Thank you, Erika Ratner Steinberg, for including me in this excellent and revelatory piece. Honored to be featured here alongside such brilliant minds as Andrea (Andi) Benjamin, Susan Kurz, and Cynthia A. McCollough.
EXCERPT: Roy Sexton is immediate past president of the Legal Marketing Association – LMA International Board of Directors. LMA is the single largest trade group for legal marketing professionals, with nearly 4,000 members. In his “day job” as Director of Marketing for international law firm Clark Hill Law out of Detroit, Sexton has been able to integrate deftly his experiences from a prior career in consumer-facing healthcare marketing with those from two prior smaller firms.
“I came from a large hospital system and my first law job was at a small mortgage foreclosure firm in 2011, and they seemed very marketing-savvy there. At the time, I thought healthcare had a lot to learn, but a basic tool—the customer survey—was commonly used.”
But Sexton says that when he came to that mortgage foreclosure law firm, a logical, basic notion like regularly surveying clients was still an alien concept.
“I worked out a survey of clients with the managing partner and sent it out. The executive committee first heard about it when it was complete, and I came into their meeting to report the results. They were shocked, and they had a few questions:
‘On what authority I had decided to send this client survey? Who had reviewed these questions?’
I candidly pointed to the managing partner, who conveniently, was not in the room.
‘Why didn’t you include us?’
I noted that even though it seemed I had inadvertently missed out on some protocol, it had produced some valuable client feedback.
Answer: ‘We won’t be doing anything with it because we didn’t know about it and we don’t like the way you wrote the survey.’
I replied that we had created client expectations to hear back from us—after all, we had asked them their opinions. And the committee said, ‘Well, that’s your problem. You’re marketing.’
To me, the survey represented valuable data. To them, it was a perilous risk, laced with criticism. They weren’t having any. I learned about buy-in that day; I haven’t forgotten. Everyone needs to feel like they are in the driver’s seat until they don’t feel like driving the car anymore. I’m grateful for those early learnings which have served me well as I’ve progressed to larger firms.”
Happy anniversary to my dear hubby – love you very much, John, and proud of our life together. #loveislove