Future opportunity in legal sector marketing and BD….
After a range of conversations with Marketing and BD leaders a few areas have come up as key focuses for professional services firms for the coming months and years. Potentially areas where they will need to strengthen or re organise their teams and I thought it might prove interesting to share some of these thoughts:
Client relationships – creating a focussed process and team to concentrate on building closer ties with your existing clients, listening to their needs, understanding their concerns and proactively helping to alleviate those worries. This support now, will lead to increased business as the economy improves in the future and will help ensure that your clients do not take their business to other, more proactive, firms.
Bid Management – a number of leaders have highlighted the need to be more adaptive, responsive and creative with their bid management in order to improve the win rate. In a market where there will potentially be less opportunities to bid for business, they will become more competitive. Therefore it becomes imperative to offer more creative and targetted bids try and win more of the opportunities on offer.
New business development – there may not be a lot of new business out there right now, but there is a belief that the work you put in now, into attracting and addressing new business, will pay for itself as the economy loosens. Re organising, for example, around strong sector led business development managers to support the partner sector heads, if you are not already doing it, is something that a number of firms are accepting will be needed in the future.
Communications – content, marketing communications, PR, internal comms. In the current economic climate the need to present quality information to the relevant parties quickly but without compromising the quality is essential. Proactive and creative individuals who can turn this act from a untargeted response into a commercial strategy are going to be needed to help firms weather the next several months/years.
Clearly a lot of this restructuring will be fuelled through existing internal resources and reallocation of the team but there will be opportunity for external individuals in the near future and this is the time, if you are looking to source a new position, to get yourself in the best possible position to capitalise. If the opportunities do not exist in the short term on a permanent basis, there is every likelihood that these skills will be sourced as interim resource to ensure a quality but speedy adoption.
Give me a call or get in touch via linked in or email if you want to review your CV, linked in profile and discuss the types of roles that will come up in the future.
