A new client instructs the firm on a substantial piece of work. A high profile client, and good profile for the firm: exactly the sort of client the firm wants more of. Naturally, everyone wants to know who referred this client in?
At the first firm, no one quite knows. Someone thinks it might have come from the roundtable event in the spring. Someone else remembers the client mentioning a mutual contact at a previous firm. The intake form has a dropdown for "referral source" and it says "Other." Six months later, when it's time to plan next year’s marketing, this unexplained win gets folded into the case for doing more of everything: more events, more sponsorships, more LinkedIn, more of whatever felt busiest at the time. Nobody can say which of those things actually worked, so the answer becomes keep doing all of them, perhaps a little harder.
At the second firm, the same kind of client shows up, and someone actually asks the client directly, in the first meeting, how they'd heard of the firm.
The client mentions a fairly minor speaking slot from eight months earlier - not the flagship conference the firm invests most heavily in, but a smaller sector event a partner had almost turned down. That detail goes into a spreadsheet that's unglamorous but up to date: who referred what, when, and through which relationship. Over a year, a pattern starts to emerge that was previously only a hunch. The big, expensive sponsorships bring in plenty of attention and almost no direct work. The small, specific speaking slots, the ones that always felt like a lot of effort for not much audience, are where three of the firm's five best new clients that year came from.
The difficulty is that most business development in professional services is a slow accumulation of relationships, reputation, and activity that pays off months or years later, in ways that can be hard to trace back to a single cause.
But there's a real difference between accepting that referrals are hard to measure precisely, and not measuring them at all. The second firm's spreadsheet isn't sophisticated: no attribution software, no dashboards, just a habit of asking one question at the first meeting and writing the answer down somewhere it won't get lost. An accurate picture forms over time of which relationships and activities are actually doing the quiet work of bringing clients in.
It doesn’t mean that the flagship sponsorship is a waste of money because it doesn’t appear on the spreadsheet. If it’s seen by the right audience, it may be doing an important job in building awareness and perhaps even making the firm synonymous with that area of law. Equally, the smaller, easy-to-cancel activity may be doing more to create relationships that turn into work.
So, with the risk of sounding like a broken record: both are important. You need the long term activity that builds your brand. And you need the shorter-term activity that strengthens relationships and creates opportunities now.
The important thing is to understand which is doing which and to make those investment decisions deliberately rather than simply repeating whatever you did last year.
