As you all know, professional services marketers and BD’s love to share and learn. In that spirit, I’ll be continuously updating this post with common challenges and solutions that I hear from my network. Check back each month for new ideas.

 “I lead the marketing team in my firm and I struggle to keep my senior BDs challenged.”

Proactively managing team members is a hard nut to crack. Not only does your management style has to change and resonate with each individual team member, you have to do this on top of your day to day technical remit. Here’s two tactics to help ensure your senior BDs are engaged and challenged:

(1) Add to their duties a responsibility around client relationship management. Specifically, empower them to have their own relationships with the firm’s clients as a means to enhance the client experience overall. Some senior BDs and their firms then feel comfortable introducing revenue targets around new business that is brought in as a result of these relationships. Apt senior BDs ready for this challenge love the client facing role and responsibilities and feel like they are contributing to the firm at a much higher level.

(2) Give them their own team or people to manage. Odds are you have too much on your plate already, so let the tier below you take some of that burden. Managing people requires a different skill and leadership capability that your senior BDs can learn from you and sharpen as they get more comfortable. 
 
 “We’re hiring a BD professional, but the candidates we’re seeing don’t have enough ‘true BD’ experience.”

The words “business development” mean something different in each firm, and sometimes even to different people in the same firm. There are also numerous ways BD is practiced and executed. For example, the preparation of proposal documents versus responsibilities around bringing new clients into the firm. Often, the gap between the candidates and hiring manager expectations is related to different definitions of the catch-all term “BD”. As a hiring manager, you need to specifically spell out what the role entails to attract the type of BD-focused professional you’re seeking. Consider these two tips:

(1) In the job description, explain the proportion of time that will be spent on each task and get specific about this apportionment. Additionally, try to define what you mean by BD. This tells the professional applying to your role exactly where the time will be spent, and that it will – in your case – be spent on true BD initiatives and projects. True BD professionals will be drawn to a role that shows it has true BD.

(2) Look at the potential of the BD professional in addition to what they have done. What I mean by this is just because a candidate hasn’t done something you were expecting, doesn’t mean that they can’t do it. Consider what happens if you hire a candidate who can do your role perfectly, where is the challenge in that role for them? Similarly, do you have the capacity in that role to expand it and grow it to accompany the candidate’s learning curve? 

“I’m a solo marketer at a small firm and I’m hungry for the ‘big law’ experience. What do I need to be aware of with this career move?”

I love working with solo marketing and BD professionals who come from smaller firms. Why? They are typically resourceful, relationship-minded and client centric professionals. They have also had to be solutions-focused in an environment within minimal marketing and BD leadership, and with little to no resources under and around them.

But I find some of the small firm solo marketing professionals in my network feel that they may not have what it takes to go up against their bigger firm peers. And yet, many big law firms seek out skills unique to smaller firm candidates.

There are certainly pros and cons to working in both small and large firms. As an eternal optimist, I focus on the pros, but I am aware of the cons. After this, my best advice to the solo marketers seeking a bigger firm is to leverage the things that make you different to your competition (not the things that make you the same). Firms like different. They embrace that perspective and seek it out. And, if you are a great cultural fit for them, then it often does not matter what size of firm you are coming from.

As a person who spent her early years in smaller firms before also getting hungry to work in the bigger firms, consider this as you contemplate your ‘big law’ move:

• As the solo marketer, you will have likely either set, or helped to set, the strategic direction of the marketing and BD effort at your firm. Think about all the consensus building you had to do for that. Use this example when interviewing to show your input and influence.
• Think about what resources you have had to use to help you do your role. For example, some of the administrative professionals, or outside vendors, or firm consultants. You will have managed those people. You can talk about your skills in delegating and managing on a shoestring budget to get results.
• Consider which partners you have worked with. (Likely all of them.) From named equity partners to executive committee partners to junior partners. Each has a different focus and a different set of BD goals. Working within all of this shows you can flex your style and capability and then execute for different causes. 

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Firms share with me each day what is happening inside their marketing and business development teams. The conversations have changed subtly over the last couple of months in particular. They are noticeably less about the technical aspects. Firms are looking for professionals who can achieve results inside of a partnership model with other valuable skills. Below I share four common themes that are emerging and are fast becoming key influencing factors to firms as they grow their business development and marketing teams further in 2019:

• A client centric approach. In the past, business developers have been hidden behind the scenes. They focused on helping their partners talk to clients about the partners’ subject matter expertise, trying to find areas that resonate. Now, business developers are heavily ingrained in the efforts of the clients of the firm and are leading client growth efforts with targeted, subject-matter driven questions and strategies to help clients problem solve their business needs. This means active listening to the firms’ clients to create a tailored dialogue. For senior business developers, this includes them having their own relationships with the firms’ clients to bring in new revenue streams.

• From order taker to innovator. Partners have shifted their mindset from what they want and expect from their business developers. For the most part, they are recognizing the specific and different expertise of their business developers and are asking them to contribute this expertise to their client growth strategies and challenges. This is different to the days where business developers were hoping to simply convince partners that they had to do BD. Partners of firms now see the value of business advisors and generating fresh ideas from client interactions (see above), to proactively issue-spot and problem solve. BDs aren’t reacting to partner-driven leads, they are instigating opportunities.

• Overcoming obstacles and achieving outcomes. Having marketers and business developers who don’t get caught up in politics or red tape, and who can quickly and easily find ways to get the important priorities achieved, are – quite simply – irreplaceable in firms right now. Let’s face it, sometimes partnerships can be challenging environments. Similarly, finding a way to cut through the busyness (a problem common to everyone) is critical to achieving outcomes. Put simply, there’s value in people who “get things done”.

• A cultural fit. The right type of BD professional who matches your team and your firms’ work ethic, value system and personalities are still right at the top of the list for firms when they hire. I’ve seen time and time again where firms will hire the professional who is a better cultural fit. If the cultural fit is right, everything else can be taught and learned. A cultural fit stays for the long term, whereas an ‘on paper’ fit will typically move after one to two years.

Why? Firms who hire based on the above typically experience a better and longer-term fit. Similarly, candidates who bring these elements into a role are quickly and effortlessly integrated, and soon become higher performers.
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