Are you measuring what matters or what is easy to count?
With BD and marketing teams increasingly feeling pressure – self-imposed or from above – to show their ROI, there is a significant risk of unintended consequences. Teams that measure volume – of events, proposals, press releases, social media posts, contacts in their CRM system – may show how busy they are but not how effective they are. Worse, since much of BD and marketing requires lawyers to be involved, metrics that emphasize volume of activity may waste their firm’s most precious and fixed asset, their lawyers’ time.
Take care not to boost your ROI metrics at your lawyers’ expense.
In professional services, a particular action is rarely connected directly to a sale the way it may be with consumer products, nor is there typically a large enough sample size of actions to draw valid conclusions about cause and effect. Data is not the plural of anecdote.
It may be better, in fact, to focus on fundamentals and illustrative stories. For example, the controllable goal of BD is to create opportunities for facetime with your targeted clients, prospects, and referral sources. Good marketing communications should be well targeted, convey your capability and authentic personality, and be memorable. You can credibly assess your performance on these things, even if it doesn’t fit comfortably into a dashboard.
Years ago, I worked at a large telecom company that was struggling with poor customer service ratings and decided the problem lay with their service center reps, not their lagging investment in network infrastructure and terrible morale among their front-line workers. They decided to measure and reward the reps on their productivity, defined as the number of calls they handled per hour. The result was entirely predictable: reps would rush customers off the phone, and if a customer had a particularly time-consuming service issue the rep would hang up on them, confident that the company’s call routing software would almost certainly route the customer’s enraged call-back to a different rep.
That’s the risk with metrics: they work. So be sure you’re measuring what has impact. What do you think should be measured?