Smartlegal, the dedicated legal division of Cheshire-based Converge IT, has announced the launch of a new marketing application for the sector. The software, known as smart, has been designed from scratch with the help of law firm clients, its aim being to make marketing tools more accessible and affordable to encourage wider adoption.
Nigel Wright, Converge IT’s managing director, said: “The term ‘a very big sledgehammer to crack a very small nut’ has been used about enterprise CRM systems like Interaction, and that’s why we’ve created a more suitably proportioned marketing tool to do the job. Prospective users gave us a clear steer on the functions they needed, and the frills they could go without, and asked us to deliver that in a package that was Google-esque in its simplicity, and would effortlessly fit in with the way they worked.”
With a familiar MS Office look and feel, smart comprises contact management, account management, event planning, campaign management, referral management, pipeline management, forecasting and profiling. While integrating smoothly with existing PMS and CMS systems, the solution itself is self-contained, requiring no additional hardware or software. It has been developed on a .net framework, rather than Dynamics, to accelerate deployment and minimize consultancy costs. The company also boasts that the application can be up and running in two days, including integration, training and rollout for up to 15 users.
Quality Solicitors Oliver & Co is among the first firms to sign up.
The firm’s Liz Pennink said: “We knew adopting a formal marketing and sales tool was fundamental to our strategic requirements, but it was about getting the right tool. Many of the solutions we reviewed were too generic, too complex, too unwieldy or simply too expensive. What made smart stand out was the fact that it has been written specifically for the legal market and for lawyers – it’s genuinely lawyer-friendly, very intuitive and very slick. That’s crucial if we are to successfully engage everyone across the practice in the wider marketing effort.
“Equally important was the fact that smart has been sensibly engineered – it can be implemented and integrated in just a couple of days, picked up with the minimum of training and has the features and functions you really need, and none of the distracting frills you don’t. Its relevance, accessibility and ‘fitness for purpose’ really appealed in the face of some of the bigger enterprise alternatives, as did the affordable pricing.”
For more information visit www.smartlegal.it
