CovConnect (Covington & Burling)
Winner in the Category of Marketing Technology
At Covington & Burling, obtaining a comprehensive understanding of client and prospective client relationships required manually compiling information from 13 different sources.
Facing the daunting challenge of consolidating data from these sources and making this data easily accessible and digestible, Covington began the arduous process of building and deploying CovConnect, which was designed to:
- Create and execute better business plans for practice and industry groups and individual senior lawyers.
- Make it easy to comprehensively connect the dots among these plans.
- Measure progress against goals.
- Empower lawyers to find opportunities to connect more meaningfully with clients.
- Gain insights into key industry trends and identify targets.
- Leverage various tools, from content marketing to CRM, to efficiently reach those targets.
Production & Implementation:
Recognizing the complexity of the project, and the aggressive 12-week timeline for initial migration to Salesforce, the team divided project implementation into five main workstreams to ensure effective management and execution:
- Migration from InterAction: The team enlisted the assistance of an expert consultant to extract and transform company, contact, and opportunity data into Salesforce’s data structures, some of which were still under construction. The migration provided an opportunity to clean up data from the decades-old system and allowed for the merging of companies and elimination of dormant and duplicate contacts.
- Building the Salesforce Instance: The team chose Upper Sigma to jump-start the implementation efforts, providing access to a trusted expert who complemented Covington’s internal salesforce administrator’s skills.
- Integration with 3E Accounting System: This integration facilitated the seamless transfer of client, matter, and timekeeper data from 3E to Salesforce, ensuring the accuracy and accessibility of this critical information.
- Rollout of Marketing Automation Platform: Covington selected Pardot and its advanced features such as web tracking, lead scoring, and engagement tools, offering a significant upgrade from its previous platform.
- Rollout of Dashboards: Once all of the data was available in a single platform, the team developed robust and easy-to-use dashboards, bringing this information into one easy-to-use tool.
Daily stand-up meetings were conducted with each consultant involved in the project, promoting real-time collaboration and issue resolution. Joint stand-up sessions were also held, allowing consultants to collaborate with one another and ensure seamless coordination between the workstreams.
Results:
Two years after deploying CovConnect, Covington improved client engagement, streamlined business development, and facilitated comprehensive business planning. More than 700 senior lawyers and BD team members have been onboarded onto the platform, and many use it daily.
The platform was refined following an initial rollout to the business development and marketing team, adding more features and functionality that would appeal to a broader group of senior lawyers. Covington then focused on providing dashboards for practice group leaders to facilitate cross-selling and to client relationship managers to provide insights that would help them better serve their clients. After overwhelmingly positive feedback, the team introduced the dashboards at Covington’s senior lawyers retreat earlier this year.
The lawyers have embraced the platform, using it to identify which other groups are targeting the same company, to see which group’s targets have had touches (and which have not), to find client targets easily in a geographic area, and for direct outreach or building lists for invitations or content targeting. They continue to request new dashboards and find innovative ways to use data.