Last year, I wrote an article about how legal marketing teams should use data analytics to stay ahead of the game, and in this article, I’ll discuss how development teams sales reps can apply similar data analytics in their daily workflow to stay ahead of the curve.
Currently, large amounts of data can be found in multiple sources, which disrupts the industry.
What data is available to your business development team?
The available data useful for your business development team to collect and analyze can be divided into three categories: internal data, industry data and individual data.
Internal data: Data you collect from your internal organizational processes. This uses billing, time tracking, and customer lifecycle research to identify trends with your existing customers and provides the team with insights to build on those relationships and secure potential new ones.
Industry data: Information collected by third parties to identify industry trends and patterns such as the Lexology Analytics Toolkit. Lawyers can use industry data to identify potential new clients, demonstrate expertise, stay ahead of competitors, and position themselves well in the industry.
Individual data: Information you collect from web analytics such as Google Analytics, your landing pages, email campaigns and cookies. Individual data will provide information about your website performance, content performance and visitor activity.
By using data from these three categories, business development teams will have access to the customer intelligence data they need to stay ahead of the game. Your business development teams need to take a data-driven approach and figure out what data they need to improve day-to-day operations, better serve your customers, win new business, and stay ahead of your competition!
So what is this data-driven approach? It is one that encompasses the use of data and analytics to gain business insights, giving your team the competitive edge needed to have a successful business development approach. It’s an approach that reminds you that value isn’t just data, but also what you do with that data.
From better understanding your customers’ concerns and getting them to solutions faster, to personalized responses to RFPs, a data-driven approach offers many benefits to your business development team. And, in this article, we are going to discuss some of the major benefits.
Build stronger relationships with your customers
Business development teams can tap into the customer intelligence data available to them to better understand their customers, understand those customers’ concerns, and gather insights into their specific challenges.
With this understanding, business development teams can effectively prepare for customer meetings and respond to customer concerns, presenting themselves as aligned with customer needs. A better understanding allows the team to find solutions for customers faster, improve the customer experience and increase credibility.
Identify and target potential customers
Using data analytics, business development teams can provide a personalized, data-driven approach to targeting leads, but can also identify an audience that may not even know the business.
By also using data analytics, business development teams will not only be able to identify potential customers interested in their business, but by analyzing certain data will be able to determine the interests, challenges or concerns of those target customers. This insight gives the team the ability to have a more personalized approach, the ability to create client-specific information reports covering key issues affecting the client’s industry or domain, as well as legal topics of news.
Additionally, business development teams may also be able to access data that tells them what interests their current customer base, which could lead to new business opportunities – for example, a focus on a particular area of work.
Create a first come approach
Using industry data, business development teams can analyze what is happening in the industry, identify trends, determine the popularity and profitability of certain practice areas. Teams can react faster to market changes, predict future trends and detect new business opportunities faster, creating the opportunity to gain market advantage.
Law firms can better target their business development efforts to those who are most likely to need their services, growing practice areas and the potential clients this may attract, and they can quickly identify trends downward in specific industry practice areas and adapt strategy.
Support strategic decision making
Business development teams can give lawyers all the information they need to make informed decisions about the types of cases they want to advance or pursue and enable law firms to make decisions about their approach to the market .
Using data analytics, the team can work with lawyers to analyze trends in certain practice areas and determine their profitability and popularity. This will provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions about clients and the types of cases they wish to pursue or handle and enable law firms to make strategic decisions regarding their business development efforts.
