These unprecedented times have highlighted just how critical communication is. 

Key during this crisis period is to make contact with the right people at your client’s firm ensuring you can provide help where it’s most needed. 

What’s crucial is these connections must be direct person-to-person contact. However, you need to know who the best person in your business is to establish that connection. 

Unfortunately, you know that some of your clients will be forced to make changes to their team. You may well have to do the same. 

Therefore, you cannot rely on generic outbound emails and lists. You need real time accurate data so that you can have empathetic conversations as to how the crisis is impacting their roles and the firm. 
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What has data got to do with relationships? 
Your firm likely has a large network or known contacts, clients and referrers. These relationships are what drive revenue, yet few firms have the visibility required to identify, protect and grow these relationships. 

Working tirelessly in the background, your firm’s communication systems likely manage hundreds and thousands of transactions each day. Email and other systems not only facilitate digital communication, but they also log and store data about each of these transactions. This data is something that often goes unused by firms, yet when put into context, can provide a myriad of Business Development and Client Retention benefits. 

Busy professionals need easy to use intelligent mechanisms that ensure client and prospect contact records are not out-of-date and that where possible the firm is capitalising on opportunity. 

Identifying known relationships 
Leveraging accurate and real-time data presents a whole new range of opportunities. If, for example, you queried your Practice Management or CRM system to understand if the firm has a relationship with a business or contact you are looking to win work from, having no results returned may mean that the firm has had no contact. But it may also mean that no one had entered their contact into the system. By connecting automatically to the firm’s communication systems, your ability to identify a known relationship increases rapidly. Having visibility can help a firm enormously when pitching, looking for lateral hires, prospecting or looking to cross-sell into an organisation. 

Managing and maintaining referrer relationships
 Referrer relationships can significantly drive firm or group revenue, yet these relationships can easily dissolve if overlooked. The data captured by your systems can help you to understand where there has been a lapse of contact with one or more referrers, potentially helping to protect and maintain these revenue sources. 

Many firms will report monthly or quarterly on fees generated by key referral sources, yet by the time a decline or absence of referred fees is detected, the referrer has likely begun referring work elsewhere. Using real-time data can allow firms to proactively manage these relationships, with no effort or input needed by staff. 

Cross selling / cross servicing 
Winning more work from an existing client is typically much easier, less costly and more likely than trying to win an entirely new client. Using data to identify which groups have and have not had contact with a particular client, can quickly and easily allow the firm to identify cross selling opportunities. Cross selling not only provides the opportunity to increase firm revenue and develop new practice areas, but it can protect a client from being lost to a competing firm who manages to cross sell their services sooner. 

Succession planning 
Accessing data in real time can also be leveraged to support a range of other initiatives such as succession planning, managing or creating invite lists or developing and maintaining email distribution lists.

This access to live communication data ensures that when a colleague leaves you can understand communication patterns and gain relationship intelligence insights into the best person to be the successor. You also know who the best person you need to speak with at your client’s firm. 

The benefits of a data-drive approach 
The good news is that these capabilities are not limited to large firms or firms with large in-house IT teams and data analytics skills. Developed specifically for professional services firms, Client Sense provides a simple and a cost-effective solution for firms of all sizes. By leveraging existing data, Client Sense allows firms to quickly and easily enhance their Business Development capabilities and improve client retention. 

Having a clear picture of existing communication data can help you understand business development possibilities. A software solution that can be installed quickly and remotely such as Client Sense will help you automatically joins the dots, providing you with the visibility you need to manage, protect and grow the relationships that drive revenue. If you are interested in discussing how you can enhance your firm’s business development capabilities, please contact the team at Symphony for a demo.