introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA) by protecting our private client services from potential competitors like Tesco, Co-op and all those organisations that have large affinity customer bases.

Did you have any problems in implementing these initiatives?
Before making any changes at the firm I made sure that all of the key stakeholders knew what I was doing, the reasons why and what the likely results would be. This was essential to ensure that I had their support and confidence and that I would be left alone to get on with it.
When I joined the firm in 2003, the marketing team was lacking in expertise and structure. Within 18 months I had built the team I required and put the infrastructure in place. The new recruits included a business analyst, a communications manager, a CRM specialist and a full-time events, seminars and advertising professional – four of the five key skill sets I believe every law firm marketing department needs. The other one is full-time sales capability.
Convincing the lawyers that my plan, and direct marketing and sales in particular, would work was a challenge. But the way I did it was to fight my corner and externalise as much of the cost as possible. We did this by outsourcing the direct marketing and approaching of clients to a telemarketing boutique, which we pay on a results-only basis. The next step was to make sure that all successes were communicated to the firm at all levels. There is absolutely no point in being shy and hiding your light under a bushel if you are a legal marketer. Believe me, very few lawyers will go out of their way to sing your praises so it is up to you to communicate your successes and to do so continuously.
Building and maintaining credibility is particularly key when working in this industry. Unless you can argue your case coherently when challenged, you are not going to be in it for very long. You have got to have the balls to be able to make a change. Those who don’t will simply not last.

How has Boyes Turner sought to optimise marketing structure within the firm?
We have built the firm’s marketing departments on an ‘agency’ basis. That is to say, we drive the firm’s marketing, we focus on acquiring the best clients and we then assist other teams and other departments in their networking and second-tier marketing activities. To that end, we have a five-member marketing team consisting of individuals who specialise in face-to-face sales, web-based new client acquisition, cross-selling, communications and events and advertising. You could triple the size of the business and you wouldn’t need any more marketers.
ROI defines our team. We can prove the financial value of everything we do, whether it’s an advertising campaign, a seminar or our direct sales process, which means we can prove our value for money. Every month we report the ROI that we have created. We report on the progress of the direct sales strategy, on the effectiveness of the website, on the awards that we’ve won and lost, the tenders that we have won and lost and why, and so on. I don’t know any other law firm that is as clinical about that as we are. And it is an attitude that has won us industry recognition as a top-class marketing team.
Indeed, benchmarking is something that I am absolutely passionate about – particularly in this industry where it is hard enough to tell one law firm from another, let alone how effective their marketing teams are. I firmly believe that openness and all third-party objective evaluation is a good thing. Otherwise how do you know where you stand and what you need to improve?
At a time when marketing should be leading from the front, it is extremely disappointing that many City firm marketing directors don’t feel able to put their heads above the parapet at the Legal Marketing Awards, which have been cancelled. This is the time when they should be singing about their successes, demonstrating ROI and demanding greater budgets.
I find it wholly unsurprising, then, that there are a large numbers of legal marketers being made redundant. Put simply, if you can show the ROI that you are producing, why would a law firm want to get rid of you?
At Boyes Turner we are happy to compete on any level, with anybody, in any environment. In fact our approach to marketing is more strategic than operational and focused on looking for opportunities. We’ve always got our eyes open looking for ways in which we can help other parts of the organisation. As a result, we tend to get involved in many different areas of the firm. Most recently we have been working very closely with human resources (HR), improving the firm’s internal communications, designing an award-winning advertising campaign for The Lawyer and assisting with the graduate recruitment programme. This has resulted in significantly improving HR’s standing in the business, turning it from an ordinary HR team to a department seen as one of the best in the industry with regards to bringing talent into the organisation. Working closely with other functional departments is a great way of making the most of your firm’s marketing function, but you have to get your priorities sorted and maintain focus on your core role of client-led ROI.

What do you think are the greatest hurdles that marketing and business development departments will face?
Law firm marketers are going to have to justify their roles and demonstrate ROI if they are going to survive. I have no doubt that many will struggle but this is the challenge they are going to have to face up to if they want to work in this industry. For many this will mean developing new skills, for all it will mean taking more control over their future. There will be no room for passengers and frankly it is up to marketing directors to lead the way. Their challenge is to place marketing right at the top of the tree and secure a place at their firm’s top table.

What’s next?
Going forward, my team will get more involved in strategic recruitment and directly looking for the best lawyers to hire in the market. We also intend to enter into joint ventures both with other specialist law firms and non-legal firms (such as marketing organisations) in order to gain access to a wider client base.
Personally, taking advantage of the opportunity the LSA has created to profit share within the firm is right at the top of my agenda. I am on the firm’s management committee so it is now about taking the next step up, becoming a true part of the partnership and sharing the risk with the organisation. Because with the sharing of risk comes additional benefits such as profit-sharing. I would like that to happen as soon as possible. As far as I am aware no law firm marketer has, as yet, been admitted to partnership. It is a challenge I am more than happy to take on.

Paul Brent is marketing director at Boyes Turner. He can be contacted at pbrent@boyesturner.com