Monthly fireside – Ruskin Kerslake – ePartners

November 8, 2007 Richard Boardman

This month’s fireside is with Ruskin Kerslake of ePartners talking about their push into the legal market-place…

RB – Ruskin can you introduce yourself?

RK – I’m the CRM Sales Manager for ePartners and I’ve been working with CRM for over nine years. I’ve worked for a number of CRM vendors including SalesLogix and Pivotal before moving to ePartners.

RB – Can you tell me more about ePartners?

RK – ePartners are one of the largest global Microsoft Dynamics partners. We focus on the Microsoft Dynamics division products. We have around 9,000 implementations world-wide, around 600 of which are for CRM. These range from companies with 10 users to 2,000 users, and we have around 300 employees world-wide with 50 in the UK.

RB – If memory serves weren’t ePartners a SalesLogix business partner at one stage?

RK – Yes, we were the largest SalesLogix partner in the US. We made a corporate decision in about 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, and that was based on Microsoft’s road-map which seemed a much more attractive proposition.

RB – It was a pretty bold decision at the time given that it was the early days of MS CRM, and 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, and it’s fair to say the initial release of Microsoft CRM was a pretty basic application….

RB – I think that’s fair!

RK – …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.

RB – I know ePartners are a big player in the US reseller market, but why come to the UK?

RK – We’ve been in the UK for about three years now. While that’s been part of a global growth strategy it was also at the invitation of Microsoft to come over and be one of the key partners to help with the launch of Microsoft CRM in the UK. We also saw a lot of potential in the UK for the Microsoft ERP products as well, particularly Axapta.

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

RK – In a couple of key ways, 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, as well as education, where CRM traditionally hasn’t necessarily been a good fit, and that’s been something that’s put those organizations 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 – Absolutely; we’re not even the only Microsoft reseller focused on the legal market! In terms of why legal, 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 their 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 – If we take the example of one of our clients (a large UK legal firm), if they wanted to run a seminar or event then the data about people they might want to invite was spread across multiple systems, from fee earner’s Outlook systems through to the billing and practice managements systems. So that data had to be extracted, centralized, de-duplicated and cleansed into a single Excel sheet, then sent out to each fee earner in the organization 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 recognize 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 that 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 – I still think people think it’s a technology buy. It’s amazing how many organizations buy the technology and think the benefits will just happen. A lot of organizations are not really taking the trouble to clearly define what they are looking to achieve.

RB – There’s a cultural thing here as well isn’t there? I know when we went out to market for legal services it was amazing how poorly firms followed up on enquiries; even those who seemed pretty switched on about marketing themselves.

RK – I’d agree with that totally, but I think that’s an issue across all industries not just the legal market.