Whether You Want More Clients or More Work from Existing Clients, You Need a Plan.

Hope isn’t a strategy, and it shouldn’t be the way you grow your practice and your firm. You may be in search of your next best client or perhaps you’d like to expand the work you do for a current top client. Either way, you need a game plan.

From small general practices and boutiques to larger firms with multiple practice groups, Rain BDM partners with you to design a business development strategy suited to your goals, your people, and your resources. Our consultants draw from their unique professional backgrounds to help you:

• Define your target audience, including referral sources, business partners, and influencers who can connect you to potential clients
• Analyze billing trends to identify opportunities and threats in your client base
• Implement contact management and sales pipelines to track and measure business development activities
• Assess lawyers’ business development skills and personality types, then determine how to best deploy people in pursuit of your goals

Strategic Skill-Building

We help law firms outfit their people with the right skills and tools to build long-term relationships, not only with current and prospective clients but also with referral sources and others who can help generate opportunities. Our methodology includes:

• Inventorying attorneys’ personality types
• Fostering individual business development conversation skills
• Pinpointing strengths and gaps within lawyers’ contact networks
• Determining an appropriate regimen of business development activities at the individual, practice group, and firm level
• Creating reasonable expectations to sustain momentum and encourage good habits

We customize our methods to each lawyer’s unique strengths and goals, and when healthy habits take root, the firm’s business development culture improves.

Many law firms don’t fully appreciate that business development success comes from the efforts of individual attorneys, client teams, and practice groups. Let’s face it – rarely does a firm land a new client. More often, it’s the lawyer who brings in the business by cultivating connections, sparking chemistry, and instilling trust.

Targeting & Pursuit

Business development acumen is only useful if there is business to develop. We work with our clients to:

• Identify new business targets
• Maintain and grow existing business
• Gather and analyze market and competitive intelligence
• Map cross-selling, account management, and share-of-client opportunities
• Strategize around new targets
• Ensure alignment between client, industry, and practice team plans
• Make follow-up activities, next steps, and individual accountability part of the firm’s business development culture

Done well, business development opens doors – and keeps them open. It’s the chance to promote yourself, convey your value, and distinguish your firm and your lawyers from fierce competition. If that’s a vision you want to be your reality, we can help get you there.