CRM – Applications, systems and fee-earner engagement

July 1, 2025|Accountants, Kim's Blog, Lawyers, Management Skills, Marketing, Psychology, Relationship Management|

I joined a new PM Forum – PM Forum workshop on “How to choose, set up and manage a CRM system” facilitated by (2) Simon McNidder | LinkedIn. Simon has spent many years working in accountancy firms (e.g. PWC) and law firms (e.g. Pinsent Masons – which won two awards for CRM) and is now a consultant. During lockdown he created software Promptr – CRM Management for Law Firms and Lawyers. Delegates ranged from MBD executives to CMOs, some of whom were entirely focused on CRM and others who used CRM as part of their other responsibilities. Some delegates were looking to implement their first CRM system, others were leading major transformation projects and some were hoping to increase engagement in their existing systems. Delegates had broad experience of systems including InterAction and Salesforce. CRM – Applications, systems and fee-earner engagement.

Workshop contents

Introduction and questions
What is (and isn’t) CRM?
What good CRM looks like
How to buy the right CRM for your firm
Auditing your data
CRM software
CRM adoption
CRM ROI

What is CRM? (Client Relationship Management)

CRM isn’t just a database – the database supports your CRM strategy and your entire philosophy and practice of managing client (and target and referrer) relationships.

CRM is a way to treat your BEST contacts – it’s about your culture, strategy, processes and behaviours.

A CRM might support mailshots and event invitations, but it extends from marketing communications activities such as these to helping everyone in the firm manage their relationships and understand “Who Knows Who”. Referrer management and Key Account Management (KAM) are also key applications.

In a great database:

50% of the contacts are known by 2+ users (multiple contacts reduces relationship risk and supports succession)
50% of contacts have engaged over the past three years (date of last contact)
50% of fee-earners have added business development activity in the last 12 months
There should be little effort by fee-earners to enter and update data (automatic contact and diary scraping)
There are processes to archive and remove unwanted data
“Who knows who” is a simple and well used function
Users receive overviews and prompts for activity with their contacts
Users should find collating mailing lists (for events, emails and even Christmas cards) easy
There should be feedback and stories of how the database has helped fee-earners secure meetings, clients and work
The database supports effective marketing and business development and promotes good client relationship habits for fee-earners

In a good database:

50% of contacts have job titles or job function (to support segmentation and targeting)
50% of contacts have business development notes added in the last year (to support lead nurturing, relationship management and opportunity pipelines)
50% of contacts are “owned” or known by fee-earners
25% of users have logged business development notes in the last year
Users are pestering non-using contacts to use the database
You can compile a mailing list at the click of a button

To achieve a great or good database you need:

Support from the Board and senior management
A culture that is client-focused and promotes actives business development
Fee-earners who see the value in using the system – and do so regularly

For those starting out on their CRM journey, it is recommended that you work with one or two small teams to allow sufficient education, training and support as they integrate database use into their daily marketing and business development activities.

How to buy CRM software

Build a business case

Acquiring CRM software, implementing it, integrating it with other systems (e.g. finance), adding (cleaning) the data, training and managing use is a major project requiring significant cash and time.

Typically, a business case will need to be produced where objectives (and benefits) and costs (both upfront purchase and implementation and ongoing licences and maintenance) are shown. This will require input from a variety of other functions such as IT, Projects, Learning & Development and Change Management.

The business case will typically be supported by a detailed project plan (see below) for the acquisition, implementation and embedding of the system.

Assemble a project team

MBD obviously has a major interest in improving CRM systems. But there are other important stakeholders from across the firm – most importantly in IT but also in Finance, Learning & Development, fee-earner teams and other potential users.

So it is likely you will need a cross-functional project team with representative members from different parts of the firm. You will also need to expand the team to accommodate software providers and consultants used to manage implementation and data integrity.

Scope your requirements

The first thing to do is to identify your needs and requirements for the system. This is tricky as you have to cover any activities that currently take place (e.g. mailings) as well as anticipate how you would like the system to be used in the future. And you may not yet have strong business development behaviours embedded in your fee-earner teams yet.

One starting point is to consider the issues that you are trying to fix. For example:

Manage mailing lists and send and monitor mailshots for alerts, newsletters and event invitations
Track new leads to produce better pipeline analysis and support bids and tenders
Support fee-earners in exploring who has contacts in common and having an overview of the various relationships within a client organisation
An all-singing and dancing system that does everything in the marketing and business development space

Firms differ in the facilities needed by different users, For example:

The marketing team using the CRM to compile and manage mailshots
The business development team to plan, implement and monitor client, referrer, contact and target communications and sales activities
Fee-earners only looking at their Outlook trackers to monitor their own contacts and activities and produce relationship maps

Some firms produce different user personas to help consider the different needs (e.g. Board member, team leader, sector leader, partner, senior fee-earner, marketing and BD professional etc).

Simon provided guidance on seeking systems that make it effortless for fee-earners such as:

Automatically adds new contacts in Outlook
Automatically support “Who knows who” questions
Automatically adds who emailed and met data
Provides inbox alerts (such as a weekly update of “my contacts”
Creates automatic pre-meeting briefing packs

Knowing who will be using the system, and for what, will also help in understanding the licensing requirements which usually differentiate between system and team administrators and limited users.

Assess the CRM systems available

There was some discussion about the different systems used by professional practices and their pros and cons. (A list is shown here: Proactive marketing and business development executives – CRM). For example:

Many firms use Mailchimp for simple email applications. However, poor data can lead to high bounce rates (25%) which will block future usage
As CRM databases can be complex, it is often better to have a simple frontend system – such as an Outlook Tracker – to make it easy for fee-earners.

Most firms will analyse and compare the strengths, weaknesses and differences of various systems. This might involve inviting suppliers to provide tender documents or demonstrations. Naturally, firms will need to select a system that is affordable within their budget.

Simon mentioned some of the most common CRM systems:

Marketing and web site tracking (Mailchimp, Eventbrite, Eventogy, PopCorn, Hubspot, Zoho)
Data (Cirrom, Katchr, PowerBi, Power Automate) Marketing technology system review – Clean contact data with Cirrom
Outlook tracking (Client Sense, Introhive, Promptr Trackers)
CRM databases (Salesforce, Dynamics (Peppermint), InterAction, Nexl, OnePlace or DealCloud, Intapp, Introhive, Promptr CRM)

Delegates commented that Salesforce is very complicated interface. We often find that there is a trade-off between functionality and simplicity.

(As an aside, I recently had a conversation with ex-Grant Thornton digital transformation and comms consultant Paul Thomas Chart.PR | LinkedIn. He mentioned that he is seeing increasing evidence of FibreCRM – Heart of the Practice in medium sized practices). His web site is worth a look as there’s some good CRM content there: Paul Thomas, Author at Excited by Digital…)

Question the suppliers

Simon commented: most systems do much the same thing, prepare a list of issues and questions that are important for your firm, ask to see “must have” features in action, request a free trial, rank all suppliers against your pre-agreed criteria and select the best two options to demonstrate to senior decision-makers. He also provided templates for comparing the replies to supplier requests for information.

Simon provided a series of prompts of the sorts of areas to investigate with suppliers and questions to ask providers including:

Marketing features and applications (e.g. event calendars, mailshots, pipelines, lead management, bids, referral and reciprocity trackers, credentials and deals, sales trips registers
Product (e.g. customisable, cloud-bases, mobile-friendly, Outlook friendly, integration with practice management systems, Open API for integration etc)
Security (e.g. data ownership, data storage, compliance standards, export potential, data integrity reports, data important tools etc)
Implementation (e.g. install timescales, implementation support, dedicated support staff, training resources)
Support and costs (e.g. support facilities and levels, service level agreements, additional costs, software updates, upgrades, licences, contract length etc)
Other areas to explore (e.g. hidden costs, initial data import and cleanse, support and training, use of AI)

Prepare a CRM project plan

Firms often under-estimate the time, effort and skills required to implement a CRM system. It is rarely a quick and easy project. Once the requirements are clear you should conduct a capabilities and capacity audit to assess whether you have the necessary skills and knowledge available inhouse. Or whether you will need to acquire these resources through talent acquisition or external consultants.

A detailed project plan Delegation and project management – Kim Tasso is required to consider all aspects including:

Objectives (from the business case)
Scoping
Stakeholder management Consulting Skills – The power of workshops – Kim Tasso
Assessing systems
Contracting with suppliers (system providers and implementation consultants)
System integration (adaptations to reflect your firm’s processes and compliance) and testing
Internal communications
Training and user input
Data transfer, structuring and cleansing
Pilot programme
Roll out phases
System revisions and changes
Monitoring and reporting

Often, a CRM project will be so complex that it extends beyond a simple project plan to become part of a change management programme The Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP). Culture change management is usually a component.

Manage and clean your data

Simon considered the pros and cons of linking CRMs with Outlook. And described a case study where a firm moved from 60% of contacts being not known in a database to just 20% by integrating with Outlook.

Audit your data

A range of processes and tools were described to help firms audit their data. These included:

Reports and dashboards to monitor KPIs
Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly processes
Searches to find data exceptions and duplicates
Removing unused fields and records
GDPR compliance checks (e.g. Data Protection Toolkit – Law Society Bookshop)

Improve your data

As a rule of thumb, he suggested enhancing the top 30% of data, deleting the bottom third and keeping the rest. And proposed a process to improve data:

Step One

Find and archive unwanted contacts
Find and archive unwanted companies/organisations
Delete unwanted fields
Centralise updating of your data

Step Two

Plan an annual spring clean
Plan a monthly welcome note for all new contacts
Plan annual “these are your contacts” reviews for each user
Plan monthly archiving of unwanted records
Set up weekly and monthly data checks

Marketing technology system review – Clean contact data with Cirrom

Engage fee-earners in CRM adoption

Simon considered some of the common objections from fee-earners to CRM use including: their contacts not being included, not wanting to spend time updating data, being concerned about duplicates and out of date information and not having time to learn how to search for the information they need.

He offered a number of strategies to improve engagement:

Get a Board level mandate
Invest time in stakeholder engagement and research
Modify the culture and rewards for CRM use
- Don’t pay expenses without a CRM generated BD note
- Use logged BD notes for appraisals and promotions
- Set up leaderboards
- Agree KPIs for client teams (calls, meetings, data cleaning)
- Support executive assistants (EAs) and secretaries managing team data
- Work around fee-earners who are not comfortable with tech
- Share user guide videos with new joiners (and make it part of the induction and onboarding process)
Design an integrated and long term internal education and communications campaign
Prepare workshops and training sessions
Demonstrate value in automating dull processes (e.g. conflict checks)
Make common applications effortless
Organise in-depth support for pilot teams
Share success stories from thriving teams
Improve business development and sales training so fee-earners learn the value of CRM
Make things simple (offer 10 minute video guides rather than two hour training sessions)
Spoon feed users with inbox alerts

As general advice, Simon advised not to try to “boil the ocean” or “eat the elephant” but to focus effort and start small.

Simon suggested demonstrating CRM benefits (success stories and case studies) as return on investment (ROI) was almost impossible to do for CRM. Other ways to demonstrate success included: identify at risk or ignored contacts, tracking web visits, use CRM to generate profiles that can be used for targeting new clients, asking key client teams how they have used the CRM, monitoring the growth in work pipelines and improving referrals.

There are many resources on stakeholder engagement and buy in. For example:

Buy in – Influence and Persuasion Toolbox – Kim Tasso

Achieve more engagement and buy-in

Seven thoughts on stakeholder management, engagement and buy-In

Change challenges – Culture, Communications and Clutter

Workshop contents

What is CRM? (Client Relationship Management)

How to buy CRM software

Build a business case

Assemble a project team

Scope your requirements

Assess the CRM systems available

Question the suppliers

Prepare a CRM project plan

Manage and clean your data

Audit your data

Improve your data

Engage fee-earners in CRM adoption

Related articles on CRM in professional services firms

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CRM – Applications, systems and fee-earner engagement

Workshop contents

What is CRM? (Client Relationship Management)

How to buy CRM software

Build a business case

Assemble a project team

Scope your requirements

Assess the CRM systems available

Question the suppliers

Prepare a CRM project plan

Manage and clean your data

Audit your data

Improve your data

Engage fee-earners in CRM adoption

Related articles on CRM in professional services firms

Tags

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