Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have 80% of your entire new business income derive from 20% of your top clients — the “Cream of The Crop” clients?
When you dedicate yourself to harvesting more from your Cream of the Crop” clients you will:
1. Enjoy your work more and earn more while doing it.
2. Be busy every day working with clients whom you enjoy, clients you trust and who trust you in return.
3. Have clients who will refer more business to you.
Here’s how to identify your Cream of The Crop clients and ask for referrals:
Select 15, 25 or 45 of your top clients, whatever number is appropriate.
These are the ones that you would like to clone if you could, so your firm would be full of clients like them.
The next time any one of these clients sees you step up the quality of your service. Make the meeting so unexpectedly amazing and positive they’ll be extremely appreciative of your attention, remember you, and be more professionally dedicated to you. This experience begins in the reception room.
At the start of each meeting ask him or her about significant events that have happened. To make sure you have fuel for this conversation, make it a habit to write down something new about each client after EVERY visit or every time you speak with him. Make the effort to build rapport. Without this, you will not be able to develop any referral systems.
When you are ready to ask for a referral, send a letter to each client on your “Cream of The Crop” list or TELL THEM PERSONALLY he or she is your ideal client and you would like more clients just like them. You might be surprised how many clients aren’t really aware that you’re accepting new clients.
In a recent Closers Group Client Retention Survey one of the questions was “What percentage of your attorneys ask their clients for referrals?”
75% of the marketing professionals said “NONE.”
10 % of the attorneys said none.
What does this tell you about a huge lost opportunity?
Harvesting more from your Cream of the Crop clients doesn’t happen overnight. They won’t become your greatest fans if you are hit and miss with your efforts. You will need to keep up the momentum, the energy and your follow-through 100% of the time. Do this and a bumper crop may be happening in your not-so-distant future!
Prior to meeting with new business prospects, we urge clients to prepare a needs analysis. You can’t help a client until you know what they need. Rainmakers diagnose a prospect’s problem by asking questions and listening closely to the answers.
To conduct a proper needs analysis, you must know the questions you will ask. And you need to ask these questions in a logical order. Keep track of the questions asked. And at the same time, take notes on the prospect’s answers. Questions, answers, tangents new areas of investigation must all be juggled.
Questions to Include in Your Needs Analysis
Ask and answer the following questions before the first meeting.
What are their goals?
What are their challenges?
What solutions have they tried?
What is the problem costing them?
What are the consequences if the problem continues?
What is their timetable?
What is their budget?
Who else are they talking to?
Who, in addition to the person you are meeting with, will be involved in the decision making?
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.
Continuing our series on making your speeches generate more leads and opportunities:
4. Obtain the most up-to-date attendee list and assign any of your colleagues in attendance to meet “must-get-to-knows.”
5. Encourage others in your firm or company to send invites to their clients. The presentation may be valuable for those clients too, or they can pass the information on to others.
6. If this is a firm sponsored event, or you are the keynote speaker, send invitations on your own letterhead/email, even if one has been separately sent by your firm. Doing so can not only boost attendance, but acts as a reminder of your expertise on the presentation topic.
More on building business from speeches in the next several posts.
PROBLEM: “Our firm has no business development pipeline.”
RESPONSE: Don’t let this cause paralysis. Take a tough, hard look at where clients fell by the wayside, what results are speeches and articles bringing, and are your lawyers really cross marketing, and direct marketing?
RESULT: This type of crisis should spell OPPORTUNITY. Take your assessment and ensure that your attorneys and marketing professionals jump into the Business Development fray with a series of specific 3 month action plans.
Finishing this series on the top “best practices” for new business development:
7. Position your firm to be ahead of economic and industry trends. And make sure the proposals and pitches build this knowledge into every client contact.
8. Guide decisions on underperforming activities. Have the courage to analyze, abandon them, or improve the approach. But do look closely at success/investment.
9. Double your efforts to respond to and overcome inhibitors to new business development. In too many firms, compensation, individual capability and discipline, operational structure and reporting block incentivizing the professionals.
If you have other best practices, please add them at www.closersgroup.com/blog.
Is Your Cup Full of Business Development Best Practices?
We are often asked by firm managing partners and marketing partners if there really are “best practices” for business development. The next few posts will identify those we think have the greatest impact on growing your firm’s new business.
1. Energize partner-leaders for each target that practitioners have stored in the back of their minds. They often identify them as “low hanging fruit.” You need to get them out there picking it.
2. Set and manage timelines for each step toward the final closing. Step by step planning now will often get you to the target faster than hit or miss.
3. Lead strategy debates before investing in rfp responses or initiating new contacts. Go-or-no-go decision making takes a closer look at the opportunity and prevents the waste of time and expense.