Awards submissions - brilliant or downright pointless?
If you’re one of the many, many firms who questions their very reason for being at the same times every year when awards submissions need to be in - I hear you! Having worked on hundreds of them in my time, including the dreaded Legal 500 and Chambers submissions, for more years than I care to mention - I can completely relate as to why you dread these submissions coming around, and why you begin to wonder a) whether they’re even worth it and b) how you can possibly make this process LESS PAINFUL!
Let’s address the second point first (I like to keep you on your toes) - making it less painful than someone ripping a wax strip off your leg (whether you’re a woman or a man!!) - there are easy ways in which to make this whole process run more smoothly, and hopefully effectively!
1) Make sure that you keep a database of work that you’ve undertaken throughout the year. Don’t fall foul to what most (I generalise here - but I bet it’s true) firms do and six weeks before the deadline realise in horror that you have no work examples to put in your submissions - and so send out an “urgent” e-mail to your entire team (we all know how they go down!) asking them to remember back to last May and recite in great detail what happened on a piece of client work. Most awards organisations ask for the same information year on year, so set up at the very least an Excel document that the team can all access - which records key data from each GREAT example of work done. If you do it regularly - ever month or as part of a process on closing files/work - not only do you get more information but you get it when you’re still excited about the deal, the words will ooze with excitement and that will help no end with making your submission, and examples of work, stand out from the crowd.
2) Make it an all year round process. Get your spreadsheet at the ready and actively have it as an agenda point on your team meetings - for the marketing and BD team AND for the wider teams. In the same way as you collate your work examples also make sure that you’re collating information about your team - their biogs and their industry specialisms etc. Use this information to keep the website up to date and any team sheets that you might have, for new client packs etc, interesting and relevant. Don’t be an awards dullster and use the same (six year old) biogs from your website that you use every year, whoever is reading your submission might just fall asleep while reading them.
3) Don’t leave it until the last minute to get client permissions to use their names as referees, or to include client quotes. Add this into your spreadsheet and actively ask the client at the end of the project/piece of work if they could give you a quote, and ask if they would be happy to be approached by the awards organisers or directory. How many times have you got to the couple of days before the submissions and not actually got any client permissions and then spent 48 hours of frantic calling and e-mailing clients? It CAN be different (and less stressful for you, and the client that you’ve sent 20 e-mails to and left 16 voicemails for).
Are they worth it?
When you think of awards, you may just see yourself standing on stage, clutching a small shard of glass with your name etched into it as the only benefit of undertaking this whole charade. But as much as standing there with an adoring audience looking on, whilst you recite the names of every “life changing” manager that you ever had, that bought you to this place in time, there are far more benefits to awards submissions, shortlistings, nominations and SUCCESSES than you might be thinking about.
Internal referrals - once you’ve got that lovely spreadsheet, that we spoke about above, up and running - USE IT! Produce case studies of all the fabulous work that you’ve done and put it on your intranet (or similar internal communication device) so that other teams in your firm can see it, and understand more about what it is YOU do for clients. There are few better ways of breaking down the silos often found in professional services firms, and that help generate more internal referrals, than bringing “services” to light with an interesting case study or two. If the case studies are able to be used externally (with client permission to name them, or on an anonymous basis) then put them on your website, in pitch/tender documents (YES these award submission spreadsheets can provide valuable fodder for pitch documents too, particularly for those firms who don’t have good pitch/tender processes to record them), in newsletters, in press releases for the local/national/industry press… just USE THEM!
Attracting talent - there is an obvious benefit in winning awards to attract new talent, from an ever more competitive pool of candidates, but there is huge merit in being shortlisted or nominated for these awards too - just the inclusion of the award name on websites/recruitment materials can make all the difference. This is particularly true if you’re a smaller firm and you’re going to struggle to compete with the larger firms in terms of the salary that you can afford to offer - if you have awards saying you’ve been recognised for what a diverse company you are, how happy your workforce are, or what a fantastic CSR programme you have, it’s going to make you more attractive, over and above being able to offer a huge financial package (and it’s also been proven that younger generations are far more interested in elements like this than pure financial aspects - but that’s a blog for another time).
Appreciating your team - applying for awards/directory submissions using work that your team have undertaken gives them a real sense of pride, and of personal involvement in the success of the firm. Putting forward team members for individual awards provides recognition of their success over and above financial recognition, and raises the profile of the firm at the same time. Once again showcasing your current team members and their skills will act as a brilliant way of attracting talent into your firm.
A myriad of benefits - depending on your firm, the award/directory submissions that you produce there are probably multiple other ways in which you can repurpose the submissions, or the information from these. The key is to think outside the boxes that you complete online/on a Word document and just imagine what else you could do with this information.
Within this diatribe I’ve not even gone into how you can actually use your award wins or legal directory rankings - I’d like to think that you have that side of things covered. But if you’d like to talk more about how you can do that side of things too, or about anything in this article, get in touch on anne.renshaw@flammerouge.co.uk. As you can tell I LOVE to talk about this topic and love nothing more than to help implement processes which enable you to make SO much more of these submissions.