Monitoring: lawyers must spend to gauge effect of strategy

Law firms and other professional services firms are 'flying blind' by failing to adopt objective measures to assess whether their marketing strategies are working, research claimed this week.


A survey by the non-profit association the Professional Services Marketing Group (PSMG) said that more than half of firms did not require marketing managers to show their return on investment.


Firms were failing to make use of the most effective means of monitoring marketing success, according to the poll of marketing professionals. More than half did not use client satisfaction ratings, while more than a third did not measure pitch or tendering success rates. Almost half did not monitor the potential opportunities to pitch for new work.


PSMG joint chairman Chris Hinze said: 'Firms are spending 2% to 3% of firm income on marketing and business development. By the time they have spent that, they don't want to spend anything else on measurement. But they are flying blind, and they need to spend an extra half a per cent on measuring marketing success. The more they can understand how things are working, then the more they can become more targeted.'


Where firms track client satisfaction, they often rely on anecdotal evidence, rather than more robust and independent research. Mr Hinze added: 'Firms should be wary of death by anecdote. An anecdote is not a trend unless you have about 30 to 40 clients who have all said the same thing.'


Two-thirds of the 68 respondents were from law firms.