The Bay Area Member Spotlight Q&A series shines light on our members and their work, celebrates our diversity, and reinforces a sense of community among Bay Area marketers.
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Lisa Sanford is an LMA member and a Director of Client Development in the Interim Group for Major, Lindsey & Africa in San Francisco. Prior to joining MLA in May 2021, Lisa was a business development manager at Morrison & Foerster, Fenwick & West and Simpson Thacher and Bartlett. |
You were most recently at Morrison & Foerster. What did your role at the firm entail?
I was responsible for supporting the Securities Litigation, Securities Enforcement, Commercial Litigation and Trial practices across the firm. Among my many duties, I was responsible for creating BD and Marketing plans for each of the practices as well as the partners, identifying and pursuing speaking and publication opportunities, planning and producing events, responding to pitches and RFPs, writing rankings submissions, supporting firm-wide marketing program roll-outs, and providing one-on-one BD coaching. I was also the lead on a number of firm internal programs, notably MoFo Empower - a 12-month BD introduction and training program for associates initially rolled out in the Bay Area offices, the Dingers Sharepoint that monitored court filings and firm outreach, the Litigation Experience Database update, and a concerted Corporate/Securities Litigation cross-selling effort
I understand you spearheaded an innovative cross-practice client outreach initiative. Would you provide an overview?
The Above Board project was originally started in 2019 as an effort to build business for the corporate attorneys by reaching out to boards of directors with the deliverable being a stand-alone resource page on the firm website. I heard about this on a marketing call and, because I too was targeting boards, I connected with the BD manager in corporate and asked to be included in the project. Note that the initial cross-practice success of this initiative was within the firm’s own siloed marketing group.
We quickly recognized that a combined effort would position the practices for better external and internal BD opportunities, so we created a designated internal marketing team and set to work. The parameters of this particular effort were daunting: finding out who sits on boards is difficult, and finding their contact information harder still. Also, board members are mostly not lawyers, so all external messaging had to be customized or created for that audience.
A few months into the year-long effort the BD for corporate left the firm and I took over the management and delivery of the initiative. I initially managed a marketing group of corporate and litigation BDs who divided the efforts of conducting competitive intelligence, researching the firm CRM for current board member affiliations, and tracking down board members of the firm’s top 100 clients. I then presented our findings to key corporate and securities litigation partners which resulted in identifying several practice champions. I next presented the fleshed-out concept to marketing leadership including securing the TM on the branding of Above Board.
Once I had Corporate and Securities Litigation practice leaders and marketing leadership approval, I managed a team of content creators, web designers, PR managers, MarComm and researchers so that the site would have a content library, including a 12-month calendar of podcasts, and an initial mailing list of 150 high-value targets. The soft launch of the landing page in November was immediately well received as evidenced by the caliber of opt-ins via the site’s call to action button as well as SEO stats.
What challenges were unique to this initiative? How did you overcome them?
Convincing the corporate and securities litigation partners that this initiative was an opportunity was initially a challenge. We overcame any trepidation with research and data. We reviewed the websites of over 20 competitive firms for any similar resources and mapped the materials and attorneys associated within any firms with similar focuses. We also researched the very robust Boards of Directors outreach programs that the Big 4 (EY, Deloitte, KPMG & PWC) have. We then created a PowerPoint presentation with statistics and examples, which included identifying existing materials that could be repurposed as initial content - demonstrating our focus on cost-effective marketing. Another challenge was creating a 12-month calendar of podcasts - a core part of the resources we wanted to promote – as well as a library of appropriate content. We overcame that by soliciting internal partners whose BD plans included the desire for more PR opportunities, initially proposing topics of possible interest to boards, with the intent to spur suggestions based on industry trends or client conversations.
What were the results of the initiative?
The site was soft launched, because our date fell only a week before the 2020 presidential election. We focused on promoting its release via LinkedIn Elevate, Twitter and direct outreach to the boards of directors mailing list we’d created from our CRM database. We included an opt-in link in all emails as well as on the landing page and were rewarded with a steady stream of high-level targets opting in.
How did the pandemic impact your planning and execution?
Because the marketing team was used to working remotely with each other, our parts of the initiative went smoothly. The remote recording of podcasts, and competition for scarce internal resources required building in time and identifying work-arounds so our deadline did get pushed a bit.
Do you have any advice to share with the legal marketing community as a result of this initiative?
My advice is to keep your marketing colleagues informed of what you’re working on so possible cross-pollination opportunities are identified early. Then, do as much front-end work as possible before presenting a formal suggestion anticipating pushback because each new initiative entails asking people to do work they weren’t doing before. Make it easy for them to say yes.
If you know a Bay Area marketer who should be profiled or if you are that marketer, we would love to hear from you! Tell us about recent accomplishments, personal or professional. How has COVID-19 impacted your job? What keeps you motivated? Please send a brief (one paragraph) nomination for yourself or a peer to jessed@infiniteglobal.com