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How Does Client Sense Support Your Prospecting

This article explains how to find organizations worth pursuing that are not yet clients and how to see the connections your firm already holds with them.

In this article:

Short answer

Prospecting is about turning organizations that are not yet clients into ones that are. Because Client Sense records everyone your firm communicates with rather than everyone it bills, prospects, referrers, former colleagues and contacts met once at an event all appear, which means most firms are already connected to more of their target list than they realize.

Why it matters

Prospecting looks at organizations that are not already your clients. Cold approaches rarely succeed in professional services, because the purchase is high trust and low frequency. A prospect who has never heard of your firm has no reason to shortlist it. A prospect who has met two of your people, attended an event and been introduced by a referrer has several.

A target list is usually built from ambition rather than from evidence, and the connections that already exist stay invisible because they sit in individual inboxes rather than in the client ledger.

What this looks like in practice

Smith Anderson, a full-service business and litigation firm, use Client Sense in part to streamline how they identify potential clients. Their Director of Client Services describes using Client Sense to quickly access relationship information about potential clients and being able to prioritize strategic action instead of spending time guessing or asking colleagues to check. Read the full account in the Smith Anderson case study.

A worked example: take a target list of forty organizations. Search each one. In most firms roughly a third turn out to have some existing contact, whether a former client, a company where an alumnus now works, or an organization on the other side of a past matter. Those become the first tier, and the genuinely cold names go second.

How to do it in Client Sense

Test your target list against what you already know

Search each target organization with Organizations selected. Because search matches on any part of a name or a web domain, subsidiaries and trading names surface too. Where contact exists, the Engagement view shows whether it is current or historic, and the heat map shows who holds it. Steps are in How to use the Search functionality.

Build a target list from characteristics rather than names

The Details tab searches across titles, industries, locations and any custom fields your firm has created, so you can look for the people who fit a profile rather than starting from company names you happen to know. Where Company Insights is enabled, industry and size information from public sources is available across search, reports and Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) Lists, which makes profile-led targeting considerably easier.

A Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List keeps a target set current by updating itself against rules you set, such as job title, company, industry or volume of contact, so a list built once does not decay. Both kinds of list are covered in How to Create and Manage Favorite (Favourite) Lists.

Export the periphery

The External Contacts report under Reports produces a list of the contacts held by one or more colleagues over a chosen period. Two columns are especially useful for prospecting. Last Firm Contact shows when anyone at the firm last communicated with that person, and Discovered shows when Client Sense first recorded them, which together separate live relationships from dormant ones. Where a CRM is connected, a column identifies which contacts are not in it. Full detail is in Exporting a list of External Contacts.

Tip: The default window is 90 days and the default minimums are five sent and one received. Widening the period surfaces dormant contacts, which is usually what you want when prospecting rather than when building a mailing list.

Turning the output into action

A target list is not a plan. What converts is sequencing.

  • Tier the list. Existing warm contact first, dormant contact second, genuinely cold last. The effort each tier deserves is different.
  • Find the route in. For every target with a connection, name the colleague best placed to open the door and agree what you are asking them to do.
  • Give cold targets a reason to meet you. An event, a briefing, a piece of relevant work. 
  • Work a short list properly. Ask partners to pursue ten targets over a year beats sixty listed and forgotten.
  • Review quarterly. Check whether contact with each target has increased. If it has not moved in six months, the target or the approach is wrong.

Common pitfalls

  • Assuming no contact means no relationship. Check the date range before concluding a target is cold. A dormant relationship from four years ago is a very different starting point from nothing at all.
  • Confusing a contact list with a target list. Everyone your firm has emailed is not a prospect. Filter by whether the organization actually fits the work you want.
  • Approaching without telling the connected colleague. The fastest way to damage an existing relationship is to use it without asking.
  • Building a list and never revisiting it. Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) Lists exist precisely because static ones go stale within a quarter.
  • Treating prospecting as a marketing task. The data can be prepared centrally, but the conversations belong to the people who will do the work

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do we know if we already have a connection to a target?

Search the organization. Because the 360 relationship view covers everyone the firm communicates with rather than only clients, connections through referrers, past matters, events and former colleagues all appear. Widen the date range before deciding a target is genuinely cold.

Can we build a target list without knowing the company names?

Yes. The Details tab searches by title, industry, location and any custom fields, so you can start from the profile of the buyer you want rather than a list of organizations. Company Insights adds public industry and size information, which sharpens this considerably.

Our target list goes out of date constantly. Is there a fix?

Yes, use a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List which updates against rules you set, such as industry, job title or volume of contact, so the membership changes as the underlying data does. 

How do we prospect without a CRM?

The relationship data does not depend on one. Where a CRM is connected, the external contacts export flags which contacts are absent from it, which is useful if you want to push a target list into that system. Where there is no CRM, the export and Favorite (Favourite) Lists serve the same purpose.

What is a realistic number of targets?

Fewer than most firms choose. Ten to twenty worked consistently across a year will outperform a list of a hundred, because prospecting depends on repetition and a long list gets abandoned after the first round.

How do we tell whether prospecting is working before we win anything?

Watch engagement with the target list rather than waiting for instructions. Rising contact, meetings and event attendance move months before fees do, and they are the earliest evidence that the approach is landing.