Charlie: Welcome to the CMO Series podcast, where we talk all things marketing and business development in professional services. In this very special episode of the podcast recorded live in London, Connor Kinnear explores the challenges and opportunities for cross-selling in professional services firms. He uncovers how AI can finally help firms make cross-selling happen. So let's jump straight in. 

This episode is brought to you by CrossPitch AI, the new cross-selling tool from Passle. Cross-selling should be the easiest way for law firms to grow, but most firms struggle. Why? Lack of awareness, lack of trust, and frankly, fear of selling. The result? Missed revenue. CrossPitch AI fixes that. It breaks down silos, helps professionals connect and delivers timely, relevant insights to the right people, inside the firm and out. There's no heavy rollouts, just switch it on and try it today. Head to crosspitch.ai to book your demo and make cross-selling happen. Now back to the podcast. 

Connor: Just under a year ago, lots of CMOs that we worked with started coming to us and saying, listen, our managing partners are asking us how we can use AI and how we can develop AI 'cause everyone's talking about AI into what we're doing from a BD and marketing perspective. So they said to us, you know, is there anything you guys can do and anything you can build that would help us? And we said, well, what's the, what are kind of the biggest issues at the moment, and we heard unanimously that cross-selling was a big thing at the law firms and consultancies we work with. And we said, well, we'll see if we can try and help with that a little bit then. 

So we are lucky to have a really, really clever group of people up in Passle HQ in Oxford, led by our CTO, John Bosley, so we went and challenged them to see what we could kind of do. We hear this so often from our clients, you know, if our consultants and lawyers knew what their colleagues were able to deliver, our clients would potentially buy it,  but they often don't know that. We often hear this a lot, so many emails, lawyer, consultant, emails, the whole firm says, does anyone know another firm that does this area or of the law or consultancy? And they come back going like, we do that thing, we've like told you so many times that we do that thing and you're referring it out to another firm. So, thank God I have this one in Siri.

So by six months or so, Tom and Adam Elgar and I went and Sadie gave up a morning afternoon of her time, and we picked her brains around cross-selling and this is something she told us, cross-selling is the cheapest, fastest and easiest way to grow revenue. So we sat about seeing if we could do something to help solve that problem and as Will mentioned lots of times, there's two things we kept hearing from Sadie that then from all our other clients. Awareness and trust stops cross-selling, so awareness, trust and other things that stop cross-selling. And what we heard again from our clients when they did create insights, and Peter mentioned a little bit or, or thought leadership. 

And I had a meeting with, um, the Head of Content Globally for financial services at one of the big four, and she was telling me that they basically create all this content, takes absolute ages, they spend so much money on it, and then they just send it to everyone, and then nobody opens it at all because it’s not relevant to most of them. So she was saying they track and they've got about 2% to 3% open rate, which is absolutely horrendous for all the work they do. 

So, we built CrossPitch AI to try and help with that, and Peter mentioned it very kindly a little bit earlier on, and all we do is we use a little bit of AI. So you can imagine here you've got these different people, maybe they're all in the same office, maybe they're in different offices, Peter was talking about everyone in their office doesn't know each other. At one of the Magic Circle firms we were with the other month, we were saying, people in the different offices or the different companies don't know each other. And they said, the people in that office and that office down there don't know each other, so how do we drive that awareness and trust? 

And so really simple, what we do is we analyse every piece of content that goes onto your website, you could be using the Passle Thought Leadership platform to do that, you could be using Lex Blog, Sitecore, WordPress, whatever you do to create your content. And what we do is we analyze each piece of content using AI and we analyze the profiles of all the people across your firm and we start to work out well, who is that actually relevant to across the firm. So in this example it said that it's relevant to Alice and Patrick and Penny, but it's not relevant to Molly and Michelle and Tracy. 

And in the backend you can if you want control lists, you can set a little threshold, sending threshold, set at 70% here, maybe you want it up to 90%, and keep it really, really relevant to those people. If you want to add people who aren't on it, you can do that. But typically after one or two sends we've got 26 clients signed up in this now, typically this is, they just fully automated after the first couple so it's fully automated and just runs in the background. So you publish a piece of content and it goes out to the 52 people that it's relevant to. And what Alice receives, she receives something that looks a little bit like this so we've taken the article, we’ve summarised it down for her in about 80 to a 100 words, and tell her what that article's all about and who it's written by. So hopefully by reading that, Alice in what, 20, 30 seconds, she can understand the point of the article and she can see who at the firm wrote that for her, for the firm then. And then she can do a few other things, she can click through if she wants to read the whole thing, she can connect with Oscar, the person who wrote it, she can push it off to LinkedIn, or she can start to tell her clients about it as well then.

So she's driven that awareness of Oscar and she's understanding what he's talking about and what he's thinking about. So she can ping it out to a client via email, again we use a little bit of AI to create that email for her, but she can obviously edit that. Or maybe she's got a meeting with them so she can speak to them in the meeting the next day about it. Or maybe she WhatsApp’s their client or maybe Alice plays golf with them. So however she meets her clients she can go and tell 'em about that little nugget that she found out from Oscar. So instead of getting these 78,000 unopened emails, you get that one relevant email that's really relevant to you and hopefully then relevant to your clients as well. 

And because it's relevant I actually took, not the big four, rate of 2-3%, I did some research and apparently the industry average is 18%. Loads of our clients don't even measure the internal open rates, I don't know if you guys all do. That's the industry average, the ones I hear from clients is that do measure, it's much, much lower than that. But because we're only sending the relevant content to the right people across the firms that we work with, across those 26 clients that we've signed up, the average open rate for CrossPitch AI has 42%. So totally game changing. People are opening it and it was 38% when we presented this at our event in New York, a few months back and it's creeping up because we think once people know what it's about, they know it's more likely to be relevant to them as well then. 

So we're really happy with that and what happened then was our clients started saying, well, this is great we've got the 42% open rate but how can we really start to understand how we're connecting the firm internally through our thought leadership and our insights and content? So we went back to the team up in Oxford to see what they could do to help us show those connections because we were starting to connect these firms like they've never been connected before through that thought leadership, insight and content. So what they did is they built this, which is what we call a Cross-Selling Intelligence Map and this is something we're about to launch very soon, and it's basically an interactive network diagram that shows how your firms connected across individuals, offices, practices, and sectors across the firm. 

It looks a little bit something like this, I can actually show you the latest live demo of it then as well. So if I bring this up and I click, hopefully refresh, never do a live demo, so Tom Elgar always told me, that's what I learned actually seeing Tom Elgar doing live demos. So you can see here, we've already connected, here's actually live data from a client, we've just anonymized the offices and the names of the people. But basically what it does, you can see all the connections across the firm. So in this example you can see, well, if they're interested in how the offices are connected, you can see that Chicago and New York and LA look pretty well connected, but Nashville's looking, looking pretty lonely out here on the side then. 

If you want, you can even click on an individual, and you click on all the individuals and see how each of them is connected and who they're connected to from across the firm. I say you can do this by individuals, if you want, you can go in and you can do it by practice group or by sector group. So here we've done the intellectual property team, so again you can see where the different firms and different offices are connected through their insights and thought leadership. If I take that away so intellectual property looks not too bad, if I click on litigation, you can see it's pretty sparse and not so well connected. So you can start to see where different parts of your firms are connected.

Interestingly, Peter mentioned lateral hires earlier on, so when we brought this to CMOs, I think the most excited people we've seen are the managing partners, and CEOs and senior leadership teams. So this ability to see in one shot how the firm is connected through their insights and thought leadership. So if you bring in a lateral hire, you can maybe see after a couple of months exactly how well integrated they are into the firm, are they engaging in the content? Are they creating content and insights that other people are reading as well then? So you get a real feel for that.

We also have clients who are constantly merging, especially in the US, lots of mergers going on. So how are those two firms started a merger, so through the Cross-Selling Intelligence Map, you can start to look and understand how they're doing that. So that's kind of the Cross-Selling Intelligence Map. I said it's so easy to switch on and that's one of the beauties of AI. It's not like a CRM project where you have to put in loads of data for months and months and months, or a new website project, and finally you launch it a year and a half or two years later. With AI it's all there so this is all publicly available information. It's insights that are published on your website already, it's the profiles that are already there so you can pretty much switch it on immediately and it's all fully automated then as well. And the great thing about that is you can start seeing those benefits in as little as one or two weeks. 

So that data I showed you was from the first two weeks of that client and using that data that they've seen. So really, really easy to launch, the best thing for our CMOs is the managing partners absolutely love it. So they can go and see the snapshot of how the firm is integrated, and the next thing might be looking at what can we do? How do we integrate that office better with Chicago and New York and how do we get Nashville and much more engaged in what we're doing? 

As mentioned, we've launched 26 clients, so we've signed up 26 clients in just a couple of months. We're really, really excited about this. A lot of them are on the other side of the Atlantic, and what we would love to do is get, you know, double that number and get more across the UK as well. We call 'em our kind of early adopters, and with early adopters we give a much lower cost than we'll charge in the future so that we can get loads and loads of feedback from those people to show us how we can enhance that product and develop over the next couple of years as well then. 

So for the next couple of months, the next two months, we have early adopter pricing so that we can hopefully encourage lots of firms to get on board and start benefiting from CrossPitch AI. So, if you're interested in that at all, go and speak to one of the team or message us and we'd love to show you how easy it is to set up for your firm and how there's new tech, no project, no integrations needed to get going and seeing results immediately. 

Charlie: You can follow the Passle CMO Series podcast on your preferred podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.