Making Sales Part of Your Legal Practice
Most law firms have a unique business structure and unusual challenges related to the sales process. The lawyers are doing the substantive work that clients need and want, but at the same time these attorneys need to be focused on creating new business opportunities. This is the proverbial, “Flying the plane and building it at the same time,” scenario that impacts many professional service providers.
Why?
There’s a trust issue underlying the legal services sales process that even Sigmund Freud would be challenged to unravel. What prospective clients are considering buying from a law firm is not a tangible item, the quality of which may be assessed by looking it over, or having it inspected by an expert (think new car and experienced car mechanic). They are not purchasing a black box of services, a situation in which any skilled and experienced attorney may provide the requisite support from his/her organization.
Rather, when a prospective client in need of legal services goes to market to seek help or assistance with a sophisticated legal issue, he/she is scanning a mental checklist, a hierarchy of considerations that impact the decision to hire an attorney and his/her firm:
* Has this person been recommended to me by peers whose opinions I respect? (if yes, go to the next item);
* Does this person – and his/her firm – have the requisite amount of experience dealing with this legal issue in my industry? (yes; then continue)
* What about this person’s communication style? Do we have a good rapport? (vs. I can’t wait to get away from this pompous windbag)
* Are his/her proposed fees for services consistent with our budget for this project?
* Will this person make me look good to my colleagues and my boss?
* Do I trust this person to do what he or she says?
Even when a prospective client company employs a procurement expert to vet outside counsel in an effort to streamline the hiring process, what is being purchased is the experience and judgment of a person or people, not a box of pencils. So, at some level these considerations come into play and the individual lawyer or lawyers who are selling their services must also be involved in the process.
A few years ago, Alan Lepene, my former group leader in the corporate bankruptcy practice at Thompson Hine, asked me if I had any insight into the types of qualities or capabilities that characterize a good lawyer business developer – one who is able to navigate the prospective client’s mental checklist successfully (at least most of the time). “It must be a person who is outgoing, friendly, a sort of ‘hale fellow well met,’ right?” he asked. Intrigued by his question, because Alan has always been a very good business developer – but he is not a back-slapping, social type of guy – I shared what I have learned in more than twenty years of providing business development coaching and training services to lawyers and their firms.
“There is not a type of personality that is predictive of business development success. In my experience, if you love what you do as an attorney – at least most of the time – you can learn how to sell your services, even to the most anxious and battle-scarred prospective client.”
If you haven’t yet studied how to make business development part of your daily work, let’s start working on that. Next post: The difference between marketing and business development, and how to get started on the latter.
