“Non-lawyers” as a description of those in Operations, Business Development, Marketing, Finance, Account etc. etc. in a law firm doesn’t bother me. For many law firms experience rapid growth around the country, there is a strong, diverse non-lawyer backbone that develops the business-side of a law firm while lawyers do what many lawyers do best (and would prefer to do every day): practice law.
When I worked in-house, I was a “Director of Online Business” operations at one firm (an interesting title, of nearly no weight when I reflect in retrospect), and the “Director of Marketing” at another, which is adequate as far as seniority, but confusing in an organization where I was the only non-lawyer that wasn’t technically a receptionist or legal assistant. When orgs become more robust, you’ll see law firms with a defined Business Development segment, because medium to large sized firms will almost always have clear goals and processes for Leadership, Management, and other traditional business-oriented operations. While the business-side org grows, so does the org chart, and eventually you’ll have roles for everything from assistants to directors. And with time, C-suite such as COO and CMO.
In our conversation with Brenda Pontiff, we were able to discuss the point in which a firm would seek a CMO, what the hiring process looks like, and the clear expectations and goal for this role. As a lawyer, it may be evident what the value would be of a Chief Marketing Officer on your team building up your brand and reputation day in, day out. But the crucial questions that prevent people from moving forward could be:
- How the heck do I interview someone like this?
- How do I manage this person, and if we believe in helping them grow and elevate, how can I possibly mentor a CMO or even someone more junior?
- What metrics do I keep them accountable for, for both rewarding and disciplining?
Many of these questions are answered on this podcast (and the transcription) which will give you more clarity on how to bring in an in-house marketing position, whether it is a CMO or a more entry marketing assistant.
The following interview has been transcribed for our readers from rev.com. Please excuse any discrepancies from the transcription.
Chase Williams:
Today on Legal Mastermind Podcast, we have Brenda Pontiff. She’s the Managing Principal at Partner Track Academy. Welcome to the Legal Mastermind Podcast.
Brenda Pontiff:
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Chase Williams:
For our listeners that aren’t familiar with who you are, what do you do? Can you please share?
Brenda Pontiff:
Sure. My company helps law firms figure out the new innovative waves to go to market and service clients. I also do a lot of coaching. Sometimes it’s young associates and sometimes it’s senior partners on how to retain a client or how to get a new client. And we stay really busy right now. We’re very busy with law firms needing that service.
Chase Williams:
And today I think the main thing we’re to focus on is hiring our CMO at your law firm. So really, the first question is who needs a CMO? Like how big does your firm need to be? How does the structure need to be, can you start there?
Brenda Pontiff:
Right. Well, of course the large global firms all have a chief marketing officer. Sometimes they’re called the chief business development officer. Sometimes they have two, they have a chief marketing officer who handles the visibility side of it, the branding side of it. And then they have a chief business development officer that’s more business development, going out and innovating new services, things like that. That’s a little bit more rare, but even your small litigation boutiques now are requiring marketing services. The world has changed so fast. And as you know, everybody has a website. Now you have to have a website. You don’t exist if you don’t have a website. So you’ve got to have someone help you design that, maintain that. You’ve got to keep up with social media every day. You have to have people help you place articles every day. So even the smallest firms need help.
Now, what my company does often is, we can step in as an interim CMO or a fractional CMO to help the smaller firms that don’t want to hire someone full time. I don’t know if you’ve been reading, but the salaries for the big, large global firms are really getting up there. Some of them are making a million dollars and over for the large global firms.
Chase Williams:
Got to quit my job.
Ryan Klein:
Yes. What are we doing?
Chase Williams:
Sorry, Ryan.
Brenda Pontiff:
Yeah. Well, believe me, some of the litigation attorneys that I work for at these boutiques are like, “well, what am I doing? I need to quit and go.” And I said, “well, sure, why don’t you it for a while and see how would you like it?” So of course these smaller firms and the middle market firms, they can’t afford to have that kind of a salary on their books, but they all need help. So it’s a matter of how much work can you delegate to administrative assistance and how much work are you willing to pay a higher dollar for someone to come in and give you some sophisticated guidance and consultation. And do you want to make that person full time?
Chase Williams:
Sure. And so what could an average firm expect to spend on a CMO?
Brenda Pontiff:
An average being, let’s say you’ve got 200 attorneys across the nation. A good firm is going to pay at least 240, 280 around that range. Your larger firms are going to get higher than that. If you’re global, you’re looking at closer to 450, 580 in that range. It was quite a few years ago that a firm got known for paying 1.2 million that was back in, I think, 2009 or 10 that, somebody first started paying the million dollar price tag. So and I think at that point, in my opinion, you need to be able to prove that you’re increasing revenues. That revenues just didn’t happen because in these law firms, they will grow revenue year after year. I believe that you must hang your hat on proving that you brought in some of that revenue in order for you to be making the million dollar salary.
Ryan Klein:
That must be a pretty interesting feat too, because lawyers, as far as like business backgrounds and disciplines might not always know, not trying to gauge what everyone’s expertise is, but marketers can throw together a lot of metrics and data and make it seem like things are going the way that they want them to. And then, it’s going to be hard. It could potentially be tricky for people to kind of untangle or decipher some of the information they’re providing to prove their value.
Brenda Pontiff:
That is a really good point. Hopefully you’ve got a good CFO on board who can figure that out, hopefully. But you know, people are persuasive and some of the personalities that I’ve seen, I think my fitness test is can they discuss the services that you’re providing? Do they understand the services that you’re providing to clients? And do they understand how those services? Number one, mitigate risk, number two, save dollars. And if they can’t speak to that, then what they’re doing is, I’m not saying that what they’re doing is not valuable. They may be helping you get articles out there and they may understand branding and they’re a great brand ambassador. But if they don’t have any understanding of the true value that you bring to the marketplace then, I think there’s a difference between a marketer and a business developer.
And I think your business developer really is where you get your higher salaries. That’s where you can link actual revenue growth to a business developer, easier than you can a marketer, in our business. That’s not saying it’s that way across the board. For instance, when you’re looking to hire a CMO right now, a lot of them say they want to go outside the industry, which is good because there’s kind of a musical chairs thing going on with law firms. You see a person will be at a firm for three or four years and they go and move to another firm. Well, if that firm really wants to innovate and be different, why would you hire a CMO, who’s just done the same thing over and over again at other firms?
So those firms that are looking outside the industry, I applaud them. Now, you have to be careful which industry you’re looking to. I would strongly suggest that you look to other professional services like the accounting world, who understand some of these areas that you’re delving into. If you go and hire like say the CMO of Nabisco who has been selling cookies and crackers and has not been selling people and services, then you’re going to run into a real cultural roadblock.
Ryan Klein:
That makes sense. And if there’s time later, I’d like to follow up with some of those things, because I agree with that and we’re doing that in some ways with our own hiring. But going back to like the day to day, we’re talking about the CMO. I know you mentioned something in the marketing world or at least digitally, you mentioned the website and social media and articles in the posting. And 10 years ago, you’d definitely be describing for the most part, like a B2C CMO, someone in that industry, the plaintiff and that those sides of things, but B2B, I guess, is heading that direction too. So are those a lot of disciplines and requirements in some ways for the CMO as it is today?
Brenda Pontiff:
Yes, that is a good point. I mean, AI and B2B, it is, and your buyer is much more sophisticated. You’re talking to a sophisticated buyer now who understands data analytics and so, that’s where it gets more complicated. I think the team that these CMOs put into place, you have to bifurcate and yet these teams must work in unison. So you’ve got people who are dedicated to marketing, telling the story about the firm. And then you’ve got people who are dedicated to client service delivery. Who do I put on your case or your project and how do I show that these people add value? How do I retain you to make sure you’re getting good service? How do I keep that relationship going?
How do I collect feedback, which is data and understand that data in terms of helping you improve your services. So it’s getting more and more complicated. And I think a sophisticated CMO is one in our industry who has not just been moving from firm to firm. That’s why I think that, it’s time for law firms to start looking outside of just the legal industry. I’m not saying that there aren’t some terrific CMOs already out there, but I think it’s time to start digging deeper.
Chase Williams:
So recruiting for this role, I assume it’s almost like a full time job. Is this a situation where you’d want to hire like an executive recruiter or reach out to something like Partner Track Academy? How does that process work?
Brenda Pontiff:
Well, we do a little bit of that, we do, and I’m going to be really honest. For me, it’s going to, I only would put in a Big Four sales executive in that role. That’s just, and I tell people up front, that is my sweet spot. It’s a Big Four sales executive, that’s who this person is. If that’s what you want, that’s what you’re going to get from Partner Track Academy. There are many other recruiters out there and there’s some who really kind of own the industry, who have a different viewpoint, who have a different kind of person or people in their Rolodex. And so it really depends on what people want, because I’ve had meetings with law firms and I’ve said, “this is what I want to bring you.” And they go, “oh, that’s really outside the box.”
And I have to say, “why is that outside the box? Why would a person who’s been selling professional services and sitting in the C-suite with the general counsel and the COO and the CEO face to face, why would that be out of the box for you?” Explain that to me, why that’s so out of the box and then they kind of go, “well, we’re…” And as you know, attorneys are so risk averse, it’s almost hilarious how risk averse they are. Because they’re in the risk business, but a lot of times they want to stick with, “oh, well this person’s been a CMO at law firms for 20 years. So I’m going to go with the safe bet, and just stick this person in this role because they understand the culture.”
And I would argue that business executives in the Big Four accounting world also understand the partnership culture, but they’ve had a more visible role. And they’ve been treated a little bit differently than your marketing people from law firms, because they are client facing and they do go to meetings. There’s a little different philosophy there, which that’s almost the biggest hurdle. I think in making that transition from the professional services before world to the law firm world, is that you’re going to have face to face conversations with your actual clients and lawyers are not ready for that yet. Some of them are like, “what? Wait a minute.”
Chase Williams:
And for those firms that want to recruit the role themselves, is this something where you have found more access by putting a listing out there on Indeed or actually poaching, current CMOs or current people in positions?
Brenda Pontiff:
I think that some of them post, Legal Marketing Association has a job bank and occasionally you’ll see them post there. They post on LinkedIn a lot. LinkedIn is sort of the new place for these people to spot things. I think it’s very challenging for the internal law firm recruiter. They seem right, now, they seem very overwhelmed. There’s a lot of movement going on right now. And it’s interesting because when the pandemic first started, it was kind of slow at first and we were all a little worried what was going on. I was kind of like, “Hmm, this is kind of scary.” And then suddenly things got crazy. There’s a lot of movement, there’s a lot of need right now. And it’s exciting, but it’s also hard to keep up with. And those internal recruiters, I see the stress, they are really having trouble getting those roles filled right now with the right people.
Ryan Klein:
So I want to pose a scenario to you, and I’m sure you’ve been through this on several times and especially like what you need to know before you get the CMO. So let’s say hypothetically, a firm has secured a CMO. They’re really excited about them starting next week, the salary, they didn’t really have in mind. Let’s say it’s half million dollars or something, but they want like the best of the best. And their background is digital websites, branding, and all that. And they start their first day and they say, “okay, great, what’s my budget for branding? I have a great company I know. What’s my budget for, I need a $100,000 for new website.” Do lawyers typically think like this new CMO is coming in and actually doing everything themselves? Or do they know that there’s also going to be support for the CMO and other vendors and third parties, and a much more robust budget to actually do all these things and CMO doesn’t literally do all those things themselves?
Brenda Pontiff:
Right, that happens. A bigger firm is going to know that you need infrastructure and you need those outside vendors. A smaller firm, and you can see it in the job postings and it’s kind of funny. A small firm will say, “we want a sophisticated chief marketing officer and oh, by the way, you need to be really stellar at PowerPoint.” Well, if you really want a sophisticated CMO, he or she might be great at PowerPoint. I don’t know, but that’s not what they should be spending their time doing, doing your PowerPoints. You need somebody else to be doing that. And they are going to obviously reach out to a website company to design. You know, they’re not going to be coding and they’re not going to be worried about your SEO. That’s not what they do. So, but the smaller firms need to be coached and they need to be because they really have no idea.
A lot of them think the CMO is the person that makes things look pretty, “oh, the CMO makes our logo and the colors.” And a lot of lawyers really want to talk about that all day long, what their logo looks like and the colors and they’re very credential focused. They’re very focused on that website because they want all of their awards on there. That’s so important, their awards. Whereas when you get a true business development executive in there, they’re going to say, “it’s not about your award. It’s about your understanding of these companies that are in your wheelhouse.” Do you understand these companies? Do you understand their industry? Do you understand the trends that are impacting these companies? That’s what I want to showcase on the website.
So when I open up your bio on the website, I want to see right off the bat, how do you help clients? How do you help clients like me? Like my company, say, I’m an automotive company. I want to know what your experience is in that area. It’s a different mindset. And we’ll get that with accounting firms, accountants get that. Lawyers, they’re like, “well, should it be blue or should it be red?”
Ryan Klein:
And that goes hand in hand, even for some people that currently have someone in marketing position in-house with their best use of their time. And actually, we were talking about that with Roy in the previous podcast. It’s like, do you want me figuring out how to rebrand your image or how people perceive you around the world? Or do you want me to schedule a time for you and the guys to go to a baseball game? Like, what do you really think I should be doing?
Brenda Pontiff:
Exactly. And it’s so funny that you mentioned that because events that’s a whole nother thing is some people look at their marketing executive as just an event coordinator. And of course with the pandemic, some of that’s changed a little bit because you can’t go to so many events. But you’d be shocked at how they want to go to every conference, but they don’t want to bring back any business cards. They don’t want to really meet people. They just want to go and they don’t want to take classes to understand when you go to a conference, how do you meet that person? How do you meet this person and start a conversation and start a relationship or they don’t… I actually have been hired, this sounds weird, but I have been hired as a wingman to go to conferences with attorneys to get that conversation started. I know it’s a weird part of my job, but I’ve done that several times.
Chase Williams:
That’s interesting, that’s almost like a movie. I could see that being like a Ben Stiller, something. I thought it was really interesting before you mentioned like the CMOs role is not worrying about SEO. So what are some high level things that, all right, I’ve got my CMO now, I can put this in their plate, and this is like the top, like two or three things that they’re going to deliver to our firm every single year.
Brenda Pontiff:
Right. Well, I mean, and they will worry about SEO, but they’ll push that to somebody else.
Chase Williams:
Sure.
Brenda Pontiff:
They’ll delegate that to somebody else. I think first of all, the CMO needs to understand the current client list and where the revenue is coming from. Looking at P&Ls and figuring out who is most profitable and who is not, and where are we getting our rates, who’s paying our rates and who is not paying our rates. So that, you can develop a list with the partners and leadership as to where your concentration should be. And I think, that’s the first thing. Secondly, you’re going to look at staffing and is your staff effective? And are they serving the right lawyers in the right places, in the right function areas effectively? And third, how are you going to retain clients and grow your base where you need to?
So those are the areas that I think would require focus. And what’s hard about being a new CMO is, you have to meet with so many different partners to hear their stories. And you could spend your first year traveling around listening to these different partners, and they’re all going to have different agendas. So your top leadership needs to be supportive of you and needs to help guide you in terms of listening to you and say, “well, I think this should be our priority.” Maybe they don’t agree, maybe you come to consensus, but you cannot be all things to all people. And that’s where a lot of firms don’t understand. You bring a CMO in, that CMO cannot support 400 different individual attorneys. That CMO cannot be at your personal beck and call.
You know, I’ve seen it where CMOs walk in the door and you’ll get some attorney from one city called, “well, my bio on the website, I don’t like it. What are you going to do about it?” You can’t do that for 400 people or 600 people or whatever. So hopefully, you’ve aligned it so that they know who to call for that. And that you have a process in place for that, so that you can focus on the top priority clients. And when you do that, my suggestion is, and some firms are doing this, is that you develop a client team program so that you can figure out, say, these are my top 20 clients, and we’re going to develop a team around them.
Ryan Klein:
I definitely want to talk more about the client teams because I know that’s a great segue. Also, kind of out of curiosity, I mean, if you’re a CMO coming in, there’s hundreds of staff and lawyers. It probably takes a long time, I mean, months before you can even figure out what the culture is like, what the goals are, what their personalities are like. So do you ever advise on a timeline for a CMO? Like your CMO is probably not going to be able to start doing things for X because they have to even get an understanding of the business internally first.
Brenda Pontiff:
Exactly. Part of my partnership academy, I come in as an interim CMO and I never do it longer than 24 months, but I always say, it’s a lot of fun. The first 18 months are a lot of fun. And after that, it’s interesting because it depends on leadership. You need two years to get your footing. And unfortunately, you will find that law firms get very impatient and often do not give the CMO that much time. It’s getting better, but there were a few years there where you would see CMOs getting in and out 7 months, 12 months, 18 months and that’s improved. I think sometimes the personality issues can happen quickly. A lot of times you’ll have a marketing department already in place and you bring a new CMO in and you’ll have a couple of people, senior level people in the marketing department that we’re planning on getting that role.
And that can be a challenge because, you’ve got people already not in your corner. So I’ve seen that be a real problem for CMOs to sidestep that while you’re trying to help the company grow and get revenues, then you’ve got this problem over here. It depends on the size of the firm, a smaller firm that works, that’s more nimble, it’s easier to get things. You can get things moving quickly and make change quickly. And actually I’ve seen a lot of people that have worked for these large global firms and make huge salaries. They’re happier at the smaller firms. They might be doing more hands on work too. They might be actually writing those executive summaries for the large proposals, which they weren’t doing at the large global firms, but they’re happier.
Chase Williams:
So I know you mentioned before briefly on our pre-interview, it’s more of like a holistic approach to managing clients by having a client team. So can you kind of explain like what actually, how a client team is actually structured?
Brenda Pontiff:
Sure. First of all, you have to get kind of a firm wide consensus on which clients will be deserving of a client team. So they kind of have to pass a test, are they profitable? And do we already have an existing relationship with them and do our firm services match their industry? You know, like if you’re an oil and gas firm you wouldn’t go after Clorox or somebody like that so, that kind of has to match up. So once you get a consensus of which clients are going to be served by the client team structure, then you begin pulling together the client teams. And usually, the partner or partners that have an existing relationship with these clients would be your anchor partner and lead the team. And then you develop a team around them. You start looking at well, this client needs some transactional work and they’re going to go in. They’re going to have a merger next year. Let’s pull our M&A guy in.
Then, what’s beautiful about the client team is that you can also bring in associates to work with that team that have an interest in that area. And the marketing department, a good marketing department leverages associates appropriately. Because associates are closer to the work, they understand the services and they need to understand marketing and business development. So if you put them on a client team and you let them drive, say they are responsible for creating the monthly agenda for the meetings. So every month, this group of lawyers and a marketing person meet to talk about this client, what’s going on with this client, what can we do? What can we present them? What happened last week? What are the projects we’re working on for them, now? If you let an associate drive that agenda process, then that gets them very involved.
It also takes a little pressure off your marketing department. Because, your marketing department may not be big enough to fully support all of this. Now attorneys sometimes go, “wait a minute, that’s billable time.” Yes. Well, you get a billable number for the client team that you don’t charge the client for, but at least the associates able to show I’m directly helping with this client, with this billable number. Then you have to have research, you have to. If it’s a public company, you pull up the 10-K and the 8-Ks and you understand what’s going on with that company, you do a full presentation of all their issues and their needs.
Then you start meeting with the client and asking the client, what’s going on? How can we help? It’s beautiful too. Because when they have a project that comes through the door, they may have a small project that might not be very profitable, but because they’re already a client team, you will not have to go through all the obstacles of getting approval because they’re a client team and it’s a green light, may even be a loss leader. You may even lose a little money on that particular little project. But because it’s a client team, we’re going to go for it. Because sometimes firms waste time and money trying to figure out whether or not they want to even pursue a piece of business.
Ryan Klein:
Would you say that this is in some ways pushing marketing to be like a little bit more sales oriented and is a CMO ultimately orchestrating a lot of these things, kind of oversee the whole thing and making sure it kind of moves smoothly?
Brenda Pontiff:
Yes. And I think the hard part for the CMO there is getting, first of all, the consensus on which clients will be part of the client team program and then which partner will be the lead. You know, sometimes it’s obvious which one and sometimes it’s not so obvious. And then, what other industry groups and practice areas are you going to put on that team and how well are they going to play together? Because historically, large global law firms have not been great about cross-selling. And there’s a reason for that. They get very territorial and client teams are trying to break down that wall. And that’s, what’s good about client teams. And a lot of firms have gotten excited about it because it helps them. They start to trust the other partners and they start to learn about what their other partners are doing across the hall, that they didn’t even know, that somebody else was offering that or that person had that great knowledge in that area.
And it’s like, it kind of opens the door for them. They’re like, “wow, this is great.” It also teaches them, I believe, which is very important to understand that the client’s going to like you better when you can prove to them that you understand them holistically. I’ve seen a lot of litigators, especially not so much the transactional people, but the litigators say, “well, I’m only handling this one little piece of this class action and labor employment. I don’t need to really understand the whole company.” I would argue, yes you do. When you take that general counsel out and that COO out, you want to show them that you do understand that company, that you know what’s going on, that you’ve read the news articles about their latest. It may not be in labor employment. It may be something else, but that you’re up to date with them. They appreciate that, that’s important.
Chase Williams:
Is there anything else specific that you want to share with our audience?
Brenda Pontiff:
Sure. I just want to say that people who are interested in being a CMO, this is a job that didn’t exist 25, 30 years ago. I started and I don’t want to say exactly when I started. I started out as a paralegal at a large oil and gas firm, Vinson & Elkins in Houston. And I was a water district paralegal. And I started, I quickly moved into a sales role, selling adverbial tax collection services to these water districts. And we didn’t have a marketing department. So I got into this very early and then I moved over to the accounting world. But some people go to law school and decide they don’t want to be a lawyer. And this is a more creative approach to being in the industry. Some people are just smart, energetic, love project management. This could be a career option for you and you start as a coordinator or a specialist and you move up to manager and then, senior manager and then, director and then CMO. And it’s a great career path and you can make a lot of money.
Chase Williams:
Awesome. Brenda, thank you so much for your time. For our listeners that would like to get in contact with you or possibly learn more about Partner Track Academy. What’s the best way to reach out?
Brenda Pontiff:
My website is www.partnertrackacademy.com and you can reach me at bpontiff@partnertrackacademy.com.
