The dust has slowly settled on an ILTA educational conference that not only ended with a bang (a la the inaugural ILTA Distinguished Peer Awards), but overall proved that NOTHING compares to this 4 1/2 day extravaganza of legal technology education, demonstrations and networking. The vendor education program, which has kicked off ILTA day one (Monday) for the past 7 years, proved, more than ever, that 'if you build it, they shall come'. In our case, as perennial producers of this program, this translated to tailoring educational sessions based on exhibiting vendor feedback; assembling bright, reputable, and established legal technology panelists; and filling a room with 85+ legal technology vendor and consultancy decision makers including CEOs, GMs, marketing and sales excutives, and technology product managers.
The three and a half hour vendor education program kicked-off, as in previous years, with ILTA's Vendor Business Meeting, followed by a Working with ILTA (beyond the annual conference) session led by ILTA's Program Director Peggy Wechsler and Executive Director Randi Mayes. Peggy began by thanking all the exhibitors and consultants for supporting ILTA throughout the years and particularly during the conference's move from Nashville to Las Vegas this year. The great news was then shared that member attendance for 2010 was approximately 1,130 - indicating a 30% increase from 2009! That definitely set the stage for a high energy week. Last but not least, Peggy introduced the ILTA Board Members, Conference Committee and staff that were able to be there. Angela Roarke, Advertising Sales Coordinator, was brought up to speak about getting the most out of the exhibitors sponsorships and new opportunities to get involved with ILTA's publications through advertising. [Editors Note: Randi Mayes spoke to Jobst and me about her initiative to incorporate more rich media into ILTA's publications. Randi is very excited about including more audio, video and social media within their publications' content and is looking to the vendor community for ideas to help push the envelope here. This is a great chance to get involved and stand out!]
The meat of our discussion started with the Advice for Selling to Law Firms session, which we first included last year based on vendor feedback. The panel was designed to give vendor executives and vendor sales folks an insider's view into what works and what doesn't work when selling to their law firm clients and prospects.
In order to make this a real worthwhile experience, we brought back Joy Heath-Rush, Enterprise Multimedia Services Manager at Sidley Austin and ILTA's past President, (who served on this inaugural panel last year) and added Scott Christensen, IT Director of Wildman Harrold, and current ILTA president. Joy and Scott are both technology decision makers for their law firms; in Joy's case a top 20 global law firm and in Scott's case a 200-attorney national firm. We asked a variety of questions related to the sales process and how vendors can most effectively work with them.
Both panelists continually stressed that building direct relationships with them directly is critical to any sort of success they might have selling (versus contacting their boss or others first). Contrary to popular belief, cold calling is an effective tool if utilized properly and respectfully. Joy made a point to say that if she does take a cold call, which she regularly does, she'll be more inclined to follow-up if she knows how long the introduction will be. For example, if she gets a cold call saying "I'd like to setup a 15 minute call to introduce you to our product", she is more likely to accept. She also urged vendors to be very clear about their intentions and not to over-promise or under-deliver, especially in the beginning of the sales process.
The session, which was very interactive with many questions coming from the audience, included other tips as well as "dos and don'ts", mostly focused on education and common sense business conduct:
- The panelists talked about the importance of being able to not only walk the walk in legal but also talk the talk. Specifically, they both said that it's very important to understand legal speak so if you're not a legal specific vendor, educate yourself on legal jargon, how law firms work and operate, their workflows, etc. For example, the point was made, that anyone who refers to legal customers, as opposed to clients, evidently does not understand legal speak.
- Also, educate yourself on the legal technologies that a law firm relies on. Understand the technology infrastructure, how IT is structured, the importance of the IT department, and the overall selling process.
- Do your homework on the firm and the organizational structure within the firm. Treat the sales process like an interview; with all the online tools at your disposal and with the advent of social media, there's really no excuse to not be fully informed before making that first phone call.
- The legal community is very loyal so once vendors have established a solid reputation and earned respect from their law firm clients, future business opportunities are a natural progression of the relationship.
- Understand law firms' purchasing and procurement processes. Increasingly, larger, global law firms follow a formalized, centralized purchasing process for everything from tissue paper to servers and enterprise software solutions. So, while vendors may have relationships with one particular decision maker or influencer, there may be many more layers to uncover as it relates to firm-wide purchasing buy-in. On the other hand, smaller firms (i.e., Wildman Harrold) direct technology purchasing through the IT Group and give IT Directors (such as Scott Christensen) direct and final purchasing influence and decision making ability. The bottom-line: It's vital to identify and understand the legal target audience, from influencer to final decision-maker.
- Peer networking and peer recommendations are the key factors in law firm technology decision-making. As a legal technology peer networking organization, ILTA enables members to seek out each other's recommendations and experiences, critical aspects to comprehensively evaluating and purchasing technologies and related services.
Up next was the session topic that received the most votes from the ILTA exhibitors - Vendor Thought Leadership, with a focus on how to establish it & maintain it. This particular topic has been near and dear to InsideLegal's heart for some time, and truly one of the core reasons we initiated the InsideLegal forum and blog as a means of promoting legal technologists regardless of their heritage (including vendors, consultants, law firm leaders, etc.). While we have long preached thought leadership (as opposed to blatant selling and promoting), the ILTA education session served as our kick-off to an ongoing initiative focused on not only educating vendors and others on the attributes and qualities of legal thought leaders, but also providing a forum for thought leader 'work product' if you will. While assembling the thought leader panel, we didn't waste time in reaching out to who we consider to be one of the poster children for legal vendor thought leadership ... Donna Payne. A well respected and experienced public speaker, author and legal technologist, Donna has managed the extremely difficult task of separating herself (and her expertise) from the successful vendor company (PayneGroup) she operates. During the discussion, JoAnna highlighted the importance of industry involvement, commitment to the industry and to organizations such as ILTA, and fine line between espousing subject matter expertise and shamelessly promoting vendor products and services. While Donna talked about the importance of integrity and honesty in paving the way for long term thought leadership, the group also came to the conclusion that there is still a stark bias and mis-conception when it comes to promoting vendors as thought leaders. Stay tuned for more content on this topic on InsideLegal (including exclusive legal thought leader video interviews filmed during the ILTA conference).
Continuing the theme of 'thoughtful' education, we next presented our public relations-themed session PR Doesn't Stand for Press Release focused on the components of a successful PR (read Public Relations) campaign (view presentation here). Again, this topic was voted on by the attendees pre-conference and was designed to help everyone from a vendor CEO to a marketing manager to a consultant understand what PR can and can't do for their company; what steps can be taken to engage clients in the proactive PR process; and how a focus on education and thought leadership can help establish meaningful relationships with the legal (traditional and social) media. The biggest take-away from the presentation was the continued relevance of developing client-focused content such as user case studies and client testimonials. As revealed earlier in the day during the Advice for Selling to Law Firms session (and mirrored in the 2010 ILTA Member Technology Purchasing Survey), peer recommendations and examples of other firms' technology best practices and implementations remain the top influences when it comes to legal technology purchases.
No modern legal conference would be complete without the almost obligatory social media/web 2.0 session so it was appropriate that the Leveraging Web 2.0/Social Media to Reach Your Prospects topic throughout the day, the primary goal was to make it relevant and valuable for legal technology vendors, in this instance ranging from those who have never tweeted to others who actively use a variety of social media tools to enhance their marketing communication efforts. The social media faculty included InsideLegal's JoAnna Forshee (Twitter @InsideLegal), a regular presenter and educator on the topic of social media, Donna Payne of PayneGroup (Twitter @donna_payne) and Rob Robinson, VP of Marketing for Orange Legal Technologies (Twitter @complexd). While many of the basics were covered in a similar session at last year's conference, attendee feedback indicated a desire to dive into the details of how various social media tools can be better leveraged. Rob for example shared his philosophy of using social media to provide value to his audiences including twitter followers, LinkedIn group subscribers or those that regularly read his blog posts. He talked about his controversial (but successful) strategy of including all industry news relevant to his readers - including that of his competitors. [Editors Note: Rob wrote an excellent social media strategy article for Peer to Peer. Check it out here.] In addition to providing and adding value, the panel emphasized the ability to use twitter and LinkedIn to engage in conversations, gain valuable client and industry feedback, but also leverage various tracking tools to monitor what others are saying about topics and themes of interest to vendors.
In closing, InsideLegal truly appreciates the opportunity to continually collaborate with ILTA on producing the annual vendor education program and is always looking for feedback and suggestions to improve session content for future programs. Please send any ideas and comments to JoAnna Forshee. Remember, marketing to the ILTA membership is something you should be doing all year round, not just at the Annual Conference. Start now and you'll be ahead of the game by the 2011 ILTA Annual Conference, August 21-25 at the (newly renovated) Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville.