The final session of our CRM success webinar series turned the story told so far into a cohesive whole. Whilst a robust CRM like Intapp OnePlace pays dividends across a range of law firm BD and marketing activities, where its power should ultimately be measured is in its ability to contribute to revenue gains. The path to doing so that our session explored was customised pitch creation, using not only invaluable data but also the highly intuitive proposal automation software, PitchPerfect, that allows marketing and BD teams to refocus their effort on getting the content right knowing that the final document will simply fall in place within their custom templates.
Capture, Search, Collaborate, Output
The four pillars Chris Whitmore, Johnny Jones and Bryan Austin walked us through during the session provide a reliable guide to our thinking about the pitch creation process. It also allows a more systematic approach to revisiting existing practices if your team responsible for proposal writing is looking to run its regular review of pitching process efficiency or is thinking about re-engineering it.
As one of our previous articles explored, we expect many of these conversations to currently be in progress or to start as we are nearing the end of the financial year. Technology, now is an even more dominant part of every aspect of law firm operations, ought to make its mark on pitching practices, something it was yet to do in 2017 when an eye-opening Pitch Management Report was conducted. At the time 59% of top tier law firms did not use any dedicated pitch automation software despite over two-thirds of respondents not being satisfied with the level of customisation their pitches had.
Why high-quality pitching processes matter
Sales Account Manager, Alex Higgins reflecting on the session said “Firms are surrounded by useful data – more than they can ever use – but they need to couple the data to the context in order to see its real value.”
Director of Sales, Tim Kenney also commented “To spend the effort capturing information, finetuning technology to search and find it and then not using the best possible tools to create the proposal and track it is a non-justifiable waste of time, energy, technology and money.”
Johnny Jones, a presenter at the session and Customer Services Manager, also echoed the point “[…] you don’t want to fall at the last hurdle with output.”
Kenney continued “You should not ‘settle’ for a mediocre proposal automation tool. It’s analogous to a meal where the chef has used the best ingredients and laboured over the recipe – only then to rush the cooking and preparation and slop it in a Styrofoam container!”