Think of it this way: if every “leader” in your firm generated only a 5% increase in their new business, with virtually no extra overhead costs needed, what a powerful impact that would have on ROI. But most firms today employ either a collegiate or consensus form of leadership. While there are often Managing Partners who take strong stands on certain issues, the biggest problem we see consistently is the absence of holding people accountable for results.
Yet it has the most potential for success if firm leaders (managing partners, executive committee, practice group leaders, partners-in-charge) are reminded of their commitments, helping them overcome obstacles and challenges, and not letting them skip “next steps.”
Take a hard look at what can be refined in order to identify “critical improvement areas.” Organize them into an IMPLEMENTATION MAP, focusing on accountability for activities that have the greatest impact and value. It is not necessary to revamp your entire organization. Just shake up the system a bit to make it clear what the expectations, time lines and results are for the business generation task assigned.
Place your leaders in charge of implementing each task, set specific timing, hold them accountable and watch the revenue grow, more doors opening, and the firm’s reputation cower the competition.
MARKETING the LAW FIRM, American Lawyer Media
August 2015
Sales Speak: What’s Missing in Law Firm Business Development?
Firm Leaders!
For the past decade, business development training and coaching have been considered the standard for growing more firm business. Those who have benefited are primarily senior associates and newer partners. And certainly there have been multiple examples of real success. But with competition growing, clients terminating long-term relationships and the inability of firms to keep up with technology and market place changes, business development training and coaching have become mainly a palliative measure, ignoring the primary problem:
… the absence of leadership that will overcome what you are missing in the marketplace.
“Palliative” is defined as “relieving pain or alleviating a problem without dealing with the underlying cause.” The way to overcome the underlying cause for these and other business growth issues is to shift from the traditional business development training and coaching currently in vogue to placing more emphasis on “critical improvement areas.” To accomplish this means transforming the firm’s leadership (Executive Committee, Marketing Committee, Practice Group Leaders, Partners-in-Charge of offices, etc.) in order to transform your business growth.
Business Development Issues
Primary issues often mentioned to us during strategic business assessments include:
• Need to expand the number of attorneys actively selling;
• Number of new engagements per client is dropping;
• Resistance to transitioning clients is growing;
• Absence of cross-marketing and internal-marketing;
• Senior attorneys producing less and taking more;
• Missing hidden opportunities, i.e., building up referrals; and
• Erratic performance by practice groups and offices.
Note that those who can have the most influence in turning these issues into productive revenue are the firm’s leadership. And while business development training and coaching for senior associates and newer partners should continue, the firm’s leadership requires an organizational assessment and implementation map to accelerate the transformation of your teams to open up many more opportunities.
The key is to refine your organization to actively deal with the issues and turn them into ROI.
Business Generation
Just as “marketing” has evolved into “business development,” business development must now evolve into “business generation and creation.” Refining the roles and requirements of firm leadership needs to focus on the complete picture: the underutilized assets and development of suppressed skill sets of each professional; the hidden opportunities , both current and future that every firm has and needs to identify and use; and those undervalued relationship s and timely associations with contacts and clients that have not been fully explored and exposed to total benefits to generate new matters. Revealing and implementing these key avenues to your firm’s leadership are keys to achievement, growth and success.
Are the time commitments and costs associated with social media content being measured and evaluated? Are they attracting the readership and driving actions as traditional advertising and public relations did? What are the “openings” scores of firm e-blasts, alerts, etc.? Are attorneys assigned to follow up with those who open and read your communications on a frequent basis? Is the firm ignoring the power of an occasional direct mail piece?
Important questions include, Is your brand being used as a marketing theme by all who are face to face with clients and prospects? Or is it nothing more than an image on your home page? In other words, does your firm culture actively define the themes you want the marketplace to associate with the firm? Are your practice group leaders and PICs using group meetings to remind and refresh the needed approaches?
Leadership Accountability
Most firms today employ either a collegiate or consensus form of leadership. While there are often Managing Partners who take strong stands on certain issues, the biggest problem we see consistently is the absence of holding people accountable for results. When applied to firm leadership as defined earlier in this article, this is the area of greatest weakness. Yet, it has the most potential for success if firm leaders are reminded of their commitments, helping them overcome obstacles and challenges, and not letting them skip “next steps.”
Well-organized follow-up, using an implementation map, focuses accountability on activities that have the greatest impact and value. It isn’t necessary to revamp your entire organization; just shake up the system a bit to make it clear what the expectations, time lines, and results are for the business generation tasks assigned.
Conclusion
Think of it this way: If every “leader” in your firm generated only a 5% increase in their new business, with virtually no extra overhead costs, what a powerful impact that would have on ROI. Take a hard look at what can be refined in order to identify those “critical improvement areas.” Place your leaders in charge of implementing each, set specific timing, hold them accountable and watch the revenue grow, more doors open, and the firm’s reputation cower the competition.
________________________________________
Dr. Allan Colman, a member of this newsletter’s Board of Editors and CEO of the Closers Group, specializes in Accelerating Rapid Revenue Growth for Law Firms. He may be reached at www.closersgroup.com
Starting a new series with a collection of speed review questions that are essential to knowing your client. They come from my book, OWN THE ZONE – Dominate the competition and are on page 90 at www.ownthezonebook.com
1. Who is the decision maker? Are you sure? How do you know?
2. What other firms or companies are they using?
3. When is the last time they hired a new firm or company?
4. Do they prefer to communicate by email or phone?
Among standard business development activities, none provides a better practicum for leveraging than the presentations and speeches delivered at professional conferences, client-sponsored programs, and your own firm-sponsored seminars. Too often their participation is a one-off with none of the preparation or follow-up necessary to generate business. Conversely, mastery of the best “event marketing” practices will carry over into other marketing areas as well, helping to create a real marketing culture in the process.
Pre-Presentation: Dress for Success
There are two dimensions to every presentation: the material being presented and the business reason for presenting it. The latter deserves at least as much preparation as the actual content of the speech or panel discussion, in fact, more so, as the marketing impact depends on many careful logistics. Among those logistics:
Send invitations on your own letterhead/email even if one has been separately sent by your firm. Doing so can boost attendance as colleagues and prospects who might not attend an institutional event may want to attend one they identify with you. From a marketing standpoint, it’s also a reminder of your expertise on the presentation topic.
Your firm should arrange to contact all sign-ups with a reminder a week ahead of the event. Call your own contacts a week before as well.
Circulate an internal note urging others at your firm to attend the presentation, wherever it is happening. Marketing staffers should attend as well as that can only help them promote and follow up on the event.
Obtain the most up-to-date attendee list and assign each attending attorney and professional support person from your firm a group of “must get-to-knows.”
Encourage attorneys from other practice areas to send invites to their clients. The presentation may be valuable for those clients too, or they can pass the information on to others in their company or organization.
During the Presentation: Deploy the Troops
Think of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the event in military terms. To maximize the long-term marketing impact, your own people need to be in the right place at the right time, and you need to engage the “other side” – those with whom you want to develop relationships – as strategically as possible. To these ends:
There should be at least one member from your firm at each table, if at all possible, so that every audience member can be potentially engaged. To avoid redundancy, no more than two from your firm should sit at the same table.
Introduce your colleagues before, after, or, if appropriate, during the presentation itself. The goal is to mine for cross-selling possibilities. You may find a pretext for introducing them in your speech. For example, “This whole related area of sick building litigation is also important…my colleague, Don Jones, who’s here today, specializes in these cases…Don, please identify yourself in case anyone in the audience has a question for you after the presentation….”
During the presentation or panel discussion, be on the lookout for opportunities to mention one or two relevant successes you and your colleagues have had. Do so, of course, in proper context, without being obviously self-promotional.
Any subject matter-related pretext for future contact is worth pursuing. For example, refer once or twice to an event, opinion, new legislation, etc., and say, “if you want more information on this, leave me your card.” Or consider distributing a simple survey on a substantive matter and promise to send the results to the attendees.
Make sure you ask the prospects you meet if it will be ok to contact them in the near future. It’s called “permission marketing.”
Post-Presentation: Seal the Deal
All these preparations and tactical maneuverings are for naught unless you follow up, follow up, and follow up some more. In particular:
All contact info from the cards you’ve collected should be entered into your CRM or other contact database.
Find pretexts for direct phone calls, including lunch invitations to those event attendees in your area.
“Merchandise” the presentation: i.e., post the speech to your website, send it as an e-blast, and get it to journalists who may be covering related topics.
Identify prospects not at the conference, but who you know are involved or interested in the subject covered. Send them highlights of the presentation.
If it was a third-party or association-sponsored event, identify ways in which you can further participate in that organization’s activities, including professional initiatives and pro bono activities as well as additional presentation opportunities.
No doubt, other best practices may occur to you. Generally speaking, if it seems they’ll be helpful to your prospects, they’re worth doing. As with all good marketing, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. What kind of outreach would you appreciate if you were an audience member? What would maximize the value of the event for you?
It’s common sense – but uncommon common sense.
Allan Colman is CEO of The Closers Group, based in Torrance. He may be reached at acolman@closersgroup.com.
These next 3 tactics to generate leads from your speeches, workshops, etc. need to occur before the engagement.
7. “Merchandise” the presentation: i.e. post the speech to your website, send it as an eblast; include it on your social media pages; and get it to journalists who may be covering related topics.
8. Circulate an internal note urging others at your firm to attend the presentation. Marketing staffers should attend as well as that can only help them to promote and follow up on the event.
9. Your firm should arrange to contact all sign-ups with a reminder a week ahead of the event. Call your own contacts a week before.
We have more coming but please share your ideas as well.
In a recent blog we discussed what we recommend for clients who want immediate targeting, managing, contacting, meeting, training and evaluation. Here are 6 more “quick hits”:
G. Establish time-lines with individualized sequences of approach, support needed, results and evaluation including meeting deadlines and providing firm management with Success Reports.
H. Pre-test strategy and upcoming actions.
I. Evaluate contact results and follow up on a regularly scheduled basis.
J. Train and support assigned marketing staff.
K. Begin new engagements.
L. VIP, track results, challenges, etc. to get ready for Phase II.
A great business development tactic we recommend is to introduce your clients/prospects to your firm’s other clients. Another great tactic: ask you clients to introduce you to their other business unit executives, suppliers, supporters, advisors, and the individuals they go to as experts.
In other words, in order to meet new prospects and develop new client relationships, work with your clients to “host” meetings with non-competing and complementary prospects.
More in our next column on building successful business development relationships.
The tactics presented in OWN THE ZONE are all used one way or another in our business development training sessions and workshops. For example, our training emphasizes thinking long term. When it comes to approaching a new prospect or a long term client, we encourage our clients to:
* UNDERSTAND the prospects’ and clients’ needs and internal pressures;
* BECOME a trusted adviser, and
* PROTECT the prospects’ and clients’ interests.
Become a valued business partner and friend, offer rewarding solutions that are profitable for all involved. It’s how we work with our clients and how we encourage them to approach their prospects and clients in the same way.