Where are YOUR clients going

Earlier this week, I received a promotional e-mail from BTI Consulting about its new research on "How [Law Firm] Clients Hire, Fire and Spend."  The report summary outlines some of the findings: 53.7% of clients ousted their primary law firm; Only 30.7% of clients recommend their primary law firm; 64.3% of clients plan to hire a new law firm.

These are daunting numbers, but perhaps they will begin to shed light for law firms (and other professional service sectors) on one of the key findings that Larry Bodine and I recently found in our own study, "Increasing Marketing Effectiveness at Professional Firms."   

• Professional firms that said they were extremely effective used three particular client-focused metrics in combination with each other.  These three are:  (a) Growing client revenue:  “Did you grow revenue with your client or not?” (b) Moving the phases of a sale through a pipeline:  “Did you close the sale or not?” and (c) Listening to the client:  “Did you listen to your client or not?”

Let's face it: if the law firms in BTI's study were really doing a good job of measuring their "listening-to-the-client" initiatives, their percentage of retaining those clients, and growing their book of business with them, would be higher.  We found that it's not enough for firms to undertake simple client satisfaction surveys.  Rather, our findings reveal that successful professional firms take deliberate steps to improve their client satisfaction information-gathering approaches! 

Ask yourself:  "When is the last time we asked our clients whether our satisfaction surveys (feedback interviews, etc.) are really getting at their most critical issues?   When is the last time we revised our client research approaches to go deeper than shallow client satisfaction questions, or sytematically analyzed the factors that REALLY grow our client relationships?"   

Check out some fascinating new thinking on the subject of researching client loyalty in Fred Reichheld's new book, "The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth."  Our research findings and BTI's results offer additional perspectives on aspects of Reichheld's research: that one simple question -- "Would you recommend us to a friend?" -- is the one true measure of a firm's performance in the eyes of its clients. 

It may not matter where professional service marketers get the point (our study, BTI's work, or Fred Reicheld's fabulous new book), but get it they must:  becoming more competitively effective and attaining true marketplace growth will inevitably require professional service firms to think differently about how to measure and deepen their clients' loyalty.