Sandy Waters

I am the Business Development and Website Manager at Paris Smith reporting into the Practice & Business Development Director. I am responsible for:

Business Development

• Working with the Practice & Business Development Director to create Business Development Plans from the Business Plans created by our departments/teams.
• Managing and regularly reviewing with HODs/HOTs the pipelines for each department/team – following up on agreed actions; updating pipelines with successful client wins or new KBIs
• Identifying key targets based on existing legal expertise and experience within teams/department and adding those key targets to Liberate to ensure they are in receipt of our newsletters/event invitations
• Working with the Events team to ensure that each invite list for our event has a mix of existing and potential new clients/KBIs. Working with the relevant partner prior to the event to identify new attendees to the event and agree a plan of action on how to get a host in front of that attendee. Following on from any event, following up with the hosts to report on agreed follow up actions and then report on the outcome of those to the Practice & BD Director.
• Carry out competitor research from time to time to ascertain activity in our chosen market place.
• Work with the Practice & BD Director to prepare tenders/pitch documents and proposals to new clients and key business introducers.
• Report to the Practice & BD Director on all BD activity on a month basis to include:
  • New client wins
  • New key business introducer relationships
  • Cross selling of new work areas into existing clients
  • Drop off instructions from existing clients
  • Client losses
  • Source of introduction of new clients
• Working with our Practice & BD Director, as well as other members of Business Support, champion the collection and recording of data on our systems. Reviewing Business Introduce Source codes with HODs to ensure that we accurately capture where new work is going.
• Working with the Practice & BD Director to devise a more accurate way of capturing referrals; including incoming, outgoing and within departments and reporting thereon.

Website

• Managing and updating service parent and child pages, staff bios, testimonials and blogs as well as working with the events team to ensure that we are promoting all event/training opportunities. I am responsible for ensuring:
  • pages are optimised and in-line with the firm’s messaging and the relevant department’s business development strategy;
  • teams are educated on best practice when creating content;
  • key word research is carried out utilising our existing software (SEMRush) to ensure all new (and existing) pages are being found in line with search terms being used by the general public and relevant targeted audiences;
  • that teams understand what is “trending” in our industry and suggest blog topics and key words to the legal teams to enable them to write searchable content; and
  • all pages conform to the accessibility rating obtained by the firm
• Keeping up to date with web best practices, attending training sessions and feeding back to the Digital Marketing team, carrying out training where the team (or lawyers) require it.
• Picking up new enquiries from the website, assessing which team they should be dealt with by and forwarding to the relevant person. Following up to ascertain whether the new enquiry converted to an instruction.
• Reporting to the Practice & Business Development Director; both on web analytics and conversion rates for work sourced through the website.
• Working with our development agency to ensure that the website remains user friendly, accessible and confirms to all search engine requirements.
• Work with the Digital Marketing Manager to produce landing pages for PPC (and other digital marketing) campaigns.