Meet the vendors: Ruskin Kerslake, CRM sales manager, ePartners

By Richard Boardman, Mareeba CRM Consultancy

In the latest of my series of interviews, I speak with Ruskin Kerslake, CRM sales manager in the London office of US reseller ePartners, about the company's move into the legal sector.

One of the largest global Microsoft Dynamics partners, ePartners has some 9,000 implementations worldwide, around 600 of which are for CRM. These range from companies with 10 users up to 2,000 users. The firm employs some 300 staff worldwide.

RB: ePartners was a SalesLogix business partner at one stage, wasn't it?

RK: Yes, we were the largest SalesLogix partner in the US. We made a corporate decision in 2002 to discontinue proactively selling SalesLogix. So we had the existing SalesLogix customer base which we continue to support, but we made the decision to focus on Microsoft CRM.

RB: That would have been a pretty bold decision at the time given that it was the early days of MS CRM. The first versions couldn’t have been perceived as particularly encouraging.

RK: It was a big call, but we’d been aligned closely with Microsoft since day one with CRM. It's fair to say the initial release of Microsoft CRM was a pretty basic application but there was always the confidence it was going to get there. You only needed to look at how Microsoft SQL Server evolved as an enterprise product so see how things would progress over time. Microsoft’s roadmap seemed an attractive proposition.

RB: The reseller market for Microsoft CRM and ERP products is obviously a competitive one, so how have you sought to differentiate yourself?

RK: One is to verticalise our offerings, and secondly our size gives customers reassurance we’re going to be around for the long-term. A key vertical for us is legal, where CRM traditionally hasn’t been a good fit, and that’s been something that’s put those organisations off adopting the technology.

RB: What made you select legal? You’re certainly not the only CRM vendor/reseller that’s focused on that market.

RK: We’re not even the only Microsoft reseller focused on the legal market! We felt the market was attractive because it was changing significantly. For instance, creating specific business development divisions, and trying to be much more innovative in marketing. And if these firms were going to be successful with these initiatives then they would need a technology infrastructure to support it.

RB: What other issues do you see legal firms trying to address with CRM?

RK: Lets take the example of one of our clients (a large UK legal firm). If it wanted to run an event, its data was spread across multiple systems, from fee earner’s Outlook systems through to the billing and practice managements systems. That data had to be extracted, centralised, de-duplicated and cleansed into a single Excel sheet, then sent out to each fee earner in the organisation for them to review if the correct people had been invited, or if anyone had been missed off. Marketing would then have to collate all the suggested amendments. We worked out for that activity alone there was the potential to save each lawyer around an hour per month. For a firm of 300 fee earners in that area alone there was a pretty significant potential return on investment.

The other trend we are seeing is that the business development function is increasingly being fulfilled by non-legal personnel, particularly coming from the big five consulting firms, and they are much more used to having a CRM infrastructure and processes in place. These teams are working much more like a traditional sales function and are keen to use technology to help track and manage bidding for business, and help identify the up-sell and cross-sell potential of their clients. Another area is the effective tracking of incoming and outgoing referrals. So, for example, a firm will refer cases to other law firms, perhaps where there is a potential conflict of interest. Being able to understand what business is being referred to whom, and what referrals are received from other firms is key to managing a firm’s relationships more effectively.

RB: If you took say the top 500 UK law firms, what percentage of those do you believe have adopted CRM systems?

RK: I would say that the top 25 or 30 firms have adopted CRM in some manner. A lot of those systems have been supplied through the billing and practice management suppliers really as a bolt on to their core product. Now while it’s good that those systems integrate directly into the finance system, they’ve also tended to be very cumbersome and difficult to use. And if systems are difficult to use, the users won’t use them, and you have a high failure rate.

RB: You’re addressing legal as a vertical market, are you doing that with Microsoft CRM ‘out of the box’ or are you offering industry specific modifications?

RK: Basically we have added our own intellectual property to Microsoft CRM to make it very specific to the legal sector, though we recognise every firm is different and the system will still need to be tailored to individual needs. One key aspect is being able to integrate the CRM system with the other principle systems in the firm.

RB: You’ve touched on ease of use, and we’ve heard the line from Microsoft about the system being part of Outlook so people will use it, but don’t you think there’s a lot more to good user adoption that easy to use software?

RK: I totally agree. If we just said "it’s all in Outlook so life’s going to be easy" then that’s not reality. It makes it easier that it’s in Outlook. What we bring to things though, based on our experience in a lot of different industries, is a lot of best practice advice.

RB: What other mistakes do you think people are making?

RK: People think it’s a technology buy. It’s amazing how many organisations buy the technology and think the benefits will just happen. A lot of organisations are not really taking the trouble to clearly define what they are looking to achieve. But I think that’s an issue across all industries not just the legal market.

Richard Boardman is founder of Mareeba CRM Consultancy (www.mareeba.co.uk)

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