Do you know to which other law firm your top client is sending work? Do they receive more or less than your firm? Is that firm performing better than yours? Maybe the applications you have been asked to handle are more complex and that is impacting your performance? Too many questions? What if you could answer all of them in less than 3minutes? Not possible? Read on.
We all know that being able to provide unique insights into a potential customer’s business and proving that you have a thorough understanding of their past activity, and the trends that their business is showing would be a much better approach to ensuring a gainful and engaging business conversation than just showing up once a year for the “regular review meeting”.
Likewise, it is clear that being able to use real data to demonstrate your track record would be a compelling way to differentiate yourself and your firm and would allow you to create very compelling, data-driven client acquisition proposals.
Let’s start with something as simple as knowing how large of a share of applications your firm is receiving from your key client. Do you know?
In the below example, the patent applicant (Blue; name not shown) achieved an average overall grant rate of 58.26%. The top performing EP law firm (name not shown) achieved an average grant rate of 70.77% (yellow bar) on behalf of this applicant. Now, you would expect that this law firm would at least keep receiving the same workload over time. Right? Why would the patent applicant reduce the workload if the performance was better than that of the rest?
Well, first of all, this law firm (yellow) has – despite the best results among all law firms on behalf of this applicant – lost business over time. Over a 10-year period, this law firm had a share of 5.46% (chart not shown). Doing the same analysis over the last 5-years only, they dropped to a share of only 3.63% as shown below.
It is really almost reckless, if you are not aware of your own performance metrics and how you compare to the competition. Even if you find out that you are underperforming, you have to be aware in order to implement countermeasures in time. If you are not achieving the highest grant rate, maybe you are receiving more complex cases and you should communicate this fact by sharing the relevant KPI (which is available, not show in above example)?
Shouldn’t they really have received more business? It is in your own interest to communicate your performance to your client, and nothing is more convincing then substantiating your arguments with the relevant numbers.
Keep in mind: firms that do achieve the best results on behalf of their clients are actually losing business. Make sure you don’t experience the same and start implementing a data-driven business development processes that empowers you with actionable insights so you can take the relevant measures in time.
Get in touch today to learn more about the ipQuants CI (Competitive Intelligence) solution.