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How Does Client Sense Help You Stay in Touch With Key Contacts

This article explains how Client Sense helps your lawyers stay in touch with key clients, prospects and referrers, why relationships lapse without anyone noticing, how to see where contact has fallen away in Client Sense, and how to build a routine that stops it happening again.

 In this article:

Short answer

Best practice in business development and client relationship managements means maintaining deliberate contact with the key clients, prospects and referrers who matter most, rather than reaching out only when your firm wants something. Client Sense shows you when someone from your firm last communicated with these key contacts, which relationships have gone quiet, and who is responsible for each one, so a lapse is visible before it costs you work.

Why it matters

The purpose of the Client Sense Relationship Management dashboard is to ensure that the key relationships the firm holds are actively maintained. Staying in touch, remaining front of mind and relevant with the right people will significantly help to increase and protect revenue.

What this looks like in practice

The corporate and commercial teams at McInnes Wilson Lawyers, a multi-disciplinary Australian firm, receive around 90 percent of their work through referral networks. Their commercial divisions operated largely independently, and one referrer commonly sent work to five or six of them. Each lawyer ran separate communications with the same organization, using reminder systems that ranged from personal to-do lists to sticky notes on the wall. Things were missed. Most of their referrers are also not individuals but organizations with 20 or 30 contacts to manage.

The pattern they describe will be familiar. Preparing a bid, they would look up a target and find that nobody had been in contact for months. Whatever went into the submission, they were not going to be top of that referrer’s mind. Their answer was to share the load, assigning every professional staff member a set of contacts and setting reminders to make contact on a regular basis rather than only when a tender appeared. Read the full account in the McInnes Wilson Lawyers case study.

How to do it in Client Sense

Relationship Management is the part of Client Sense built to help your firm maintain key relationships. Specifically, these key relationships are assigned to a named Relationship Manager, each with a contact threshold, and the system watches for contact between that manager and that contact, changing the status when it has not happened. Full setup detail is in the Getting Started with Relationship Management Admin Guide.

Decide your relationship types and thresholds

From the main menu choose Relationship Management, then Settings, then Relationship Types. Three are provided by default: Key Clients, Key Referrers and Prospects. Rename them to match your firm’s language if you use a tiered system such as Platinum and Gold.

Each relationship type in Client Sense carries a Contact Threshold, being the number of days without contact before the status turns Amber and then Red. The defaults are a sensible starting point:

  • Key Clients. Amber at 45 days, Red at 60.
  • Key Referrers. Amber at 60 days, Red at 90.
  • Prospects. Amber at 20 days, Red at 30.

Thresholds are set per relationship type and can be overridden for an individual relationship when it is added.

Assign relationships to a Relationship Manager

Under Settings then Relationship Managers, add the people who will hold relationships. Then use Add Relationship to search for a contact and assign both a Relationship Manager and a Relationship Type. Full setup detail is in the Getting Started with Relationship Management Admin Guide.

A new relationship starts with a Blue relationship status until the Relationship Manager first makes contact, then turns Green. From there it moves to Amber and Red as the thresholds pass. The Current Streak figure counts the days that manager has kept a relationship out of Red.

Add individuals rather than organizations wherever you can, since the point is to keep the right people in touch with the right people. An organization is the sensible choice for a prospect where you do not yet know who the key contact will be.

Turn on the notifications

Three notification types are available for each Relationship Manager, under Settings then Relationship Managers.

  • Relationship Summary. A digest of their own statuses on chosen days and times. An "All green, all good!" option suppresses it when nothing needs attention.
  • Team Summary. The same for a Team Admin across their team. Teams are how practice leaders and group managers get visibility, and need at least two members.
  • Pre-Meeting. A briefing ahead of an external meeting, set either as minutes before on the day, a summary the evening before, or both.

Turning the output into action

Relationship Management works when it is introduced to a few people properly rather than to everyone at once. The recommended sequence is deliberately slow.

  • Set yourself up first. We recommend that marketing and business development admins test the system by making themselves a Relationship Manager before sharing this functionality with any client-facing colleague. You will be fielding the questions, and the answers are easier when you have used the functionality yourself.
  • Start with five Relationship Managers or fewer. Choose people who already think in relationship terms, who will benefit visibly, and who will talk about it to colleagues afterwards. The third criterion matters as much as the first two.
  • Give each of them four or five relationships, not twenty-five. Pick ones they are already actively engaging with, so the first experience is reassurance rather than a screen full of failures. A manager can grow to twenty-five or more contacts once the habit is established, but these should stay key relationships rather than all of them.
  • Keep the default thresholds to begin with. Stretch them to twelve months and the status means nothing. Shorten them to a fortnight and the target is unachievable, so people stop looking. Adjust once you have real behavior to adjust against.
  • Let the summary email create a habit. Switch notifications on, pick a day and time that suits each person, and use the all-green suppression so a quiet week produces no email at all. The goal is that nobody has to remember to check the dashboard.

Common pitfalls

  • Assuming any contact resets the status. It has to be outbound contact from the named Relationship Manager. A colleague emailing the same person, or the contact emailing in, leaves the status where it was. People find this surprising until it is explained, so explain it at setup.
  • Expecting marketing sends to count. Automated email from a marketing platform does not reset a threshold. That is the correct behavior and worth saying out loud, because a contact who received a newsletter has not heard from their relationship partner.
  • Setting thresholds by ambition rather than reality. A threshold nobody can meet gets ignored within a month, and one nobody can miss tells you nothing. Start with the defaults and adjust from evidence.
  • Assigning too many relationships at the outset. Four or five each. A manager handed thirty on day one sees a screen full of Amber and concludes the system is a scoreboard.
  • Setting people up without telling them. Notifications are off by default and nobody is informed automatically, so a Relationship Manager can sit unaware for months. Send the welcome email as part of setting them up, not afterwards

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How often should we be in touch with a key client?

There is no universal interval, which is why it is worth setting one deliberately. Quarterly suits most key clients. The value lies less in the number than in having agreed it, which turns a vague sense of drift into something checkable.

What counts as contact?

Client Sense records emails, meetings, calls, coffees and events, and your firm can add its own activity types. Whether all of those count is your call. Most treat a meeting or call as real contact, and email about live work as something else.

Who should own a contact?

Usually whoever holds the strongest existing relationship. Where a organization has many contacts, spread them across the team. One partner will not maintain 30 contacts at a single organization.

A key contact has gone quiet. Is that always a problem?

Not necessarily. Contact follows the work, so a gap after a matter closes is normal. It matters when the gap grows long enough that your firm would not be an obvious call.

Do our lawyers have to log calls and meetings for this to work?

No. Interactions are captured automatically, which is why the position stays current. Firms relying on manual entry find uptake fades once fee earners get busy, and a half-populated record is worse than none because it looks authoritative.