James: Every law firm strives to achieve year on year profitable revenue growth. Today on the CMO Series Podcast, we'll explore how law firms can drive sustainable organic growth by focusing on client value delivery, why collaboration is at the heart of that process and the steps teams can take to drive profitable growth. I'm James Barclay, CEO of Passel Inc, and I'm very excited to welcome Wendy Bernero, Founder and Strategic Advisor at Yate Collaborative. Wendy has over 30 years of experience in legal marketing. Holding chief roles at Baker McKenzie, Paul Weiss, and Akin Gump. Wendy's here to share her valuable insights on effective go-to market strategy, highlighting the role of cross-selling, the importance of building successful client teams, and how firms can deliver real value to their clients in an increasingly competitive market.

Charlie: The CMO Series podcast is brought to you by Passle, the creators of Cross Pitch AI, which makes cross-selling happen. Switch it on and try it today by visiting passle.net. Now back to the podcast. 

James: It's wonderful to have you here Wendy. Welcome. Great to have you on the CMO Series Podcast. 

Wendy: Thanks for inviting me.

James: This is great. So, to kick things off, would you mind sharing a bit about your background in legal marketing, um, and maybe list just three key learnings you've taken with you into your current role at Yate Collaborative. 

Wendy: From my experience in the banking center, I bring a belief that a marketing department needs to function as a growth engine for an organization. And that's what I've tried to establish in law firms over the last 25 years. And what I bring to Yate Collaborative is the ability to hone a go to market strategy, a value proposition, and the necessary solutions methodology to deliver strong results for law firms. So this is really the basis. It's really the favorite, my favorite part of my role as A CMO, which has now formed the basis of Yate collaborative, together with the professional services, sales capabilities and experience in my co-founder Rob Randolph. But to be more specific, my learnings in law firms are primarily these, what works in one firm is really unlikely to work in another. So it's important to understand each firm's underlying business model and culture, and to customize your methodologies and processes to achieve results in a particular ecosystem. The second most important lesson is to show instead of tell. Many law firm business professionals across the boards, try to employ a top down approach and convince firm leadership that they need to change course. But it's far more satisfying, I find to create a coalition of the willing, find a group of partners, a practice group, a sector group, to implement pilot projects that can prove the effectiveness of new approaches. And then the last piece is the, the Business Development Marketing Communications Department can serve as a growth engine for their organization if they align insight, strategy and execution in a coherent methodology focused on developing high value business solutions and generating profitable revenue. This I have, many law firms have become somewhat fragmented in their approach to delivering services to the firm, so they have really great specialist silos of highly talented people, but bringing all of those people together, bringing the research people together with the practice group, folks that really understand what the lawyers do and what their base capabilities are. With the proposal team, with the communications and marketing and campaigns team, you can form a really coherent strategy that drives results for your firm. 

James: Yeah, and I think, and, and with that kind of joining the dots. You are ending up driving organic growth, as you say, as opposed to just buying growth in, which has proved kind of not, not as successful as you'd think. When it comes to the rate of successful laterals. I guess, um, we covered a bit there, and please do carry on with that, but your main goal at Yate is to help firms drive this organic growth in a strategic way. Um, when you talk to CMOs, what, what are the kind of core strategies you implement you recommend, and I think just as importantly, what, what do you say they should stay away from?

Wendy: Yeah, so to me the most important piece of everything we do is find your value proposition and not find your value proposition in order to put it on your website, because that's important, but way too general to drive revenue growth because it has to, if it's on your website, if it encompasses the whole firm. Since most firms are relatively general practice and cover a host of sectors and business types. That's not really specific enough to drive revenue to the firm. What you need to do is create a value proposition or many value propositions actually, that are the intersection between the business challenges and opportunities facing clients or sectors and the highest value solutions that the firm has the capabilities to provide. So we tend in law firms to create these very long lists of that usually are of items that are a sentence or too long about our representations, but we really need are case studies that show short case studies, but case studies that show how our lawyers work together. To solve a problem or to win an opportunity for a client, so those are those two pieces. Understanding what your firm is best at and where it collaborates in the best possible ways to deliver the most value to clients, and then find the clients that have business problems and challenges and opportunities that your special value proposition areas can address, because that's really the heart of all selling, isn't it? It's really where, who are the people that have the problems that you can, that you can solve for them, and obviously you're looking for the client's highest value, most important critical challenges and opportunities so that they will want to pay you your rates and want to work with you at a high level. I think another thing that I regularly tell firms is that learning by doing really is the best ways to lead lawyers to business development success. 

So sales training and coaching definitely have their role, But lawyers need to be guided. We need to have law firm. Marketing departments need to have a better ground game that helps lawyers and helps lo, helps lawyers follow up on client opportunities, helps them identify what they should be talking to clients about helps them. Remember that the sales cycle for almost all meaningful legal engagements is long, which means regular follow up, regular touching base is, is key to success in that. Um, and, and if you don't do that, you can have the best engagement with a client, can have the best meeting about how you can help them solve a problem, and they're gonna need to go back and talk to other people. And the client is gonna get distracted. And if the lawyer doesn't follow up, you're not gonna wind up winning that work. You're not gonna follow it to a close. And, and, and that's really with all the brilliant ideas that come out of business development, marketing, and communications departments. Where we lose them most often is when they sit with the lawyers and the lawyers, you know, send something out or talks to the client or makes a speech, but then there's no follow on work to help. Make that ideal land and help the client figure out how they could best utilize the firm. So some firms have addressed that because by having client managers work with their client teams, some people, some BD teams have that capability. Um, we have this. Bring called legal sales as a service where we come in and help support your ground game related to a particular initiative. Really working with the lawyers on a day-to-day basis to help make sure that they do the follow up at in, in a meaningful follow up necessary in order for them to win the work and be, it's very frustrating for CMOs because they put all this great stuff out there and it doesn't land because the people that need to make it land are too busy serving clients or too distracted by law firm management and other responsibilities. 

James: Absolutely. And that kind of goes on to what we've been talking to about in the past, and I remember it sticking with me, which is, you said that firms have to decide between being solution providers or simply talent agencies. Um, could you expand on that?

Wendy: Um, yeah, I, there's, there's a lot of law firms. Lawyers go about their marketing as if we have a bunch of hourly widgets to sell, and that's what they're trying to sell. And they come in different technical colors, right? And you, their reaction to marketing and business development is let's find people who have, who have, let's find technology companies because they have IP work, so they will need our technical skills.And their technical skills obviously are embedded in people. So we have technical experts, you have technical issues that need to be addressed. We're gonna give you our team to solve those problems. Or the one I hear most in cross-selling is every time a firm makes a cross-selling list, um, and then they're like, where are the opportunities to deliver additional value? The quick reaction is, well, all these people have employees so they must need labor and employment lawyers. So let's introduce our labor and employment lawyers and get them to, to, to, let's find use for that talent for those hours that we need to fill. And that's. A very difficult way to sell legal services first, because you're competing, right? You're, you're, you're selling people, you're competing with the in-house people for that work. 

You're competing with contract law firms to do that work. It's also very hard to differentiate your talent in any meaningful way unless you're really the person that created a certain. Type of transaction and you're the only one that could do it, or you are the only one that has solved that, you're the one that wrote the, the regulation or the piece of legislation that the client needs interpreted. On the other hand, if you are selling solutions, if you've identified a problem that a client has, like right now with the potential imposition of tariffs, a lot of companies are dealing with supply chain issues and they're having to rethink their supply chains. So you wouldn't go to that co if you went to that company and said, I have trade lawyers. Can I introduce them to you? Well, they have trade lawyers. They know dozens of trade lawyers. If you go to them and say, you know, automobile manufacturing company, we have teams of people that have worked on supply chains, in the automotive space for decades, and we've come up with some creative ideas where you can have a more flexible supply chain and some thoughts on how you can deal with these tariff issues.Who, who are you gonna, which of those people are you gonna invite to talk to you? James, the person that says, I think you need a trade lawyer. Can I introduce my trade lawyer to you or somebody who's offering to engage with you in a discussion on how they might solve your problems.

James:Exactly, and I think, you know, law firms that are selling individual talent, individual expertise in certain technical area, as you say, they're just, they're doing it hard because unless you are the top two, unless you're the one, the, the top of the list in chambers, you, you are kind of commoditized, which is where you end up in a price conversation.I was recently with, uh, the former CMO, Reed Smith, Sadie Barron, and she told us cross-selling is the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to grow revenue. I know that me and you have talked a lot about cross-selling in the past and joining those dots so that you end up with a solution for clients as opposed to a solution for an individual problem, um, actually a solution for their business. Can you walk us through the framework that, that, that you've worked out over time to, uh, to maximize that cross-selling and the steps that CMOs teams and COOs teams should take to make it successful? I know that you start, you mentioned to me that you start with research. 

Wendy: Yes, I always start with research because you really want to deeply understand the client's current and future business challenges and opportunities. You wanna understand their goals. What is the client trying to achieve this year? If you read their annual report. If you use one of the many wonderful AI tools out there to do research and then do deep research beyond that to identify what's going on inside this client company and where else could you help them. You can at that point then go look at, alright, what capabilities do we as a firm have that these are the four core goals of this company and the challenges and opportunities they're going to face. How, how can we help them? What's the one idea we have? What are the three ideas that we have? What have we done for other clients in similar situations? What can we invent for them that will make their life and work easier? And, there's two ways to look at it. There's the substantive knowledge. We've solved this problem before for numerous different clients. So therefore, we have come up with some creative ideas for how legally and you can navigate your way through a particular situation. The other way is just to change the process of doing the work or how the work is delivered. Maybe you, which is the more kind of creative pricing and packaging of services so that it's much more efficient for a client. That's gonna have a, a certain type of, of legal work over a period of time as they try to achieve their business goals. So it's, it's the, you know, this is a, this is a real example, um, that there's a in the crypto space exchanges, crypto exchanges right now are trying to diversify their revenue screens. If you read the research on all the crypto exchanges, they don't wanna just be, earning revenue from transaction fees.

They want to do what all other types of financial companies do, which is to have a diverse revenue stream. So they're doing all kinds of products and packaging ideas, including debit cards, and other types of financial instruments, they're doing, uh, education teaching sessions like for a membership fee, you can learn about crypto. There's a whole host of things that these exchanges are trying to do, but they wanna become the preferred platform and they also want to have a diverse. Um, and a stronger revenue growth rate. So if you're a company that, if you're a law firm that has a lot of financial services, a lot of experience in the FinTech and financial product space, There are some companies that could probably, there are some exchanges that could probably use your help. So if you, it takes work, you have to spend the time thinking about how you would help them, how you would work with them, how are they organized. But that's the kind of conversation that clients want to have with their lawyers and with their law firms. To take another example, I've been doing a lot of client in client interviews lately, and every in-house lawyer I talk to says, you know, all the technology companies keep coming to me and talking about AI and how we can use AI. I am waiting for the first law firm to come and talk to me about how AI could be a solution and how we work together better and how we should be working together. Again, an important and opportunity, it's something that legal departments really care about. It's AI is being brought into their companies, across the board and the legal departments want to try to figure out how to use AI to reduce costs and improve productivity and deliver better results to their companies. So law firms need to figure out what kinds of solutions they can offer in that area. Or even just start to have conversations and, and, and offer support. Right. That's, that's a way of embedding yourself in an organization and there will be legal work around that as well. 

James: I think that's right. I think starting the conversation and of course with, with the lens that I have on, um. We often think that experience for a lawyer and a law firm is what they have done, and they often show that, but their thought leadership, and what they talk about. About the width and the breadth of their knowledge within an organization is, is the future, is what they want to be doing, is the work they want to be doing. And you hit it on the head with the AI. If there weren't, there weren't law firms interested in AI or to such a degree four years ago, three years ago. Now the only way to do that is to talk about it and to start the conversations. Um, I see you guys from talking to you over the last kind of few weeks. I see you guys very much as a special forces, you kind of drop into a law firm. Um, and you, uh, and you, and you help the leaders of the law firm really change the dynamic, um, and the approach to the way they go to market. What three actions would you recommend every marketing and BD leader take today to improve their go-to market strategy?

Wendy: Um, well, first I think special forces is the right. We, we don't, our goal is to get firms more of help firms set up operations to become more effective at revenue generation, put methodologies and processes and plans in place, but we don't, our, our goal is not to create. A huge organization where we're staying embedded in firms. Our, our goal would be that our, we would work with the firm for six months or a year, and then they would have what they need in place to go forward. In many of our assignments a lot of our work, we're really just working with the, the CMO or other business professionals to help them understand the methodologies, help them figure out how they can put it in place so that they can lead these efforts within their organization. So, you know, our, our, our process is very much focused on enabling organizations to develop this. Capacity and to be able to carry on, um, effectively on their own. The three things that I think everyone should do, the first is set goals and priorities focused on best opportunities. Don't wait until your, um, don't wait until your firm agrees that these are the three priorities sectors or these are the priority regions, or you don't need to do that. You know, from your work, from your understanding of the firm's financials and that your knowledge of the clients where the best opportunities lie. So I always, I am a very covert operator in a firm. I, I don't. I don't wait until, um, I get everybody in line and agree that this is what we should focus on. I really try to focus on, um, identifying a coalition of the willing, identifying small projects that I can work on to prove that these methodologies work to prove that profitable revenue generation organic growth can happen, and then let it.

Let it grow from there. Let people start taking notice. Have some pilots that have worked and that you can point to as you try to expand through it through the organization. The second is invest in research. Invest in AI. You could free up so much time in your department to focus on revenue growth projects. If you can start harnessing the power of AI to play fetch. I, I always sort of joked that the marketing department really spent a lot of its time playing fetch. Can you buy, can you fetch and analyze these financials? Can you get fetch background on these clients? Can you, can you do this research and connect all the dots here? It's, it's, um, it's a challenging position to be in, but I think we're pretty close to a time that the, um. That we no longer need to be playing that role. So that role. So really try to harness a lot of firms have copilot and other tools. Perplexity is my favorite AI tool when I use it. Almost all the time as a starting point for research. Um, but invest, invest, invest in research, and not just external research about clients and markets, but research into what does your firm really do well? What do you have to sell? The product development piece of solution development, service offering development in law firms has never been very mature and, and it needs to be, because those are the things you can, those are the things you can build value propositions around. Providing recent surveys over the past five years when you asked general counsel what they want from there from their law firms, it used to be expertise and experience and and responsiveness. Over the last five years, solutions has started to rise up that list and is now top three on many of the, um, the surveys that you see published these days. So we should be paying attention to that. That's what we need to be delivering to our clients and, and research, internal research.

Know your firm, um, know your firm's best capabilities and external research around who needs those service offerings and solutions is really the fundamental part of creating a coherent go-to market strategy. And then the last is campaigns are important. You know, we all remember the rule of the communications rule of seven. You need to tell something. You need to repeat things to clients or anyone you're speaking to seven times in seven different ways. They need to hear it seven times in seven different ways before they're prepared to buy. So that's why we have thought leadership. That's why we have campaigns. That's why we do client alerts. That's why we, we speak at conferences. Right. It's really important to keep that in mind. There's way too many random acts of marketing. There's way too many great ideas that are not rolled out in a way that a targeted audience is hearing it over and over again, so that it then sticks in their mind and they think of your firm, they think of your solution, they think of your service offering as something they, um, something that they wanna use and something they want to purchase. So those are really the three. Marketing and Communications is really critical to the execution piece and the design piece of solutions to the, they're critical to the success of go to market strategies, and they need to really be aligned and embedded in your ideas so that you're not generating ideas, coming up with solutions, coming up with target clients, and then missing out on actually communicating and moving from awareness to interest, to readiness to purchase, because that funnel will always remain the same in terms of how you win work. 

James: Yeah, I love that. So, number one, don't play fetch. Um, make sure that you research, invest in AI to do that research. Focus on solutions, build those solutions to the needs of your clients. Build campaigns so that you don't tell them once, but you tell them seven times and, and launch with proofs of values and lead rather than follow. Um, absolutely. Perfect. Thank you very much. Um, I've now got some quick fire questions for you. Bit of fun. We always do with everyone who records a podcast with us. So, uh, nice and quick, what are the, what are you currently listening to? Um, could be music, podcast or audio book. 

Wendy: So, uh, my more everything is my go-to podcast for inspiration that's, uh, produced by a really good friend of mine, Elizabeth Deso, and I'm always reading or listening to at least one book. So right now it's Abundance by Ezra Klein.

James: And what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? 

Wendy: If you employ a growth mindset? You'll always find your way. So a growth mindset is the belief you have endless potential to learn and grow and adapt. You know, there's always opportunity out there if you're open your mind and, and look to find it and are willing to collaborate.

James: What's a book or resource that you recommend to anyone in, in marketing and BD in law firms? 

Wendy: Well, there's a few. So anything by David Maister is high on my list. Um, but my two favorite marketing books are Positioning The Battle For Your Mind by Jack Trout and Al Reese, which is the, if you ever wanna understand how to get a message across to somebody, it's really the fundamental book that explains in an over-communicated world, how you connect to people. It's sort of the rule of seven on steroids. Um, and then the other one is The End of Marketing As We Know It by Sergio Ziman, the former CMO of Coca-Cola. He is absolutely hilarious and irreverent and has, um. Such clarity around marketing. The purpose of marketing is to sell something. So we should all stop thinking that we are creative artists like developing beautiful websites and podcasts, et cetera. If, if your marketing isn't selling, if it isn't helping your organization generate revenue, it should be stopped. And he has hilarious examples. So, uh, definitely a good read.

James:  I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick that one up. What's, um, what's your favorite way to unwind after a busy day?

Wendy:  Just time with my family, friends, and my dogs. I'm, I, I, at one point I had four dogs and two cats. Um, I now have three dogs, but I, I, you know, I, my family is great. We love going to sporting events and playing sports and generally hanging out together. And then the dogs always welcome you home when you're, after you've been away with such love and abandon that they're pretty irresistible. 

James: I don't, I can't remember where I read it. It was probably something online, um, which was be, be the person your dog thinks you are. 

Wendy: Yes. 

James: Where, where is your favorite place to visit and why?

Wendy: Um, Hawaii, unfortunately, I live on the East coast, so it's very far away, so I don't get there that often. But I, the natural beauty of Hawaii is just beyond compare with any place I've ever been. And then it's just, there is this Hawaiian philosophy of love and compassion and interconnectedness, um, that you can just feel in the people. It's, it's just a, a wonderful place to be with wonderful people there. So I, I escape to Hawaii whenever I always tell people, if I ever run away from home, you will, I will be in Hawaii somewhere on an island. That's where I will go. 

James: Perfect. Well, Wendy Bernero, Founder and Strategic Advisor at Yate Collaborative. Thank you very much indeed for being on CMO Series Podcast. 

Wendy: Thank you.