<b><i>Voice of the Client:</i></b> Business Development Program Best Practices: Business Intelligence

In corporate America, strategic account management is a cornerstone of most companies' go-to-market strategies. Most businesses can count on recurring business from their key accounts. Having witnessed the success related to such programs with their corporate clients, accounting firms have adopted a similar process that they refer to as “Account Planning” into their sales strategy, and it now drives their respective sales teams' focus each year. Law firms are ever-so-slowly starting to follow this trend by incorporating similar strategies across their firms. In any case, whether a formal or an informal initiative, or whether the program is referred to as “key account planning,” a critical element in any successful strategic go-to-market strategy and/or best-in-class business development program is “business intelligence.”