Boost Your Law Firm’s Cross-Selling Efforts With Thought Leadership Content | Law Firm Editorial Service

Make thought leadership marketing and business development content a catalyst for your law firm’s cross-selling efforts.

If you are a lawyer in a law firm with more than one practice group and you have a volume of business or are building a volume of business, chances are that you have been encouraged by your colleagues to sell the services of the firm.

They will want you to tell your clients about your law firm’s legal practices outside of your own so that your clients know that your law firm can help them solve legal problems other than those you have already helped them with. .

While this seems conceptually obvious and a cinch to achieve, apparently it isn’t. You don’t have to dig too hard to find articles online about how partners and senior associates struggle with cross-selling, and how law firms struggle to build a cohesive and efficient.

If you’re in this boat or unsure how to move your cross-selling efforts forward, thought leadership marketing and business development content can be a catalyst for your cross-selling efforts.

Thought leadership content can do this by helping you identify how your law firm can solve your clients’ legal problems with an interdisciplinary approach, then presenting that approach to your clients through insightful and compelling content. .

Identify cross-selling opportunities

Here’s a ridiculously simple way to identify cross-sell opportunities.

Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles.

The circle on the left represents your clients’ legal issues that you help them with.

The circle on the right represents one of your firm’s practice groups other than your own.

The overlap in the middle will be areas where your law firm could help your clients with their legal issues beyond your own practice group. This is where there is a cross-sell opportunity and an opening to create thought leadership content around that opportunity.

But how do you know how your firm could help your clients solve legal problems other than the ones you are already helping them with? By discussing with your clients the legal issues they face or that weigh on them.

Once you know what legal issues your clients are facing, you can examine each of your firm’s practice groups to determine if they have the ability to help your client resolve those issues.

In other words, you can repeat the Venn diagram exercise until you have gone through all the practice groups in your company.

For example, let’s say you are a litigator specializing in intellectual property litigation. You are the person your clients turn to when they need help protecting their intellectual property.

You know that your customers often face intellectual property issues during transactions. If you have colleagues whose corporate practice focuses on mergers and acquisitions, they could advise your clients on handling intellectual property issues during transactions. This would be the overlap in your Venn diagram between the work you currently do for your clients and the business practice of your colleagues. You can focus your cross-selling efforts here.

Here is another example. Let’s say you’re an administrative lawyer who helps your clients manage their relationships with the administrative agencies that regulate them.

You know that some of the issues you help your clients with tend to end up later in private litigation brought against your clients by aggressive plaintiff attorneys. Your fellow litigators could advise your clients on private lawsuits arising from regulatory issues.

Again, this would be the overlap in your Venn diagram and an area where you could focus your cross-selling efforts.

Thought leadership marketing and business development content development focused on cross-selling opportunities

After thinking about your clients’ legal issues and the combination of services your law firm can provide to help them resolve those issues—that’s to say, the overlap in our Venn diagrams – it’s time to actually create thought leadership marketing and business development content around these combinations of services.

This content can take many forms, including blog posts, byline articles for industry publications, customer alerts, podcast episodes, videos, and white papers.

Whatever form this thought leadership content takes, to be effective it needs to show your clients that you and your law firm have a variety of legal practices that TOGETHER can help them solve their legal problems of effective and efficient manner.

But because you have done, and will continue to do, the work necessary to determine the types of legal issues that your clients face and that your law firm can help them with, you will be able to visit your clients’ homes frequently and Explain to them, through cross-selling thought leadership content, ways your company can help them that they may not have been aware of. You will sell your company’s services in a more palatable and less exaggerated way.

Then, whenever you or your co-workers create new cross-sell-focused content, you’ll have the opportunity to have real-time conversations about sales — oops, sorry, I mean “business development” — with your customers. on the substance of that content. The conversations would focus on how your firm, through an interdisciplinary approach discussed in this content, can help these clients resolve their legal issues.

A better way for law firms to cross-sell

Cross-selling in law firms is apparently not an easy thing to do.

But a strategic program focused on identifying and presenting clients with cross-selling opportunities in the form of thought leadership marketing and business development content can make cross-selling much easier for lawyers and law firms.

It can also make those efforts much more successful.