5 Solutions to the Problems With Legal Tech Marketing & Sales

In September, Law.com published two articles by Frank Ready which outlined the problems with legal tech marketing and sales.

The marketing problems included:

• lack of content that is meaningful to the buyer and 
• failure to differentiate from the competition

and sales-related issues were:

• impatience
• aggressive communications
• overcrowding inboxes
• low response rates on cold calls and emails
• too much techno-babble and
• pushing too hard and too big to close the deal

However, the articles did not provide solutions to these issues, which is a key component to successful marketing and sales efforts.  

In response to these articles, RPC Strategies would like to offer five proven solutions on how to marketing and sales strategies should be evolving, post-pandemic.

1.  Bring marketing and sales together as one team.  The purpose of marketing is to drive leads to the sales pipeline.

Regardless of whether you consider marketing an expense or investment, every idea, every decision, every move you make should be designed to generate revenue. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of the Chief Revenue Officer, who oversees all revenue-generating activities.  The very nature of this role brings marketing and sales together under the same umbrella to design and execute what we at RPC Strategies refer to as a revenue strategy, which is important now more than ever.  

Marketing and sales teams should come together to discuss, plan and execute strategies that work for the buyer.  When a team is working like a well-oiled machine, the power and passion and energy that it generates is unstoppable.  Remember, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” 

2.  Create marketing content that generates ROI.  All the money you’re spending on SEO, PPC and expensive surveys is wasteful unless the content actually appeals to your buyers and provides solutions to their pain points.

Consumers seek information that helps them determine the best products or services for their needs and wants.  The content you develop should be the type of responsive resource buyers find in their search for information.

In March 2015, I wrote “eDiscovery Marketing:  Chasing the White Rabbit” and recommended bringing your marketing, sales and client success teammates together to collaboratively answer the following questions:

a.  Who are the buyers?

b.  What is most important to the buyers?

c.  How do our products and services make the buyers' job easier?

d.  Where do we really fit into the buyers' process?

e.  How do we communicate effectively with the buyers?

f.  How does sales need to work with buyers?

g.  How does the client success team work with the buyers?

Use the answers to these questions to design a content marketing strategy and messaging that convinces the buyer that you understand their pain points.

3.  Generate revenue with solutions.  The work-from-home mandate and resulting, total reliance on technology has forced a revolution in the way professionals buy, sell and generally conduct business.  

Marketing and sales strategies that depend on interpersonal relationship-building have lost their impact after more than a year of social separation, remote meetings, and backtracking on budgets.  As a result, we now have what RPC Strategies refers to as the new legal services buyer. 

Three ways that legal technology and service providers can pivot to meet buyers’ needs in this new environment are:

a.  Understand your buyers better than they understand themselves by developing in-depth, sophisticated buyer personas and doing the research on specific prospects.

b.  Leverage your content marketing strategy to reframe features and benefits as solutions to your buyer's pain points, and apply that to your prospect's specific business challenge.

c.  Develop a comprehensive strategic account plan (SAP) for every qualified lead, and identify key obstacles to your prospect's business success.

Features and benefits no longer sell, so we must find completely new ways to think about, study and prepare to meet the needs of our prospective buyers. The information you uncover with these tools should help construct targeted and personal outreach to secure discovery meetings that lead to pitch presentations that lead to closed-win deals. 

4.  Learn how to sell through technology.  Since we cannot rely on cultivating relationships in person, we must leverage the tools available to us.  The pandemic has left us feeling somewhat disconnected, yet clearly changed how we see each other – through Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, revealing the truth that our jobs are merely a function of our real lives.  

In the first post of our Lift Your Sales series, “The New Legal Services Buyer,” we provide five steps to conducting a successful, virtual sales meeting:

a.  Have all of your research ready. 

b.  Put your most appropriate people (sales, client success, etc.) in the virtual room. 

c.  Determine what you will share on your screen and how you will share it (PowerPoint,  live annotation, polls, and other interactive tools). 

d.  Conduct practice runs before you meet with the prospect. 

e.  Maximize your time by presenting your best business case and emphasizing your value proposition, differentiators and ROI strongly. 

Check out the podcast by salesman.org, The 4-Step Framework to More Effective Remote Selling, for additional technology recommendations to implement in your remote selling process (including Loom for DIY video messaging) along with recommendations on best use for each.

The ironic thing about technology is that it has unified us in ways we never anticipated, so we should take advantage of that and make the process efficient and meaningful for everyone.

5.  Guarantee sales success.  You have the demand for your products and services, understand the pain points of your buyers, communicate solutions and have the personnel to make things happen.  But these pieces alone aren’t enough.  They have to be put together the proper way to make things work.  

Let me give you an example:

A couple years ago, we had a client who came to us with a half dozen marketing and sales technologies and a complaint that they weren’t generating enough leads.  Once we dug in, we realized that none of the technologies were integrated, the marketing messaging was not buyer-centric (and sometimes offensive) and that they actually had 165,000 leads within their fractured databases.  The problem was not a lack of leads but rather a non-existent marketing strategy and sales process, which should have included integrations, filters, automations, workflows and sales operations.

In the second installment of our “Lift Your Sales” series, we present “6 Tips for Driving Sales Team Success", we discussed the need to empower your marketing and sales operations specialists.  These professionals prefer to remain behind the scenes and are rarely client-facing, but they are, undoubtedly, the fuel filter in every successful sales team.  They are highly technical and understand not only the individual tools for marketing and sales, but they also know how to integrate them in a manner that creates hyper-efficient automation and workflows.  The end results are regular analytics reporting that provides clear indicators about what works, where improvements can be made and, most importantly, who the best leads are in the database.

Most of the legal industry has been struggling to make sales during the pandemic, but don’t give up.  Following the steps outlined above will help you align marketing and sales to convert more leads into revenue.

RPC Strategies’ “Lift Your Sales” series is our response to several requests for solutions to this pain point.  We have several more topics in store for the coming months that will address strategies like setting up your CRM for sales success, how to write and use an SAP for more effective lead qualification, sales process and workflows for higher close-win rates, the most important (and overlooked) member of your sales team and many more.  Please connect with us on LinkedIn and/or register for our newsletter here.