Has a Partner, Managing Director, or Boss ever come to you and said, “I need your help in creating a proposal for tomorrow’s meeting with Prospect X, and it needs to be personalized”? If you’re in legal or professional services marketing, this probably sounds familiar.
This was the situation for a marketing and business development leader within a global firm we recently worked with. They were responsible for helping Partners across over ten practice areas in conjunction with overseeing the firm’s strategic marketing initiatives. With a small team of three, requests like this typically meant extremely long hours and a constant reprioritization of the initiatives that had to be done. Unfortunately, this often meant the strategic initiatives got pushed back to make way for “today’s fire drill”.
While she managed to fulfill the Partners’ needs, this way of working was not sustainable.
The solution was to implement a Brand Center that housed complete up-to-date brand standards and guidelines, instructional How-To guides, an image library, and dynamic proposal templates that were professionally designed for each practice.
She trained the Partners and their Admins how to use the Brand Center and templates. It was so intuitive to use that even the least technological person was able to develop a proposal with ease. The templates were designed so that 80-90 percent of the information was done and the remaining 10-20 percent of personalized information was able to be inputed without the need to be formatted by a designer. Predetermined images based on the practice and topic could be selected and inserted, and the completed proposal could be sent off for final review within minutes of completing–if needed!
This was a HUGE increase in efficiency for everyone involved. Total proposal development time went from an “all-hands on deck, drop what you’re doing, six-eight hour churn and burn” to a couple people taking an hour or two to deliver a professional finished piece. Not only did the proposals get developed faster, it gave hours, even days, back to the marketing team to focus on the planned strategic initiatives and enabled people to get home earlier to their families.
If you’d like to learn more about Brand Centers and see it in action, give us a call.
Helping create, manage, and deliver brands from start to finish.
In collaboration with Bluebird Branding