Travers Smith

Travers Smith is an award-winning city law firm. We build lasting relationships with public and private sector clients. It is Travers Smith's purpose to provide the very highest quality of service to our clients whilst enabling our people to achieve professional fulfilment in a supportive, inclusive and enjoyable working environment.

The Role

Reporting to the Head of Business Development, the Senior Business Development Manager plays a central role in helping to develop and execute the firm's business development strategies and plans across several practice groups and nominated initiatives including Dispute Resolution, Competition and Investigations.

With an ability to collaborate across several distinct practice areas, the Senior BD Manager will have the confidence to constructively lead and challenge on topics such as BD strategy and execution. The role has high visibility and daily interaction with partners and other key people across the firm, and is both strategic and operational, focused on executing each group's business plan and delivering an overall first-class service at all times.

Key Responsibilities

Business and Client Planning

• Develop close working relationships with the partners and wider lawyer team, providing support to implement and refine business plans, demonstrating a deep and thorough understanding of the respective practice areas, helping to identify market and client trends, and growth opportunities from existing and new potential clients.
• Create targeted business development and marketing activity plans that flow from the business plans, to help achieve the financial, client and market positioning and penetration objectives set in the respective group's business plan. Monitor, analyse and report on activity against objectives including ROI as appropriate.
• Work closely with the firm's Client Strategy & External Relations team to ensure that client action plans are created, monitored, supported and actioned for the most significant clients. A key component will be identifying common elements with action plans for other clients across the firm as well as coordinating the intersection with firm wide client initiatives.
• Work with the Head of BD, other Business Development Managers and Executives to ensure that activities are aligned across practice groups and cross-firm initiatives to ensure a 'one firm' approach to clients and to business development activities.
• Develop a deep and broad understanding of the key client relationships and practices which includes specific partners and areas of specialism, and competitor and market trends to make recommendations to impact revenue and client growth, cross-selling with other practices and client service improvements.

Business Development and Marketing Activities

• Working with the Chief Marketing Officer, Head of BD and the Client Strategy & External Relationships team, take an active role in ensuring that the Client Relationship Partners regularly review and execute on client action plans for significant clients with a view to generating additional business.
• Together with the support of BD&M team members ensure the creation and delivery of a first-class service on all marketing and business development activities at all times.
• Create and manage BD and marketing plans for each practice group and nominated 'horizontal' initiative and ensure that each is executed well. Plans to include all elements of the marketing mix, including marketing brochures and materials, pitch documents, thought leadership articles, social media pages and content, website content, lawyer biographies, events and corporate hospitality.
• Provide market and practice insights to support the Communications team in developing a media and PR plan. Together determine how best to utilise PR and media plans as a complementary business development tool and to position the practice groups to further the objectives of the business and marketing plans.
• Work with the Events teams to ensure that all client facing events, and referral events for the group are planned, organised and delivered to the highest standards.
• Work with the Events team to assess the value and relevance of various sponsorship, events and other corporate hospitality opportunities to ensure best value for the firm and our clients.
• Work with the KLs and Communications team to plan and deliver targeted thought leadership to clients to raise the profile of the practices' priority areas through targeted materials on the website, through email marketing, on LinkedIn and other appropriate channels.
• Assist the Pitch team in supporting, pitching and winning new business as required including providing practice, partner, client and market- specific insights to target and tailor each opportunity.
• Take responsibility for managing the practices' directory and awards submissions in line with the firm's directory process, creating high quality content that delivers results.
• Be the InterAction champion for the practice groups and 'horizontal' initiative working closely with the Digital Marketing team, the department PAs and lawyers in the practices to ensure that all contact and BD activities are regularly updated.
• Manage and track the business development budgets for the groups and initiatives responsible for.
• Participate in delivering firm wide client initiatives and marketing programs including client listening, post pitch reviews and the TS Change programmes.

Other Responsibilities

• Be an active member of the business development manager team, helping to promote cross-practice activities and initiatives.
• Provide guidance, support, objective setting to a BD Executive assigned to support on day-to-day BD activity etc.
• Assist in developing the BD team's expertise through active engagement in team meetings and team initiatives, including proactively sharing best practices from previous firms, other industries, training and original research.
• Work with the Chief Marketing Officer, Head of BD and legal Heads of Department to plan and manage annual business development budgets.

Key Stakeholders

• Line manager: Head of BD.
• Key stakeholders: Chief Marketing Officer, Heads of Department, Partners.
• Other stakeholders: BD & Marketing team, Business Services community, Legal Operations teams and KL group.

Personal Specification - Knowledge, Skills & Experience

Experience & Knowledge

• 6+ years' experience, with at least two years at Manager level, working in a Business Development role in a professional services environment, preferably within a law firm.
• Proven experience of managing a diverse BD team within a professional services environment.
• Commercially astute with a strong track record in growing existing and new business.

Skills

• High level proficiency in systems skills - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and InterAction.
• Ability to understand macro-economic issues and use them to define appropriate business development plans and activity.
• Strong leader who is committed to 'trusted adviser' status.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills - able to speak with confidence and influence change both internally with senior leadership and externally.
• Experience of managing, mentoring, and motivating team members.

Personal Attributes

• Robust and resilient - able to navigate relationships with demanding colleagues.

• Comfortable providing recommendations and advising with confidence to senior level stakeholders, even when there is ambiguity involved.
• An ability to quickly gain confidence and challenge and change behaviours where required.
• Able to inspire a team through a personal and energetic approach - active involvement in getting work done yourself as well as delegating to other team members.

• Strong team player with a positive attitude - a natural coach and mentor.
• Strategic and analytical thinker, able to set and measure the success of programmes across business development.
• A strong focus on attention to detail.
• Proactive in generating high quality strategic ideas to help the firm grow.
• Credibility to advise partners, gain their confidence and challenge and change behaviour where required.
• Ability to build strong relationships with internal and external clients.
• Flexible, adaptable and resilient.
• Comfortable providing recommendations with confidence to senior level stakeholders, even when there is ambiguity involved.
• Excellent work management skills - capable of managing and coordinating a broad and demanding, fast-paced workload in an organised, controlled and efficient manner with the ability and confidence to prioritise as required.
• A change agent who is comfortable with shaping, managing and delivering positive change.
• Ability to listen, question and probe to elicit opinions and feedback from a variety of sources.