To give you an example, imagine that the firm is sponsoring a speaker at an upcoming industry conference. The speaker is well-known in the industry, and will be discussing a topic that reinforces the need for one of the firm’s service lines. In order to generate new sales leads, a firm might invite existing clients and prospects who they think will benefit from the event, while strategically offering their solutions to the captive audience.

To raise awareness for the event using the above methodology, two things must either happen:

1. The professionals and marketing department must find and contribute contacts to the InterAction Marketing list with prospects that will be good candidates.
2. An outside list of prospects that has already been compiled will be used to send the data.

For our current example, this results in a few problems.

For the first point, the burden shifts to the professionals and the marketing department to fill the seats at the conference. Professionals are given the criteria, and they submit who they feel will be good candidates. However, this is an incredible drain on the firm’s resources. This results in bottlenecks, and the professionals “rushed” to determine who will be a likely prospect. We all know that our professional’s time is valuable, and that we don’t have unlimited access to that time for non-billable tasks. The more efficiently we can automate processes to keep our professionals billing, the better.

For the second point, any data outside of InterAction is outdated. To make sure that the external list is sending information to the right people and place, it will have to be cross referenced with the data in InterAction. For this discussion we wont go into the crucial elements of having up-to-date client information for professional service firms, but it is important to iterate how time consuming the cross referencing process will ultimately be.

A more effective methodology would entail some prior planning and would use the InterAction Marketing lists to organize contacts by solutions or service lines.

Let me give you another example that uses a solution-based segmentation. Lets say we have a law firm that specializes in intellectual property. The firm has a website where potential prospects and clients can download case studies regarding trademark maintenance (among other topics), and systems in place to capture contact information following the download.

Once a contact downloads any of these case studies, it is an internal indication to the firm that the prospect might be interested in service lines regarding trademark maintenance. The prospect is identified or created in the InterAction database, and subsequently added to a Marketing List called “Trademark Maintenance” to segment prospects that are potentially interested in the applicable services.

By having automated marketing systems in place, and by organizing the Marketing Lists by service lines, an accessible list is available for any strategic marketing campaigns that arise. Now, going back to our sponsored event, we have the following advantages:

1. Marketing lists have already been compiled around the service line that the speaker will be reinforcing. Resources will not be ‘rushed’ to compile an up-to-date list of potential prospects.
2. By its nature, the list is immediately ready to be exported to any external system (an email database, label printer, etc.) to notify the prospects and raise awareness for the event.

Adding contacts before the events using solution-based segmentation, increases firm efficiencies and maximizes the benefits of InterAction CRM.

How does your firm currently organize its Marketing Lists? Email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let me know. Also email with any questions on how to make this happen.