“A Go-to-Market Strategy by Industry” with Mike Mellor

Mike Mellor, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Pryor Cashman LLP was a recent guest on the Market Leaders Podcast. Pryor Cashman has approximately 200 attorneys and three offices, primarily in the media centers of Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. Mike has been in legal marketing for about 10 years and prior to that was in financial

Below is a recap of the discussion from the episode, “A Go-to-Market Strategy by Industry,” followed by the full transcript.

Considering Your ICP’s Perspective

David noted that Mike’s previous roles likely allowed him to pull industry knowledge from the various types of professional services into his role at Pryor Cashman. He asked him to explain his industry-focused go-to-market strategy.

“I think that people pay attorneys to be myopic.” he began. “And when you’re used to the devil being in the details, it’s a difficult transition to make from thinking about how you specifically practice law – how you’re dotting the i’s on the contracts or within the litigation – and then to come out and see the forest for the trees.” He cited the often-used line that attorneys historically have solved for the symptom, not for the patient.

He continued, “So we look a little more broadly at how we align ourselves internally as a law firm. Looking at a restaurateur, they don’t care that an attorney is working on a restaurant management agreement; they want to go back to cooking. The agreement is just a necessary cost of doing business for them. So, to have somebody who is intelligent and industry-focused, who can contextualize the information – not into a regurgitation of legal code – but more like here’s what you need to do to achieve your business objectives is mission critical in today’s market.”

Mike said when a firm recognizes that, they also recognize that there’s an inherent difficulty in clients and prospective clients navigating their websites. He shared that his industry-focused go-to-market strategy initiative at Pryor Cashman started with a firm-wide, website-wide audit. He said, “We had something like 67 different pages – commercial leasing, office leasing, etc. We took a closer look at what those pages are, and because attorneys need data and evidence, we really looked at the backend and combined that information with financial data. We were able to boil our offerings down to 12 key industries and 13 key practice areas, which was much easier to navigate.”

He added, “Clients may not know what their specific legal issue is. They just know they’re getting sued for an IP claim. Is that going to be a TTAB? Is that a USPTO thing? They may not know. But they’ve obviously got decent awareness of the issue within their industry. For a firm to be able to look at it from the audience’s perspective, from its ideal client profile’s perspective, is important.”

Making It Work for the Firm

Mike went on to explain how the industry-focused go-to-market strategy works for the firm. He said, “This is really a platform to get people around the firm talking who maybe historically haven’t done so. They begin to realize that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, see where we can anticipate needs, start to look into client life cycles, and provide proactive advice. We’re seeing that’s making stickier clients.”

He noted there’s a lot of evidence that clients who work with firms in two or more practice areas are much more likely to maintain the relationship if someone leaves or other change takes place, but there are additional benefits to the firm. “I think us being able to get out ahead, not be so reactive, and to tell clients we know that three months after something happens, this is most likely going to happen. Being able to provide that looking around the corner approach brings a lot of value to clients and strengthens relationships.”

Tactical Execution

David asked Mike what a day in the life at Pryor Cashman looks like, looking at the firm structured around industry groups versus a firm taking a more traditional approach.

Mike said it all begins with looking at analytics. For example, he explained, “If we’re seeing bounce rates rise, we look at the behavioral Google Analytics and maybe see that people are rarely going past two pages. With that, we may discover we need more teaser content. Day to day, the business development team does a lot of market analysis that brings ideas that may not fit into the way that attorneys are typically pigeonholed.”

He continued, “I find it much more creative because I’m, for example, taking my employee benefits person and my art law person, putting them together, and asking what’s coming around the bend for gallery owners and folks who work in museums given new regulations. It’s fun to continue to learn and watch the light bulbs go off, and seeing creative alliances around the firm I think can only help our clients in the long term.”

Putting on the Change Agent Hat

David pointed out that it seems Mike creates an environment of collaboration that gets lawyers talking about shared interests, which is a different mindset for them.

Mike replies, “That’s exactly it. We’re seeing that change and it’s really rewarding for us. We love doing that. A lot of times I’m talking to my marketing department and telling them our job is really to build structures for communication. If we can’t do it in a practice group, can we set up email threads because people are in different time zones? What else can we be doing? It’s our job to carve those pathways.”

“When I became a CMO,” he added “I realized that I did a lot of taking the marketing and BD hat off and putting the change agent hat on. It’s a lot of change management, it’s a lot of celebrating the little wins and things that everyone talks about. The structures don’t need to be formal, but you’ve got to get folks talking, and you’ve got to be an inch deep and a mile wide to be able to pull folks together who may not have historically really thought about it. Watching those gears turn is really exciting.”

More on the Data

David asked Mike to expand on how his department uses data to assess success.

Mike shared an example of a specific initiative. “On our website, we had multiple lease pages. We asked, is everything mutually exclusive? Are we focused on issues? Is this the most accurate representation of the best way to put our foot forward?”

He said, “We had very specialized areas with maybe only one person working in them. We had duplicative things. Things aren’t very cut and dry in our music practice. There are tons of copyright issues and there’s also litigation. We looked at a lot of data to explore which one of the areas visitors are coming in from and where they are they going next. Was that because they’re not finding an answer? By leaning on the data, we were able to centralize a lot of content and centralize a lot of issues. We looked at how people were searching and improved our search strategy. We did a big SEO audit, leveraged that information, and baked it back in.

He added, “And we continue to do that. We’re looking at specific issue-based splash pages, for when issues are coming in that may not fit neatly into industry buckets or practice buckets. It’s a lot of fun, and we really earn the trust of the partnership by being able to have evidence.”

He added that every time he pitches a particular initiative, he has data in his hands in anticipation of questions so he optimizes the opportunity to influence leadership.

David asked how often Mike and his team are logging into dashboards and obsessing over the trends they see.

“Probably more than I’d like to admit,” he chuckled. He said he loves looking at data and asking questions. “What do you think spawned this? Is it the content? Is it how it’s presented?” Mike added that he and his team have earned the trust of the partnership, so they let them fail fast when they test new approaches.

He shared that he regularly challenges team members to try new things and just see how things go. He said, “We’re not curing cancer here. We’re obviously in an important role, pitching multi-million-dollar law firms, but if we have one bad social post, it’s not going to kill us. Having that comfort enables us to be creative and innovative and see what sticks.”

A Word of Advice

David asked what advice Mike would give to other marketers who want to take a more data-driven approach to their team’s work.

“Make sure that your Google Analytics is really set up and that you understand the data,” he suggested. “I bought a heavy Google Analytics textbook that I fell asleep to numerous nights, but I didn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would recommend trying a couple of things, testing a couple of different things, whether it’s specific to a practice area or specific to an industry.”

He added that if you don’t have access to Google Analytics, there are other ways to get external data, such as SEM Rush and Moz, so just get started using data to inform your decisions. He added, “It can be as small as looking at one person’s bio or at a single practice page. You’re not going to be able to manage what you can’t measure.”

Read Full Transcript

[00:00:00.170] – Intro

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[00:00:41.780] – David Ackert

Hello and welcome back to the Market Leaders Podcast. I’m David Ackert, and today our guest is Mike Mellor, who’s the Chief Marketing and Business Development officer at Pryor Cashman LLP. Mike, thanks for joining us today.

[00:00:52.620] – Mike Mellor

Thanks for having me, David. Appreciate it.

[00:00:54.410] – David Ackert

Mike, I’m interested first in talking to you a little bit about your background, but second, I’m really eager to get into this topic of a go-to-market strategy that you’ve applied at your firm. So let’s start with a little bit about you and your firm and then we’ll dive right in.

[00:01:07.740] – Mike Mellor

Sounds good. Yeah. So as you said, I’m the Chief Marketing & BD Officer at Pryor Cashman. We’re about 200 attorneys, three offices, mostly in the media centers of Miami, LA, and New York. Been in legal marketing for about ten or eleven years. Prior to that I was in financial services and consulting. So basically, a whole career in professional services marketing. I’ve really always enjoyed the positioning, strategy, and go-to-market, so this is a great topic that we could talk about for days.

[00:01:30.680] – David Ackert

Well, it’s great that you’ve bounced around a little bit between verticals too. I’m sure you pulled some of that industry knowledge from the various types of professional services into your role at Pryor Cashman. Let’s talk about that go-to-market strategy. Specifically, it sounds like what you’ve done is you’ve really identified specific industries that you’re going after. Tell us a little about this.

[00:01:50.940] – Mike Mellor

Sure. I think that people pay attorneys to be myopic, right? You know, the devil’s in the details, and that’s a difficult transition to make, from thinking about how you specifically practice law, how you’re dotting the i’s on the contracts, or within the litigation, and then just really kind of come out and see the forest for the trees. I can’t take the credit for the line, but attorneys historically have really solved for the symptom, not for the patient. And so looking a little more broadly about that, it’s really in how we align ourselves internally as law firms. Industry knowledge is obviously very important if you’re a copyright attorney. For example, looking at a restaurateur, they don’t care that David formed the company and I’m doing the restaurant management agreement, they want to go back to cooking. This is a necessary cost of doing business for them. And so to have somebody who is intelligent, industry focused, and who can contextualize that information not into a regurgitation of legal code, but more into, “hey, here’s what you need to do to achieve your business objectives,” is obviously mission critical in today’s market. So we recognize that, we recognize that there’s just an inherent difficulty in navigating our site, and I think if we couldn’t really make sense of it, it’s probably going to be pretty difficult for our clients too. So we really started with a firm wide, and website wide audit. We had like 67 different pages. Commercial leasing, office leasing, etc., you just got to look at your original hypotheses and what they are. As you say, attorneys need data, they need evidence. And so really looking at the back end, combining that information with some of the financial data we had, we were able to really sort of edify these things down into 12 key industries and 13 key practice areas which made it a lot easier to navigate. And being able to lean on data was really important to us.

[00:03:24.300] – David Ackert

That’s really interesting. So it sounds like you had this traditional practice group structure and one of the onuses for change was when you were looking at your website, you saw a lot of complexity that would ultimately be facing people who were considering working with the firm or engaging the firm. You certainly saw internal complexities, and who owns what, and who’s running what, and so on and so forth. And so one of the things that triggered this reinvention and perhaps simplification down to eight industry groups sounds like the inherent complexity and ultimately shifting gears or shifting lenses to think in terms of, “well, what is the client’s experience when they’re interfacing with us on the website and when they’re interfacing with our lawyers? And how can we translate this into their language more easily?” Is that accurate?

[00:04:11.420] – Mike Mellor

That’s very accurate. They may not know what the specific legal issue is. They just know they’re getting sued for some IP claim. Is that going to be a TTAB? Is that the USPTO thing? They may not know that. They’ve got obviously some decent awareness of that within the industry. But being able to really look at it from the audience’s perspective, from your ideal client profile’s perspective, is really important. And so there’s really accretive benefits to doing that and bringing folks in. From developing task forces and brainstorming and obviously the client bases are the same. It just makes a lot more sense.

[00:04:40.820] – David Ackert

So that’s why it makes more sense to the client. Talk to me about how it has been helpful from the lawyer’s perspective to make this change.

[00:04:49.860] – Mike Mellor

I think that the key issue is identification. Using this is really a platform to get people around the firm talking who maybe historically haven’t done so, realizing that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit there where we can anticipate needs, start to look into client life cycles, and provide that proactive advice ahead of time. We’re seeing that’s making stickier clients. Obviously, a lot of that evidence is saying that clients who work with firms in two or more practice areas are much more likely to keep the relationship if someone leaves, or whatever the case may be. So there’s certainly a lot of benefits internally to the firm like creating long term client relationships. But I think that us being able to get out ahead and not be so reactive and to say, “hey, we know that three months after X happens, that this is most likely going to happen.” And being able to provide that looking around the corner approach, I think brings a lot of value to clients.

[00:05:36.460] – David Ackert

And we know that because we know the industry. We’ve really entrenched ourselves in the patterns, and the trends, and the regulations that are impacting this unique industry. We’re experts in your world.

[00:05:48.680] – Mike Mellor

Mm Hm. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing.

[00:05:50.670] – David Ackert

So talk to us about tactical execution here. What’s a day in the life when you’re looking at a firm that has structured itself around industry groups versus perhaps a firm that is taking a more traditional approach?

[00:06:01.750] – Mike Mellor

Sure, I guess I could also delve a little bit into what that process looks like in terms of us looking at the analytics, saying, “hey, you know what? This person, we haven’t tagged an event, we haven’t had a news item here. We’re seeing bounce rates tactically fall off. We’re looking at the behavioral GA and seeing that people are rarely going past two pages, okay, what are we doing here? We’re not having any teaser content.” In terms of the day to day, in terms of how the BD team manages that, it’s a lot more, I think, market analysis. It’s a lot of bringing ideas that may not fit into the historical way that attorneys…the way that they’re typically pigeon holed. So I find it much more creative because I’m maybe taking my employee benefits person, and my art law person, and putting them together and saying, “hey, what’s coming around the bend for gallery owners? What’s coming around the bend for folks who work in museums given new regulations and things like that.” And so it’s really fun to continue to learn and watch the light bulbs go off with folks. And as I said, we’re seeing, just some creative alliances around the firm that I think can only help our clients in the long term.

[00:06:59.540] – David Ackert

You know, I’m a big fan of Heidi Gardner’s smart collaboration book, and it sounds like this environment provides a much easier tee up to apply the principles that she talks about and get the lawyers talking to one another about shared interests. As opposed to, “yeah, well, if your client says they need some M&A work, just send them over to me.” Right? It’s a very different kind of a mindset.

[00:07:21.530] – Mike Mellor

Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. And you’re seeing that change and that’s really rewarding for us. We love doing that. A lot of times I’m talking to my marketing department, and I tell them, our job is really to build those structures for communication. If we can’t do it in a practice group, are we setting up email threads because people are in different time zones? What are the things that we’re doing? That’s our job is to carve those pathways. And so, when I became a CMO, I realized that I basically did a lot of taking the marketing and BD hat off, and putting on the change agent hat. And so it’s a lot of change management, it’s a lot of celebrating those little wins and things that everyone talks about. But without those structures, they don’t need to be formal, but you’ve got to get folks talking, and you’ve got to be an inch deep and a mile wide to be able to pull folks together who may not have historically really thought about that. And again, watching those gears turn is really exciting.

[00:08:05.530] – David Ackert

One of the things I know you’ve mentioned to me prior is you’ve got industry roundtable initiatives that you’ve set up. Firms typically don’t have practice area roundtables. It just doesn’t make as much sense. Again, this notion of using the industry lens to identify needs, engage clients, and ultimately serve clients. Talk to us a little bit about those roundtables and the successes you’ve seen there.

[00:08:29.930] – Mike Mellor

Sure. It’s incredibly surprising. I mean, there’s almost a perception of reality as well. Certainly was no more clear than COVID. Obviously we had restaurants, a pretty big hospitality and restaurant practice, really struggling during COVID. Everything shutting down. We decided that we were going to bring people together. So we did a roundtable with people in the medical profession, and doctors and dentists, everything from their supply chain. Obviously you don’t need 200 syringes to show up when your office is closed, etc.. But we found that the attendance numbers, the engagement numbers were so intense, even though there’s just a little bit of difference between the supply chain issues of a doctor or dentist, and the supply chain issues of a restaurant, or the benefits. Obviously there are differences, but a lot of it’s very similar. When we did this really generally for business owners, we had decent attendance, but we parlayed that and said, “hey, this is specifically for doctors.” And, I mean, it was our biggest numbers ever. We then pivoted that. I sort of led it and had our employee benefits people come in for eight minutes and our insurance attorneys come in for eight to ten minutes, labor people, etc. and it was just a very smooth flowing conversation. Direct leads, direct matters, both for that, and for restaurateurs we did that as well. So, just continuing to see that people want to know that you know what’s coming around the bend, that you played in that space with them, and that that comfort level is really important for a long term relationship. It’s all in the data. And being able to point to that and prove those successes, kind of play off folks in terms of their competitive nature, was really successful. And those types of data points do a lot more than us pounding our heads against the wall. So we really point to a lot of data in how we influence the partnership.

[00:09:57.950] – David Ackert

I want to circle back to something that you mentioned earlier almost as a throwaway, but it ties right back into this, “it’s all about the data,” comment that you just made. You were talking about proving out the value of the industry group structure. And you mentioned that you’ve seen the evidence bear out in your Google Analytics behavioral data, in visits to industry pages, to bounce rates on those pages, and even industry mailings. So maybe just spend a moment or so talking about how those are kind of the touchstones that help you assess your success, and whether or not as a marketing department you’re on the right track.

[00:10:37.010] – Mike Mellor

Sure. Obviously there’s rotations around with marketing folks and new partners and life happens, right? And so, after six or seven years looking and seeing that we have multiple lease pages, is everything mutually exclusive? Are we focused on issues? Is this the most accurate representation of the best way to put our foot forward? We had very specialized areas with maybe only one person working in them. We had duplicative things. Things aren’t so cut and dry in our music practice. Tons of copyright issues obviously within that. There’s also litigation. So I mean, all of these things are kind of together. So, using a lot of that data to say, “Which one of these areas are they coming in from? Where are they going next? Was that because they’re not finding that answer?” Let’s start combining these things and take slow approaches and really lean on the data and see where people are coming from. So, we were able to really centralize a lot of content, centralize a lot of issues, and come up with nicknaming structures. It was fantastic. Improving our search strategy, looking at how people are searching stuff. Did a lot of work, conducted a big SEO audit, and leveraged a lot of that information, baked it back in, and we continue to do that. And so, that’s kind of the continued process that we’re going to do. We’re looking at specific issue based issues splash pages, where issues are coming in that maybe don’t fit as neatly into these industry buckets or into practice buckets. It’s a lot of fun. And we really earn the trust of the partnership by being able to have this evidence. Always good to have it in your back pocket. So typically I just go and might pitch to EC on a particular initiative and always have something in my hands, anticipating those questions, and the more you do to it I think the more comfortable you get with the questions you’re going to get asked. So, just being really prepared for that stuff is mission critical. And as you know, we don’t get too many chances to try to influence people. So when you do, you got to do it right.

[00:12:17.170] – David Ackert

How often are you logging into these dashboards and obsessing over the trends going up, going down, looking at the visitor’s journey and so forth?

[00:12:26.430] – Mike Mellor

Probably more than I’d like to admit. I’m really into it. Looking at LinkedIn and a lot of those analytics. And it’s like those kinds of shower thoughts, right? What do you think spawned this? Is it the content? Is it how it’s presented? And again, earning the trust of the partnership is important. They let us fail fast, whether that’s AB testing on client mailings, whether that’s different approaches to writing stuff. I might bring in my pitch person and have her construct a couple of social posts to see how that goes, and just always kind of challenging folks. Like “Hey, listen, we’re not curing cancer here. We’re obviously in an important role pitching multi million dollar law firms, but if we have one bad social post, it’s not going to kill us.” And so having that comfort in that enables us to be creative and to try to be innovative and see what sticks.

[00:13:07.970] – David Ackert

Makes sense. So if someone’s listening to today’s episode and thinking to themselves, “How can I be a little bit more like Mike?” How can I get a little bit closer to having a structure where the data really is informing decisions and I’m able to go to partnership with concrete evidence that we’re heading in the right direction, or this is an area where we need to make a pivot, and getting that easy support and approval from partnership. What would you recommend that they do first? What’s the first step that they can take?

[00:13:36.110] – Mike Mellor

I think generally make sure that all the GA is really set up. Are your analytics set up correctly? Do you understand what that looks like? I bought a pretty heavy Google Analytics textbook that I fell asleep to numerous nights, but didn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I think trying a couple of things, testing a couple of different things, whether that’s specific to a practice area or specific to an industry. And if you don’t have that data, there’s other ways to get external data. There’s a lot of different tools, whether that’s Ahrefs you’re looking at, or Moz. So just get started. And be able to start to inform your decisions. It can be as small as looking at one person’s bio. It could be as small as a single practice page. But you’re not going to be able to manage what you can’t measure. So that would be my advice.

[00:14:17.330] – David Ackert

Very good. Well, Mike, we sure appreciate you sharing your advice with us today, and wishing you all the best as you continue with your industry focused strategy at PrYor Cashman.

[00:14:27.280] – Mike Mellor

Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

[00:14:29.740] – Outro

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