Stevie-winner Legal Resources is a legal services provider in the employee benefits space. Legal Resources offers an exclusive network of local primary care law firms to assist employees with all life's legal matters. Legal Resources has been the leading provider and administrator of group legal services for almost 30 years.
Their Business Development team is comprised of Executives, Sales, and Marketing leaders. As a joint effort, these team members collaborate, develop, and deploy strategies that are essential to continual growth in the market. Since the legal services industry remains a niche in nature, unique and effective approaches to product and service creation and marketing are a must; therefore, their marketing and sales strategies are generated in-house.
The Business Development team targets partners like employee benefits consultants, and plan administrators (typically Human Resources professionals) at mid- to large-sized organizations. For growth, the Business Development team markets to multiple channels: benefit consultants to recommend them to their clients, Human Resource professionals to offer their benefit to their workforce, and, eventually, employees to enroll in the plan via payroll deduction.
Increased Growth and Rates of Retention
In response to COVID-19, the Legal Resources Business Development team created and deployed multiple strategies that yielded incredibly favorable growth and retention results. For example, in June 2020 Legal Resources created and launched a Guidance and Assistance program that was open to all of their clients’ employee populations, not just members.
This program offered unlimited guidance and assistance with their Certified Paralegals regarding lifestyle matters; for example, dealing with identity theft, how to file a consumer complaint with the Attorney General’s office, getting in touch with a law firm to get essential documents executed, etc.
Additional projects deployed were centered on education to provide a value add for all growth channels. For example, they created mini seminars that were held virtually and touched on COVID-19-related challenges and how to address them; like consumer issues, COVID-19 scams (like vaccine and employment scams), and information on essential legal documents (like medical directives and power of attorneys).
The Business Development team also executed valuable forecasting on COVID-19 impacts and compiled those forecasts in a COVID-19 Impact newsletter that was sent out to broker partners and clients to be deployed to their workforces. For instance, their team forecasted that the courts being shut down for a period would result in a tremendous backlog in non-emergency hearings and would significantly delay resolutions for open family law cases.
Results
Through collaboration, research, and strategizing as a team, the Legal Resources Business Development team was able to position its products and services strategically; that is, in lieu of being viewed as an expense during an uncertain time, Legal Resources instead positioned itself as a necessary tool that provided peace of mind. The approach was well received.
Providing broker partners and clients with invaluable resources during the thick of the pandemic not only reinforced Legal Resources’ value as an existing partner and vendor but also yielded an 8.6% increase in net membership, which was double the increase from the prior year.
Brokers were happy to be able to forward forecasting information to their clients, helping them reinforce their value and perception of being plugged in. The increase in proposal requests from broker partners soared compared to years prior, validating that their business development efforts were successful with existing and prospective broker partners. Another benefit to their business development response to COVID-19 was clients’ renewed interest in educating their workforces about Legal Resources' plans and services.
Legal Resources won a Gold Stevie Award for Most Valuable Response by a Business Development Team in the 2023 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
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