How Verrill improved client retention and acquisition with Intapp

Moving to a Self-Service CRM Maintenance

During the technology-selection process, the marketing team focused on finding a flexible, configurable solution that fit the firm’s culture. “The last thing we wanted was wasted investment, poor adoption, or failed implementation,” said Gostanian. “When we were going through the demo process with various vendors, Intapp CRM and Intapp Relationships stood out from our other options. Their solutions are highly configurable, and we knew we could support a variety of lawyer-specific preferences to match the ways the lawyers choose to work, whether in Microsoft Outlook, on their mobile device, or on the web.”

In addition to closing technology gaps, the marketing and business development team sought ways to capture and utilize each lawyer’s knowledge by giving them direct access to a user-friendly system. “Before Intapp CRM and Intapp Relationships, marketing was often a gatekeeper for even the simplest updates — things like adding a contact, updating a job title, or documenting a contact company change. At scale, manually updating records was cumbersome and caused a backlog of important information,” said Gostanian. “We needed a solution that allowed us to crowdsource the data quality process and let lawyers access the system without marketing’s intervention to drive better quality data.”

Deploying Intapp CRM and Intapp Relationships

During the final phase of system selection, Intapp worked closely with the Verrill team to address senior stakeholders’ questions and concerns. “The Intapp team was a true partner in helping gather the information and resources we needed to build management’s confidence in the technology investment,” said Gostanian. “They not only helped us pull together documentation screenshots for use cases, but also picked up the phone whenever we called and turned around requests within 24 to 48 hours. As a result, we were able to go to management with a tangible picture, concept, and story.”

Once leadership was ready to move forward, the marketing and business development team received training, which focused on teaching the internal team how to train the firm’s lawyers. “We trained a pilot group ourselves — folks tend to be more receptive when they’re receiving training from a colleague who they know and trust,” said Gostanian. “Although we spent some time teaching the lawyers how to use the solution’s features, we allocated the bulk of the training session to explaining the ‘why’ of the process changes. We described the robust marketing and business development capabilities Intapp CRM and Intapp Relationships bring to the table, and explained how lawyers could use these valuable tools to grow their practices.”

To drive trial and adoption to the wider firm audience, the marketing team focused on communicating a central theme to lawyer stakeholders: A rising tide lifts all boats —contributing personal knowledge to the firm’s centralized data repository benefits not only the lawyers individually, but also the firm collectively. “Ultimately, a robust and fully adopted CRM solution that tracks and analyzes a wide range of data on contacts and relationships is good for all parties — the marketing and business development team, the lawyers, and firm leadership,” said Gostanian.