Infocenter

Natalia Klein, Head of Business Development in Pavlova & Partners Law Firm 

www.legalinsight.ru

Summer is an ideal time to make an action plan for the development of the company for the new business season. During the period of holidays and vacations, the main working activity is reduced, thus you can distract a little from a direct work with customers and think about tomorrow calmly. Where from to start planning the development of legal business? We offer you a step by step guide. 

Step 1. Determining Goals
Avoid too general goals, try to specify the desired result as much as possible. An attempt to develop all practices and products at the same time, as a rule, leads to the fact that with significant time and financial costs for the promotion of all services you do not get any specific result. To set the right goals it is necessary:

• to identify your strong areas and the main competitors in these areas;
• to study the market development trends in the services in demand;

* based on the obtained knowledge to decide what exactly you will develop in the new season.

Step 2. Fixing the Development Plan
The plan generated by you has to be fixed on paper or in electronic form. Don't keep it just in your head. Perhaps this advice will seem banal to you, but, unfortunately, very often the staff of the company, having discussed and outlined the steps for business development, does not fix them anywhere. In the future, this does not allow to observe the solution of the set tasks and to make appropriate conclusions. 

Step 3. Proceeding to the Plan Implementation
Having determined the goals and directions that will be most actively developed in your company during the next business season, proceed to specific steps to obtain the intended result. Next, based on the example of a certain practice, let's analyze the scheme of its promotion for a year. For example, the key activity of your company is bankruptcy. Thus, you need to have a plan for the development of this practice for the year ahead. To do this, we recommend you to schedule in advance:

• Activities in which you will participate,
• Media in which you will post publications on the topic relevant to you,
• Work with content,
• Potential customers with whom you will establish contact.

Events. Study which bankruptcy conferences are planned for a new business season (usually all event providers are ready to present their plan of events by the beginning of the season), or check out those that were held last year (as a rule, the events repeat year by year). Keep in mind that during the year dozens of events are held specifically on bankruptcy, and you certainly do not need to participate in each of them. Choose the events most suitable for you. We recommend to consider:

• The composition of the audience,
• Speakers of the event,
• Presentation topics,
• The cost of your own participation in the event or the speech in it.

Mass media. Since a systematic approach is important in the promotion of a product or service, try to coincide the time of publications on relevant topics in mass media with the time of your speeches at selected events. For example, if you plan a presentation on subsidiary responsibility of controllers at November bankruptcy conference, place an article on the same or a similar subject in a legal or business journal by the beginning of the event or shortly thereafter. Having announced yourself several times in a certain way at about the same time, you are more likely to capture the attention of the audience.

Work with the content. If you have already written an article and spoke at the conference on the same subject, use the accumulated material for its intended purpose. Include the clause on preparation of brochures/ infographics/analytics on this topic in your plan for distribution among the database of existing and potential customers, as well as for placement on your own resources (on the website, in social media).

Contact with a potential customer. The final point for the promotion of a particular subject or service in your plan may be an offer to existing or potential customers to conduct a private consultation on a particular issue and, accordingly, to prepare a commercial proposal or a proposal for an internal workshop for employees of the Legal Department of the client.

In addition to this set of actions aimed at promoting any certain practice, service or product, add your plan with the updating your website, printing products and presentations, assisting business development. The plan also needs to indicate monthly participation in the ratings, posting comments in mass media, and conducting entertainment or charitable activities, as well as events aimed at networking. Such a plan should be detailed by calendar months. You can reflect all your activities on business development for a year in one calendar, or make an individual plan for each of the key fields. 

Step 4. Determining the Budget
The budget is one of the important components of business development plan. Making a step-by-step plan for a new business season, try to immediately assess the cost of a certain option, based on the experience of previous years, and always slightly increasing the estimated price. Then you can roughly determine the amount that you will have to spend during the year, and include it in the overall budget of the company. This method of planning is considered the most successful, because it allows you to spend money on development not in a chaotic way, but systematically, that is, conduct your business competently.

Step 5. Summarizing
Making a development plan is only a half of the battle, the second half is following this plan and summarizing. You should not expect the influx of customers, having implemented just one clause of the plan. Sometimes it takes months or even years of systematic work. During the entire business period it is very important to provide self control over the plan implementation, simultaneously assessing what you managed to perform and what you did not manage, while making appropriate conclusions. If you have made a number of steps listed in the article, but yet have not got a new client, think about why it happened. 

Perhaps after the event you conducted you did not report to the media neither about the event nor about the expertise you have or, having done both, did not process your materials into analytics/infographics or neglected mailing to customers. It is possible that you did not want to "Be Intrusive" for a potential client and, having done all this work, stopped one step away from the goal, having failed to offer him your service directly. But even if you did everything right, and the work during the year has not resulted in the arrival of a new client or a huge project, do not despair, it will definitely have effect in the future. In addition, the effectiveness of such work is not always measured by new orders. To get into a professional rating in the field you are developing, to get recommendations from colleagues in the market or to create a favorable information background around yourself is also the result that will bring investments in the future.

Adjust your plan for next year considering the conclusions you have made. Give up inefficient options and strengthen the directions of effective work. In a few years, you will be able to analyze your business development activities in a time frame, what will allow you to adjust the steps you taking more accurately. As a result, a systematic approach will certainly bear fruit, and you will definitely get what you were striving: new clients, projects and, what is very important, satisfaction from the work done.

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