Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Dear Nico

What you are describing here is a 300 plus user CRM system, where any attorney can have between 4 and 400 clients. If I were to assume that the mean of these two figures is the average (Risky with only two bits of data, but I’ve got to start somewhere) then I can assume that are about 60,000 records.

Depending on the nature of your work, each client might be a single individual for whom you act, in which case, the CRM record is synonymous with the contact.

If however you deal with corporate accounts or professional individuals who have advisers and perhaps employees, then your record will need to contain a preferably unlimited number of contacts. That potentially gives you 3 types of record:

• Private sole individuals
• Corporations where you have contacts who are the people you actually deal with
• (Usually) Wealthy individuals where you liaise with their advisors or staff.

So far so good. You have just described a CRM system with 300+ seats (600+ if each attorney has a clerk or secretary who also needs to access client data. That is quite a large CRM system when defined by users and this eliminates many of the options available because they cannot handle 3-600 seats with 60,000 records and perhaps 200,000 contacts and here’s the crunch – you could have anything from 200,000 to 6,000,000 documents associated with the clients.

We’ve been doing this type of work for 11 years and lawyer’s needs are particularly addressed by certain CRM packages which have the capability built in to handle these types of record. It gets complex for the novice, but for a CRM expert it’s just big, not difficult!

I’ll come back to you tomorrow as its late here in the UK, but there are a few things I need. Clients, corporations and contacts will need to have every relevant letter, fax, email and telephone conversation recorded against the record. This might be handled at the moment by an information management system or it may not, but for the CRM system to succeed and to remove the need to key in the same data many times into different systems, if the existing database attends to some of these functions then you will want it integrating into your CRM system and even better, to have a link to accounting systems.

• How many Individual records are there (Jo public)?
• How many corporate records are there?
• What is the average number of contacts at each corporate account?
• How many individuals who have adviser do you deal with?
• What is the average number of advisers retained by these individuals?
• How many emails per contact/client/corporation are generated inbound and outbound?
• How many documents are written for and received by these contacts or people or employees?
• Do any users work remotely in other offices or from home?
• When the attorney travels to see the client does he need access to the client data from his laptop?
• What management reports do you want to generate?
• Will you be looking at a forecast of fees to manage the cash-flow?

There’s more, but if you can let me know the above I can probably answer your question.

The kind of structure I use makes cleaning the database an ongoing task and it makes it easier. It also can handle marketing campaigns, the results of campaigns and any customer service issues where you need to work on a client with a complaint.

See you tomorrow?

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Xspirt

Nico

Thanks for the detail – I needed that information to assess how to sell internally, just in the same way as I would have needed it if I were selling into your firm. It might interest you to know that the largest single failure in CRM systems is the failure of clients to buy into the package supplied. The reasons for this are usually shared between an over-enthusiastic vendor and a lack-lustre management approach.

There’s many a $20 Million CRM investment going mouldy in the basement whilst the users carry on, as before, on the golf-links. If they can’t see the benefits of use, they won’t use it.

I’ll come back once I’ve had time to digest this and to digest the fact that my Prime Minister, Mr Brown, seems to have become the 2008 version of Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt combined into one entity!

Steve Alker
Xspirt

Nico

Can we clarify one thing first – that is the number of users?

“Would you mind clarifying "users"? If you mean users of the database, I do not believe that we have any users in other office locations now at home.”

If that truly is the case, then you don’t have a system in existence to sell to the attorneys, you have a list which is accessible through fancy software, the content of which is not of their making or choosing and the use of which is ultra-to their needs.

The “users” in a CRM context are defined by the number and the way in which that number of people can access, use and update the system.

Usually, licences are sold on the basis of having a defined number of users who will access, read, edit or add to the data. In addition, certain types of user may delete, export or report on the data. The same thing goes for mailing from the data. There has to be control or some disgruntled junior user could email a rude message to all your clients or delete vital information or sell it.

The number of users will be defined by your license. They are usually (With SQL architecture) named users – in other words, the system purchased will have envisaged access and use by a number of nominated individuals or perhaps by everyone in a firm.

A variant of this is a “concurrent user license” which says that, perhaps any 100 out of your named staff, any of which can be users with different privileges, can log on at the same time, but no more than this limit. The limit would be determined by how much your firm paid for the license.

Another variant is a site-licence which means that a fee will have been negotiated which will allow everyone in the company to use the CRM system and critically be supported in their use.

I am clarifying this early in the answer, because you cannot have a CRM system (Client Management or Customer Management System) which is centrally updated by a marketing office and is expected to contain useful data for marketing purposes if it is not maintained by people at the Client / Contact interface.

Such a structure is essentially an internally operated list brokerage where the quality of information on the lists and the quality of use it can be put to is defined by a non-existent input from the attorneys who are meant to benefit from it.

If that is the case – say the system is set up for a few marketing people and some clerical people to make use of it (Log in!) then you have a heavy structural task on your hands. For a CRM system to work to the advantage of those who can most use it, it has to be accessed by those who will take actions and form judgements based on using it. If these attorneys were not envisaged as “Users” (Forgive me for labouring this, but there seems to be some doubt) then you have a totally different task on your hands than getting a buy in from people who could access the data, but don’t.

That single aspect “USERS” is a deal maker or a deal killer for you. Forget the rest until we have resolved this.

Steve Alker
Xspirt

Dear Nico

Thanks for all the clarifications – you’ve put a lot of work into focussing on the things which I think to be important – an you don’t know me from Adam! That either means that we are making sense or that my reputation precedes this dialogue (!!) or that we are being a bit foolhardy. Let’s take a safe blend of those possibilities and try to proceed.

Firstly, what a mess your systems appear to be in. Your method of employment bears no resemblance to the models espoused by the organisation which offers ContactEase – at least as far as it espouses best practice on its website or in its suggested deployment of its many features. Something has gone rather wrong in this deployment or perhaps it was misconceived at the stage of purchase.

Be very careful here – there may be significant players in your own organisation who bear responsibility for this and people in the supplier who have been part of the process.

As a new employee, you can bring a fresh perspective and you can bring a solution to the problems, but you will do yourself no favours by trashing the ideas and purchases of executives who still hold positions of office and authority. Likewise with the vendor – mistakes might have been made, but getting them to hold up their hand to them will be difficult and possibly counter productive. Of course, if in the process of sorting things out you discover that your firm has been mislead or miss-sold, well, you employ 400 attorneys!

To fix this, you need to go back to the original purchase and the people who were involved. Without judging or criticising them (If they are still around) you need to look at the documentation, the ITT and the outline of expectations (Or whatever you call these things) in order to see what was the specification of the system and what it was expected to deliver. Then look at the contract itself and have a look at what was contractually agreed on; the price, delivery, implementation, training and support for the system.

You cannot take a complex and potentially powerful system such as this, buy 31 licences and hurl it at an organisation in the vague hope that it will, somehow, fulfil the many benefits which can accrue from it’s long list of very interesting looking features. It’s like buying everyone who needs to travel a fleet of cars without working out whether they can drive or not, what they are happy driving and then failing to put in place a maintenance programme and some rules of use!

Yes, attorney training, buy-in might and use of the system might be of paramount importance, but you first need to know why the thing was bought in the first place and what it was expected to achieve, for whom it was expected to achieve it and through what process of implementation.

CRM systems do not function by being brought into existence, populated with data which someone thought might be relevant and then set to fulfil a series of objective for a group of people who have absolutely no relationship with the data they contain or the benefits it is expected to provide.

Contract, specification, intention of deployment and intended use of the system and by whom, need to be looked at from the day it was decided to tender for a system and to place an order.


Steve Alker
Xspirt

Dear Nico

Good plan!

1) Find out how it came into being and what it was intended to achieve.
2) Find out how it was implemented and by who
3) Discover where the data on the system came from, who (Or what) put it there
4) Find out why that data was chosen
5) Discover why the 31 users are the users and how this came to be
6) Discover how the heck they expect the data to be relevant or useful if those who could benefit from it never read it or contribute to it (Remote control – mind reading?!)
7) The work out if it is even possible to get a buy-in from the Attorneys and their secretaries.
8) If it is and if it can meet some business and profit goals, go for it. Purchase asbestos underwear first as it will be a hot ride.


After that, I’ll tell you what to do next, but as I’m advising a legal firm, I’d be duty bound to charge for it(!!) Lawyers never respect people who don’t bang in a fee for breathing in their work-time and in the UK, the only time I was ever asked to submit an account for making a sales pitch (I was trying to sell to them, for heavens sake) was from a firm of international intellectual property lawyers. The senior partner of this vast firm couldn’t understand why I wasn’t going to charge him for just trying to flog him a CRM system! He thought that I was sort of odd and altruistic.

Funny world, the legal one – One day, I’ll really learn how it works rather than just try to sort out their CRM systems!

Steve